Pizza, pasta and beyond: How Italian food is changing Indian dining

A guide to how to pick and how to cook one the world's most popular cuisines

For long, Italian food for Indians was pizza and pasta. That perception is changing as restaurants serve a diverse menu and their customers devour the food.

While pasta, sauces, and cheeses are staples across Italy, every region has its own unique dishes. South Italy’s food is dominated by tomatoes, olive oil and pasta and North’s common ingredients are alpine cheese, meat.

It’s a myth that Italian food is all pizza and pasta, or that it is unhealthy, said Amit Rana, general manager at Holiday Inn in New Delhi’s Aero City. The hotel recently launched an Italian restaurant called L’Osteria Bella. “You can have lots of veggies like spinach, beans, peas, even bottle gourd in your main course dish or even make a complete meal out of soups and salads. Italian cuisine is very palatable to Indian customers. However, we have to adapt the cuisine according to our Indian customer. If you give proper Italian Risotto, the customer in India will say you have given me uncooked rice,” he said.

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Eating an Italian meal is a ritual: a gathering of food and family to celebrate traditions passed down generations. “The primary thing about Italian cuisine is its sheer simplicity. If you get a good olive oil and a good sea salt, and just a little bit of balsamic vinegar, that is enough to make an outstanding salad,” said Aseem Grover, who runs the popular Italian café The Big Chill in Delhi.

“We started 22 years ago when we had an A4 sheet printed on one side for the menu. But now we have a menu more like a telephone directory,” he said.

Get your ingredients right

A mistake people make is not using the right sauce for their pizza. If you want to master Italian food, use olive oil or extra virgin olive oil. Quality extra virgin olive oil is used as garnishing for a peppery flavor, as a dip for bread like focaccia, or it is drizzled over salad. Olives are another cornerstone of Italian menu. Garlic is a popular ingredient throughout Italy, sautéed in olive oil to create a flavorful cooking base. Dried mushrooms are another ubiquitous ingredient in Italian cuisine. Basil is a fragrant green herb with a smoky, minty taste, and the most popular herb in Italian cooking.
 

Popular cheese varieties include Parmigiano-Reggiano from Parma in the Emilia-Romagna region and Grana Padano from northern Italy. Pecorino are cheeses made from sheep’s milk. A soft cheese like mozzarella melts over meals, like lasagna and pizza.

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Pasta, which is generally a mix of flour, eggs, olive oil, water, and salt, is popular with Indians. Flour is fundamental to Italian cuisine: it’s used for everything and must be of high quality. Pasta has many varieties, based on shape and region. Popular types include spaghetti (long, thin strands of pasta); penne (tube shapes from Liguria); tagliatelle (thin pasta ribbons from Bologna); fettuccine (long, flat pasta from Rome); and pappardelle (flat, wide pasta ribbons from Tuscany).

Tips and tricks

The heart of Italian food is its ingredients. Vanshika Bhatia, head chef and co-founder of OMO Café in Gurugram, gets most of her ingredients from the hills in Uttarakhand. She believes in serving hyperlocal and seasonal vegetarian Italian food. Specials at her restaurant include eggless pastas, roasted cauliflower Aglio Olio Peperoncino, mushroom, lime and garlic, mushroom-and-cauliflower Bolognese. OMO’s St Louis Style Pizzas are paper-thin crispy and served with a tangy sweet sauce heavy on oregano.

“Italian cooking is about a lot of fresh ingredients. The best food I have had was in Italy where I could taste the actual flavour of the ingredient. Like even if I am having the pasta I can taste the dough, the tomato, the cheese—everything separately and it all just marries well together—that is the main thing. It needs to be fresh cooking. You can’t just make it and keep it," said Bhatia.

"We make fresh pastas almost every day and we don’t dry them. We just blanch them and serve them to order. Besides, you need to choose your tomatoes carefully—they need to be real plump and they can’t be too sour or too sweet. Your olive oil needs to be really good,” she said, cautioning against overcooked pasta with lots of chilli flakes and fried garlic.

“You have to put in garlic but it should not be overfried. You can use some olives and onions as they surely enhance and bring out the flavours of your Italian dishes. Fresh herbs are much better than dried herbs in a bottle. You can get fresh leaves such as basil, thyme, and rosemary in your local market. You may start cooking with Pomace olive oil. But you can dress the final dish with extra virgin olive oil and adding some freshly crushed pepper on top can be helpful.”

Italian food extracts the essence of each ingredient, instead of the spices. Much like India’s tradition, Italian food is a culture and not just a cuisine.

Ingredient	Price Range (Rs)
Pasta	138-200 per kg
Cheese	345-500 per kg
Maida Flour	20-45 per kg
Olive Oil	250-500 per kg
Oregano and Mixed Herbs	199 for 60 g
Italian Tomato Puree	125- 365 for 690g
Pasta Sauce	170-250 for 385 g
Olives	150-400 per kg
Balsamic Vinegar	99 for 100 ml

Source: Market Research