- My Italian nonno used to say when I was a kid that you had to choose joy every day.

I thought everybody was happy, but as an adult, I can assure you that each day we choose to be happy or not, and it begins in the kitchen.

So today we'll make a version of a broken lasagna that's rich and easy to make, and work with a wonderful chef in Florence on pici all'aglione, a classic Tuscan dish.

So let's choose joy in the kitchen.

(lively music) (Christina laughing) (lively music continues) - [Narrator] Funding for "Christina Cooks" is provided by FinaMill, the flavor of freshly ground spices and dried herbs with refillable swappable, pods.

FinaMill.

And by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties, sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

And by Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding provided by.

- Hi, I'm Christina Pirello and this is Christina Cooks, where each week we take fresh, seasonal ingredients and whip them into amazing dishes.

Will they all be plant-based?

Yeah.

Will they all be delicious?

Absolutely.

And we will have you falling in love with healthy cooking.

Today we're all about pasta.

I know, I know, I know, oh my goodness, carbohydrates.

Think twice before you say that about pasta.

Unless you have a gluten issue, in which case there are gluten-free pastas which you can use, some are great, some not so much, but some are great, unless you have a gluten issue, eating pasta is one of the ways that you can enjoy it and enjoy it well because pasta, while it is flour, it's cooked in water, so it's much easier to digest.

But there are some keys to great pasta.

If you're buying cheap supermarket pasta, chances are it's not so good for digestion.

It also doesn't cook very well.

If you're spending a little extra money on good Italian imported pasta, your digestion will actually thank you.

You'll be satisfied longer, no insulin triggers, really good for digestion, and you're gonna cook it in a very special way.

Stay with me.

First of all, there's our pasta water.

Bring it to a hard boil and salt it.

And I mean salt it.

They say you wanna salt your pasta like sea water.

Maybe not quite that salty, but a good seasoning of salt.

Number one, it does prevent your pasta from overcooking because salt makes things contract.

It also flavors the pasta.

So you can do something simple, sauteed vegetables or like we're gonna do today and still have a really flavorful dish because the pasta tastes like something other than nothing.

So this is lasagna noodles.

And this dish is called broken lasagna.

And all you do, you can do this after you're cooking too, but I don't recommend it.

It's a little hard to chop when it's slippery.

You're just breaking your lasagna.

And this is gonna go into boiling salted water.

(pasta rattling) When you cook pasta, pay attention to this one thing.

Most people bring a huge pot of water to the boil to cook two pieces of pasta.

You want your water to just generously cover the pasta.

You're not drowning it, you're cooking it.

If you cook it in a ton of water, it's gonna taste like there's a ton of water.

So just cook it in a way that it's just covered.

Okay, now, generous olive oil because this is the basis for our sauce you might wanna say.

A good three, four tablespoons, five, six.

And into this is gonna go some white miso.

And white miso is going to give us our cheese flavor without any saturated fat.

And you're just gonna kind of push this around and sort of melt it.

Don't worry if it doesn't melt all the way, we'll get there.

And this is also, since it's fermented, it is miso, it's east meats west, this also will help you to digest.

We're gonna add to it some finely minced garlic.

Now, very often when I cook with garlic in pasta, I use it whole and take it out.

But in this case, I really want garlic flavor 'cause there's not a whole lot going into this dish.

So, well, I'm gonna use the garlic.

So, in it goes.

We wanna cook the garlic lightly.

Don't burn it.

If you burn the garlic, I'm not kidding about this, if you burn the garlic, clean your pot and start over.

A little hot spice.

If you don't like it, don't use it.

Some pine nuts.

If you don't wanna use pine nuts or your budget doesn't allow for pine nuts, use walnuts or hazelnuts, whatever you like.

If you have nut allergies, then you can use seeds.

I'm just gonna lower the pasta a little bit so it doesn't cook over, which is my special talent.

And then once everything is sort of mixed together here, we'll add some oil-cured olives.

Make sure you take the pits out.

And then this is gonna cook.

And all we're doing, I haven't added salt because I put olives.

I have miso in here.

That's a salt source.

So you don't want it to become too, too salty.

If you cook with wine, at this point, you could add some white wine.

If you don't cook with wine, skip this step.

Wine gives it a different kind of depth of flavor, but is it essential?

It is not.

And then the next thing to go in are sage leaves.

And I like to leave them whole in this dish and I want them to cook.

It's one of the few herbs that I use that I like to actually cook, rather than just use them raw.

I'm not gonna say I never use them raw, but more than often than not, I will wilt them so that the flavor really opens up and all the essential oils from the sage go into the dish.

You can smell it.

It smells like pasta heaven in this kitchen right now.

So you can see my oil has pretty much been absorbed.

Now we take the pasta, it's not entirely cooked, doesn't matter.

It's gonna cook in here.

And you're gonna drag with it some pasta water.

And that's gonna help to form the creaminess, the body of your sauce.

(pasta sizzling) You can see the lasagna noodles are still stiff, and we're gonna cook them with a little pasta water, stirring constantly until the pasta is completely cooked.

As I stir this, you can see there's still some pasta water in the bottom of the pan.

And you wanna keep this moving.

It could take five minutes, six minutes.

So you wanna make sure that your lasagna's about 75% cooked when it goes in here because you want that pasta water to help to create this sort of shiny creaminess that you're seeing without having to add any kind of thickeners or cheeses, right?

You want this richness to happen from the pasta water, and that's pretty easy to have done.

But the one thing that's interesting to me is how pasta is the first thing that people take out of their diet when they either wanna lose weight or do this or do that, when really all they have to do is cook it al dente, buy a good quality pasta, not eat a boatload in a sitting.

And really importantly, never eat it for dinner.

Eat pasta at lunch.

You're still active for the rest of the day.

You're gonna use that glucose that comes from the carbohydrates.

That's what you wanna do.

You wanna eat your pasta at midday, if you can.

I mean, if you have to have it at night once in a while, it's not a disaster, but really, for the best benefit to your wellness, you wanna eat it during the day at lunch.

So once it looks like this, which to me looks like heaven and smells even better, we're gonna take this spider that we use to move the lasagna and gather it into the serving bowl.

And what you can see in the bottom of the skillet, you see this creaminess right here that's sort of coming off the noodles?

That's just pasta water and miso.

It's amazing.

A little olive oil.

You don't have to do anything special.

You can make this dish for a Tuesday night lunch, or a Tuesday day lunch, a special occasion dinner or just 'cause you feel like having pasta.

There is nothing about this dish that's hard or special or in any way different, but it's completely unique in that most people don't think to break their lasagna.

And we're just gonna garnish it.

We're gonna be a little chefy for a second here.

Garnish it with a little sage, although you can smell the sage and it's absolutely gorgeous.

So while I taste this delicious pasta, we are headed to Florence to work with a Sicilian chef to make a Tuscan signature pasta from scratch, pici, and make a dish called pici all'aglione.

Andiamo.

(lively music) Oh, amazing.

You have to make this dish.

(lively music) One of the things I love best about coming to Tuscany is pici pasta.

It's a classic pasta dish that is made usually with aglione which is a big, we would call it garlic, but it's not.

And you'll discover all of this.

I'm here today with Chef Francesco Arancio from Chefactory Cooking Academy right here in the heart of Florence.

Thank you for having me.

I've never made pici.

I'm so excited.

But tell me how you came from Sicily to Florence.

It's a long trip.

- Yeah.

I mean, I don't know.

No, no, yes.

(both laughing) One was the culture.

Absolutely the food that is very different.

And yeah, there are everything.

So in the center of Italy, it's usually a very big highlight for every chef.

I mean, who used to be one, so a chef one day.

And so I decided for that reason.

But as well for the touristic part and everything.

So, I mean, it's a beautiful - But you weren't always a chef?

- No, no, not really.

Before I was a classical singer.

- Wow.

- And I started for that.

But in the meantime, I started for being a chef in a culinary university in Perugia.

- Ah, bravo.

- Yes.

And yeah, now, and now I'm here.

- Yeah.

- You know I did this.

I do cooking classes.

- And did you start the school to teach just every day?

Is it mostly tourists or Italians to make pasta and other foods?

- Ah, yes, we are in one part, we are a very professional school.

So we form people to go at work.

Then in a season, we enjoy with all the people as well.

We work, but people enjoy vacation here with us of doing all the recipes, so absolutely.

- And so today you'll teach me how to make classic pici.

- Yes.

- Yes?

- Yes.

- Okay, let's try.

- Absolutely.

So here we are and we start.

Okay, here we have about 100 grams of flour, in this case, semolina but you can use as well the all-purpose one.

- And why did we choose semolina for this?

- For now it's a little bit easier, but I love it Well, it has a beautiful, rough texture.

So oh.

- All the water, - Water, better than if it's warm and we mix it in completely.

(forks scraping) - And we're trying to like a rough dough.

We're making a rough dough here.

So we're using a fork.

Don't use your hands at this point.

- A kind of very sticky couscous.

- Exactly.

It should look like pebbles in sand, right?

Is the texture of the dough you're looking for.

And it's a very quick process.

And so once you get to about this... Yeah, we're about the same.

Mine's a little dry.

- Stick it a little bit with a fork together.

- So that you really kind of bring the moisture to the surface of the flour.

And once your dough starts to stick together... - We clean the fork.

- And pull it together a little bit.

And then you're gonna dump it, everything, flour and everything right onto the table, right?

- Yep.

- Okay.

You have less flour than me.

- I sprinkle more.

(both laughing) Okay.

And... - His dough is much better than mine.

I think he maybe has done this before.

- No, some time.

- [Christina] Some time.

- And so what Francesco told me was the harder you squeeze the dough, the more moisture and so the more quickly you will gather up the flour.

And you don't want to add flour to this, right?

- No.

No.

- 'Cause then the pici will not have the texture you want.

- And we need our beautiful, a little bit sticky, a little elastic.

I mean, semolina flour works differently than all-purpose flour, right?

- It does.

- So before you give it a good texture, you have to work it and work it and work it and work it.

- But semolina is all I use when I make pasta at home.

- Yeah.

- Only semolina - Much better.

- Yeah.

- It's more... - It's easier actually.

- It's more grainier.

- It's easier, tasty.

It holds your sauces better, semolina flour because it gives the pasta a little bit of a texture, I guess is the only word.

Okay.

So here we are.

- Yeah.

- Look at that.

- Look at that.

- So we let it rest now in one side.

We wrap it in plastic film.

- Okay.

- Okay.

And we roll it out by hand, okay?

- So we made one that's rested.

You wanna let the gluten rest.

Even though it's semolina and it's a tender pasta, you wanna let the gluten relax.

So now... (hand patting) Okay, now what?

- Spatula.

Let's go, Chef.

- Okay, now what, Chef?

- We cut a very nice piece.

- Okay.

Like that.

- Yeah, okay, and we start without flour.

- So there's no flour on your table or cutting board, which is quite odd.

Most people when they roll pasta, they put flour down and you kind of pull and push.

Correct?

- Yeah.

- You're trying to make the texture of pici.

If you've never had it or never seen it, boy are you missing out.

But if you never have, it's like a thick spaghetti, a thick coarse spaghetti and they will not match.

And that's the point.

(Christina speaking in Italian) - Yep.

Here we are, perfetto.

(Christina laughing) - Okay.

- So here, let's go with another one.

- Francesco and I are gonna continue to roll pici.

And then when we come back, we'll turn this fresh pici into a classic Tuscan dish, pici all'aglione.

(lively music) (indistinct talking) Okay, now that we've rolled our pici beautifully, now we will cook the aglione So Chef, tell me about aglione and hand me some to prepare.

- Okay.

So look, aglione.

- Aglione.

- It's this very big shape of garlic that is not a garlic, right?

- No.

- While in here we don't have the sulfites.

So it is a bit more light and fresh than the normal garlic.

- It's a little sweeter, yeah?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He has this beautiful aroma that is not so aggressive.

And we will peel it and just cut it in small slices in cubes.

- Wait, no sulfites means no garlic breath.

- Yes.

- Ah.

- Yes.

- So very attractive if you're making this for someone you love.

- After this, yes.

You can give kisses to everyone, yes.

(both laughing) - No one will care.

(Christina speaking in Italian) So you want this cubed, yes, Chef?

- Yeah.

We cut it in slices.

- So the thing about aglione, for those of you watching, is that usually when you cut garlic, the smaller you cut it, the more intense the flavor.

With aglione, the smaller you cut it, it's almost like the sweeter it gets, wouldn't you say?

- Yep.

- It doesn't become strongly garlic.

So it's really quite nice.

And we're gonna go right into the skillet now.

We're using about three very big cloves of garlic, aglione.

(Christina speaking in Italian) - Yeah.

In this case, it serves for about six, five people.

- And just like garlic, if you see one of those green cloves in the center, you pull it out, not because you'll get garlic breath, but just because it's a nicer flavor with that clove sort of gone, that core.

(knives chopping) Quickly chop.

- [Francesco] So here.

You want another one.

We do half-half.

What do you think?

- Well, I'm gonna do basil.

Yeah?

- Oh, okay.

Perfect.

- Okay.

(knife chopping) And then once you have your aglione sort of coarsely chopped, don't go crazy, right?

Don't make yourself crazy because it's gonna melt as we cook it, right?

So now I'm gonna take some fresh basil and make chiffonade.

More, Chef, than this?

More?

- More it is and better It is, no?

- True.

Can you ever have too much basil or too many tomatoes?

No.

Okay.

So I'm gonna roll the basil up tight like this And cut it into ribbons like this.

(knife chopping) You can do it leaf by leaf.

I don't do that.

I'm usually moving too fast.

Okay.

- [Francesco] Perfetto.

- Now, this goes right on top as well, right on top of the garlic.

- Yes.

Everything on top.

This is a very simple sauce, you guys.

Very simple.

- But like every recipe like we have in Italy as well.

- Like every recipe, simple and fresh.

Okay.

- Perfetto.

- So now.

- And you wanna put oil in.

Yeah.

- Tell me when.

- Perfetto.

Let's go, let's go.

Just a drop.

- Just a drop of really good olive oil.

- Go, go, go.

- A big drop.

- Go.

- This is for six people.

(both laughing) Take a breath.

- Perfetto.

- Okay.

- Thank you so much.

And I will add some water.

- [Christina] Okay.

- So we don't brown it.

Very important.

- Ah, you want the garlic to stay.

- Yes, so we want that in states, very nice and white and dissolves and makes this beautiful sauce.

- [Christina] Wow, okay, so this, do we cook this covered or uncovered, Chef?

- Covered.

- Covered.

- So lid on.

- Yep.

- And let's go - 20 minutes, right?

- Yes, about 20 minutes.

- So shall we drop the pasta?

- Absolutely.

Before, we pour some salt in.

- Remember, when you cook pasta, season your pasta water.

- Yeah.

- A lot.

- Or we eat a dessert, right?

- Otherwise you eat dessert or it's boring.

- And here we are.

- Okay.

- [Francesco] Big salt and... - The pici that we made.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- Pici here.

- Into the water.

- Just move it a little bit and we wait about a little bit, 30 seconds.

- Okay.

We're gonna let this cook.

- Uh huh.

- Okay.

- Move it like that.

- So when you cook fresh pasta, remember that you can see it's starting to rise to the top of the water here.

So it's beginning to get ready to be finished.

As it starts to rise, that means it's taking on enough moisture to be tender, but still al dente.

So this, shall we?

- Yeah.

(Christina laughing) Amazing.

- Wow.

Look at this.

- Beautiful.

So you see how the sauce became white and almost creamy.

And now as we move the pasta into it, it'll thicken with the starch of the pasta, correct?

- Absolutely.

- Okay.

- Yes, yes.

I will add just in case a tiny bit of salt.

- Okay.

- And I have as well, that's very important, some pepper.

- It's Tuscany, pepper.

- Yeah, pepper.

- Black pepper.

We need black pepper.

- So a bit more.

(Christina speaking in Italian) - Wow, this looks so beautiful.

Do you want it to boil this high or no?

- But look, when we add now the pasta, we will finish it in a very high temperature, okay?

- This smells so amazing.

- I know - It smells sort of like garlic, but sweet.

Okay, go ahead, Chef.

- It's very... can I?

Sorry.

(Christina speaking in Italian) - So now we strain the whole thing.

- Ah.

Ah.

(Christina speaking in Italian) - So remember that the pici will stay always very nice in al dente, especially in the middle, right?

That's why some people like it, some people not.

It's like Chanel No.

5, you know?

- Exactly, some people like it, some people don't.

But the cool thing about pici is you have to work very hard to overcook it.

Very hard.

- Yeah.

- So now we just stir.

- Yes.

- So now the starch from the pici will cause the gravy, the sauce, if you will, to thicken around it and create a creaminess that is... Mamma mia, it smells like heaven.

(Christina gasping) Okay, tell me when you're ready to plate, Chef.

- Yes.

- You ready?

Absolutely.

Oh my goodness, okay.

- Just a little, little, little (indistinct).

- Yeah.

Oh yeah, a little toss.

Yes.

- Yes.

Thank you.

So we turn it off.

- Yep.

(stove beeping) You can't how good this smells.

- [Francesco] Okay, turn, turn, turn, turn.

- It's pici a long.

- Oh yeah.

Oh, voila.

- [Christina] Perfetto.

(Christina gasping) Okay.

- Here.

- Okay.

Put the (Christina speaking in Italian).

It looks very pretty, Chef but... - What?

(Christina speaking in Italian) - Wait, where are you?

- Okay.

(Christina speaking in Italian) - Try it.

(Christina laughing) Oh my goodness, this looks... You guys, if you could only smell this, the texture of the pasta is perfect.

(Christina grunting) Francesco, it's magic.

(both speaking in Italian) And there you there you have pici all'aglione.

Make it, buy the garlic, find it, make the pici.

Make this dish.

(lively music) Just so you know, think about this.

So much money spent on research, but is anything new ever said?

We have to eat real food.

The studies can make you insane.

Carbs, no carbs, raw milk, seed oil, oatmeal can create heart disease.

The absurdity of it all is mind blowing and all of it, every shred of these screaming headlines are designed for one thing and one thing only: likes and attention in a world where every single influencer is vying for your severely compromised attention.

And let's be real, they're not posting or writing about these absurdities to create wellness.

No, they do it to create more panic, more division, more fear, because that keeps you coming back for more.

I say basta, enough.

Creating wellness is easy.

Cook and eat real natural plant-based food and connect with real people.

Say goodbye to all the panic and live a real life enjoying every bite.

So think about that and I'll see you next time on "Christina Cooks."

(all laughing) - [Director] It is 9:55.

- And at 9:55, Riselio quit.

(all laughing) Bye, Robert.

(indistinct talking) - [Narrator] Funding for 'Christina Cooks" is provided by FinaMill, the flavor of freshly ground spices and dried herbs with refillable, swappable pods.

FinaMill.

And by Suzanne's Specialties, offering a full line of alternative vegan and organic sweeteners and toppings.

Suzanne's Specialties, sweetness the way Mother Nature intended.

And by Jonathan's Spoons, individually handcrafted from cherry wood, each designed with your hand and purpose in mind.

Additional funding provided by.

You can find today's recipes and learn more by visiting our website at christinacooks.com, and by following Christina on social media.

(lively music)