Giada De Laurentiis Uses These Unexpected Kitchen Utensils To Plate Pasta

Visit a fancy Italian restaurant and you'll be presented with a serving of beautifully plated spaghetti that's been swirled into a little pile in the center of a pristine plate. To recreate that immaculate and structured display without getting sauce all over your dish, take a tip from Giada De Laurentiis and use a carving fork and a serving spoon to plate it to perfection.

In a YouTube clip, the Italian-American chef begins by placing her carving fork upright in the middle of her sauced pasta so the tines are facing downwards. Then she twirls the fork in place while the noodles wrap themselves around it, reaching all the way up the tines, to create a little mountain of pasta. Next, Laurentiis lifts the pasta up carefully and places a serving spoon on the bottom to make sure her spaghetti doesn't fall and unfurl. Then she transfers the pasta into the center of her serving bowl and uses the spoon to gently push it down off the tines so it settles and stays in a lifted bundle. This trick is perfect for long and thin varieties of noodles, such as spaghetti, angel hair, and bucatini. However, it also works for thicker and flatter pastas, such as fettuccine and tagliatelle. As long as your noodles are long enough to twist up around themselves, you can employ this hack to create restaurant-worthy swirls.

A carving fork normally comes in a set with a carving knife, but if you haven't got one in your utensil drawer, you can substitute it for a pair of tongs. Simply place the tongs in the pasta in a closed position and turn them in place until your spaghetti is wrapped around them (you might need to hold them closed with one hand while the other rotates them from the top). Garnish your pasta with herbs and a drizzle of olive oil before serving. While this technique won't produce a mound of pasta that's as tall as using a carving fork, it will still look impressive, neat, and contained, producing a dish that looks artful and considered. Plus, you can use it to plate spaghetti and meatballs in several beautiful ways, such as making little nests of noodles that the polpette can nestle in.

Other pasta tips we learned from Giada De Laurentiis include splashing pasta water into your sauce to lend it a thicker, glossier sheen and reheating leftover noodles in a skillet so they can develop some crispy texture. As always, one of the most basic ways to prepare restaurant-style pasta at home is to heavily salt your pasta water to ensure every noodle is well-seasoned and savory.