Introduction

Welcome to my website on Italian cooking.

The recipes listed on the home page are arranged in the order in which you would eat them during a meal. Categories are grouped by color: breads, salads, soups, risottos, quick sauces, meat sauces, homemade pastas, pizzas, non-frozen desserts, and frozen desserts.

My recipes are a mixture of those made by native Italians and those by Italian Americans. The recipes with Italian names are native Italian. Any recipe with an English name is Italian-American. The Italian-American recipes include some my grandparents brought with them to Rochester, New York, from Italy. The rest are a trove of my favorite dishes perfected by my American-born mom, Alda. The daughter of immigrants from Abruzzo, she made food that reflected not just her familial heritage but her immediate environment, a community of immigrants from Southern Italy and their descendants in Western New York. I like to think of the Northeast as an unofficial culinary region of Italy, with its own distinct cuisine. So, welcome to the region of huge meatballs cooked in tomato sauce.

My mother, Alda Alfieri

This website is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather, it contains recipes that we make on a frequent basis. You won’t find, for example, any Italian “second dishes” (secondi). I’ve assumed most Italian seconds differ little from American counterparts (usually called entrees) and, therefore, haven’t explored them. In other cases, I have tried to make a classic dish, such as “lasagne alla bolognese” or “ravioli con patate, burro, salvia, e nocciole,” but we didn’t think it was that great and rejected it for now. Because our family doesn’t eat much seafood, you won’t find any seafood dishes either. My goal is to curate great dishes that we eat rather than pretend that I have great breadth as an eater or as an Italian chef. Spoiler alert: I’m neither of these things.

I am a computer hardware and software engineer by trade. I like to measure things and iterate. You may be the kind of cook who changes the recipe every time. You are probably a better cook than I am. I don’t work that way. Instead, I will start with a recipe, establish precise measurements and instructions, and then evolve the recipe slowly. When I learned to make Italian sausage from my uncles (who re-created the recipe after my dad had passed), I actually measured the spice containers before and after they sprinkled them in order to get exact measurements down to a tenth of an ounce, then maintained a table of precise changes I made to the recipe in order to get closer to my father and grandmother’s original recipe.

Once a recipe gets where I want it, I often won’t change it for a long time; however, I am still open to change. It just needs to be some kind of epiphany and those don’t occur too often. I didn’t make any changes to my mother’s ravioli recipe that she had for almost 40 years. The last change had been in 1992, when my lovely wife (then girlfriend) suggested the addition of nutmeg to the filling and I called my mother to get approval. She approved of the modification—and the girlfriend. And then, only recently, did I amend it again, now making my own ricotta and changing the dough recipe and technique.

Many recipes have photos. I have purposely kept the photos separate from the step-by-step instructions. Normally, you’ll want to look at the pictures the first time you make the recipe, and then look only at the ingredients and steps as a refresher thereafter. I often print out only the ingredients before going to the grocery store and making the recipe. I don’t want to see the introduction and steps in the print-out.

Obviously one key to making better Italian food is using better ingredients. Sometimes this is just a matter of knowing what to get. Other times it means making your own (e.g., ricotta). I have included an Ingredients page to help you get started. Every once in a while, I realize that an ingredient I am using is not as great as I thought it was, and then I feel stupid. Curating ingredients is a never-ending process for all of us. There's also a Flours page that will help you navigate the treacherous waters of Italian vs. American flours, a very confusing topic.

I have included a couple other pages that you may find useful: one on Cooking Gear, and another on common Measurement Conversions. It took me over 50 years to finally switch over to the metric system. I now weigh almost everything, which is particularly important for flour. In many cases, I will list the equivalent volume; otherwise, just use the numbers on that conversions page. Better yet, get yourself an inexpensive kitchen scale for $10 and join the party.

The internet has helped me discover how authentic Italians make the foods from their regions. I speak Italian and watch a lot of cooking videos by native Italians where I pick up new recipes, ingredients, and techniques. The internet has also helped me source some ingredients directly from Italy. For example, I import my Parmigiano-Reggiano directly from an award-winning Italian dairy, and I import my hazelnet (nocciola) paste from the Piemonte region. The one ingredient that I have never been able to import to North Carolina is authentic mozzarella di bufala from the Campania region. I’ve tried pretty hard, but no dairy will export it to me because it will perish before it gets through customs. Whenever you see “mozzarella di bufala” here in the USA, trust me that it is not the real thing. It is a "bufala" (fake news). The real mozzarella is exquisite. If you go to Italy, I recommend that you go into an Italian grocery, buy some, go sit in the piazza, and eat it while you watch the people go by.

Speaking of the internet, my wife and I are in the process of editing this site. Any recipe marked as “Unedited” means that it requires some kind of rework, but the recipe instructions are still accurate. Our home page is an improvement over the previous one, but we hope to someday convert it to something that looks more like a cooking blog.

Buon appetito!

Bob Alfieri

Chapel Hill, NC