Ten Things You Should Never Do When Cooking Italian

Chef Pietro is the executive chef of Pasta Luna, a little bit of New York's Little Italy transported to the heart of Richmond, Virginia. Serving authentic northern Italian cuisine, Pasta Luna has been voted the best Italian restaurant in Richmond for the past two years by the readers of Richmond Magazine.

1. Don't ever break pasta before cooking, or cut it after you've cooked it. If you break or cut the pasta we have to make a donation to a saint in Italy. So it costs me a dollar every time a customer cuts into pasta. So if you haven't learned how to twirl linguine or spaghetti or fettuccine, order something that you can eat easily, like penne.
2. Don't use oil in your water. Oil coats the pasta and won't allow the sauce to cling. So the sauce slips away onto the dish and you're left with an oily film and a hint of the sauce. The special shape is made so that each sauce clings to the pasta in a certain way. There's a different sauce for different shapes and textures. Only put oil on your cooked pasta if it is part of the sauce. Just keep stirring it to keep it free before serving.
3. Don't use a garlic press, under any circumstances. The press destroys the taste of the garlic, and takes all the juice out of it. Garlic juice should not be put into the sauce anyway. Garlic has to be handled with a knife--either sliced, diced or smashed, or a combination of the three. In different sauces you do it different ways, but don't use a garlic press. Just throw it in the garbage.
4. Don't use extra virgin olive oil for cooking--it's too heavy. Extra virgin olive oil should only be used for salads. Just use a normal olive oil, not a virgin, or an extra virgin. Filippo Berio olive oil is the best. Bertolli is also very good.
5. Don't use oregano in anything but specialty dishes that call for oregano, and when you do use it make sure that it's fresh. Dishes that call for oregano are easy to spot--they are usually called 'oreganata', as in shrimp oreganata, clams oreganata, etc. These are usually made with a bread crumb stuffing. Don't use oregano in sauces. We see a lot of dried oregano in jarred foods and pizza sauces, as well as in Greek cooking, but Italians just don?t use it that way.
6. Don't brown garlic. Saute the garlic until it's yellow, not brown (and do the same with onions). Browning throws off an acid taste and destroys the dish. Garlic has a natural flavor which has to ooze out from slight sauteing.
7. Don't use curly parsley. Use only Italian flat-leaf parsley, as curly parsley has no taste, no fragrance. It's a bland, American version of parsley. And don't use cilantro in place of flat-leaf parsley, as it imparts a horrible taste for Italian cooking.
8. Don't cook parsley. Never add parsley to your dishes until they are ready to be served, to provide a garden-like fresh taste. And please, use only fresh parsley.
9. Don't mix garlic and onion in the same dish. The flavors cancel each other out. If you want the taste of both garlic and onion in a dish, then use a shallot.
10. Don't use cheese on seafood dishes. With very rare exceptions, don't sprinkle parmesan cheese on linguine with clam sauce, or linguine with shrimp. In Italy if someone asks for cheese while eating a pasta with seafood, the entire restaurant will go into hysterics. That's a big no-no.