Become a Better Pasta Cook With These 5 Tips From Bobby Flay

Well into a three-plus-decade career as a chef, restaurateur, and TV personality, Bobby Flay is known for a lot of things, including 500-plus episodes of Beat Bobby Flay, an eponymous hamburger chain, and his enduring love of chiles.

What you might not know is that Flay is also a major fan and scholar of Italian food, specifically the cuisine of the Almalfi Coast in southern Italy. The region’s flora, fauna, and cooking traditions inspire him so much that he named his Las Vegas restaurant Amalfi. Recently, at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Flay shared his passion and skill for making and cooking a pasta dish inspired by the region at a cooking demonstration. Here are some key lessons from that demo of Squid Ink Fettucine with Fra Diavolo Sauce, with takeaways that apply to making many different kinds of pasta dishes. (Editor’s Note: if you plan on using the recipe linked above, you’ll notice that Flay riffed during his live demo and didn’t follow the recipe verbatim. Fret not: Flay’s recipe changes during his cooking demo will add even more flavor to the dish.)

Make fresh pasta dough in the food processor

Using the blade attachment of a food processor, Flay quickly pulses together eggs, flour, and squid ink in a food processor just until a pasta dough forms. (The squid ink is optional and can be found in the freezers of good fishmongers or is easily mail-orderable by the jar.) Flay likes the saline quality it gives the pasta and also how the black color hides any oxidation that’s typical of fresh pasta that is stored overnight. He transfers the pasta to a board and kneads it for one minute before wrapping it in plastic wrap and letting it rest for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours before rolling it. Once rolled, he recommends forming the fettuccine into loose nests and arranging them on a floured sheet pan rather than drying the pasta on a rack so the pasta stays slightly moist. 

Sauté with avocado oil 

You can use extra virgin olive oil for sauteing, but Flay says that he’s been using avocado oil more often lately when sauteing aromatic ingredients like garlic and onion, the building blocks of his pasta sauce. He likes avocado oil because it has a higher smoke point and more neutral flavor. He prefers to drizzle extra virgin olive oil over the finished pasta dish before serving to add richer flavor. 

Keep your tomato sauce chunky

You can certainly cook it longer, but Flay cooks his homemade tomato sauce for about 30 minutes to keep the marinara tasting “brighter and fresher.” He adds a 28-ounce can of whole peeled canned San Marzano tomatoes and their juices to the pot with sauteed garlic and onion and seasons them with salt. Some chefs, including Flay’s pal and chef Michael Symon, say that adding sugar to tomato sauce is “blasphemous,” but Flay always adds a pinch of sugar in order to balance the tomatoes’ acidity and accentuate their natural sweetness. Do this to taste, adding a little bit at a time, just as you would with salt. 

Sure, you can pass the sauce through a food mill to make it smooth and uniform, but Flay leaves his chunky by crushing the tomatoes with a potato masher. “I want my tomato sauce to have rusticity and chunkiness because it adds contrast and texture to the final dish,” he says. “You need those extra textures coming through.” 

Oh, and he adds that tomato sauce will always taste better the next day if you have time to make it ahead and let the flavors meld. 

Peel your own shrimp and use the shells to make stock

Peeling shrimp yourself saves you a few bucks and also gives you shells, the backbone of a quick, easy, and flavorful stock “with incredibly valuable flavor,” Flay says. To make it, he puts the shrimp shells in a pot, covers them with water, adds a little tomato paste, bay leaf, and onion, and simmers the mixture for 30 minutes to make shrimp stock. Strain it and add about half a cup to the tomato sauce to give your fra diavolo more depth of flavor or freeze it for another use. Bottled clam juice also makes a fine substitute here. Bonus tip: Asked by someone in the audience why he leaves the tail on the shrimp in his pasta dishes, Flay says it helps the shrimp keep its shape during cooking and makes for a better presentation. 

Butter and cheese help marry the pasta and sauce

Flay says he knows that many Italian cooks would scoff at mixing cheese with seafood, but he highly recommends adding finely grated Parmesan to boost the flavor and help the sauce cling to the pasta. “It’s not like it’s American cheese,” he says. “[Parmesan] is one of the greatest ingredients in the world. It’s like nutty salt, it makes everything taste better.” He credits his friend Giada DeLaurentis for teaching him another Parm and pasta trick: when you transfer al dente pasta to the sauce, sprinkle the Parmesan directly over the cooked pasta before stirring it into the sauce, so that the cheese clings to the noodle first and then grabs the sauce. 

What else? Always finish your sauce with a knob of butter. “Butter is key,” Flay says, because it adds flavor, texture, and richness and helps the sauce emulsify and cling to the pasta.