How to obtain the perfect creaminess: Marco Fabbri’s tips for creamy pasta

Mantecatura, or making creamy pasta, is a crucial step; if done properly, it can radically change the outcome of your dish. This is a culinary technique in which fatty substances such as oil or butter are added in the final stage to make your dishes creamy and tasty.

Marco Fabbri, our 5th-generation pasta-maker, offers tips in this article on how you can make Pasta Fabbri creamy at home.

‘In order to make a perfectly creamy pasta, there are a few small tricks that will help you bring out the flavours in your dish.

1. The process is quite simple. All you need to do is remove the pasta from the pot a few minutes before it is completely cooked and toss it in a pan over high heat with some of its cooking water and your sauce. In doing so, stirring it with firm movements, the famous ‘cream’ is created that makes the pasta so delicious.

2. As already mentioned, you can use the pasta’s cooking water. If you no longer have cooking water, bottled water can also work. This is because the starch in the pasta has not undergone any heat treatments and has not gelatinised, i.e., it has not turned into glue. When making a healthy pasta dish, there is no need to add ingredients that create density to the dish such as potato starch or potatoes themselves, as the pasta already naturally contains starch.

3. Finally, in the last 30 seconds add some oil to the pan, ensuring it is good oil, turn off the heat and serve your dish immediately.

Obviously, the preparation time depends very much on the tools you have available and above all on personal taste.

When we cook Fabbri pasta, it’s important to consider the type of pasta we are going to use, for example whether it is thin or thick.

For example, if we cook thin pasta shapes such as the Cornetti Bio or Capellini Bio made with semolina (cooking time 5/6 minutes), the pasta should boil in the pot for half the time and then finish cooking in the pan with the sauce and the addition of cooking water. Conversely, if we are cooking thicker shapes such as Spaghettoni Toscani Bio (cooking time 18 minutes), it’s best to take them off the heat 1 or 2 minutes earlier.’

If you’ve never tried Fabbri Pasta, we recommend starting with our penne rigate (thick pasta with a 12-minute cooking time), a short, easy-to-cook shape that’s ideal for practising your mantecatura.