Comedian Matteo Lane has a lot of opinions about pasta—and he’s not afraid to share them. He recently visited Bon Appétit to talk about his hilarious new book Your Pasta Sucks and his road from stand-up comic to cookbook author. Quick-witted and opinionated, he gabs about what Americans get wrong about cooking pasta, how his Italian Mexican roots inform his kitchen outlook, and his deep love for Italy. Plus, Matteo dishes on the behind-the-scenes drama of a viral Olive Garden video that started it all (yes, he has very strong feelings about Olive Garden) and why carbonara is his go-to. Come for the jokes, stay for the sauce tips.
Jamila Robinson: I'm Jamila Robinson, editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit and Epicurious, and this is Food People. On Food People, we talk about how food and drink shape our society. This week, we're joined by our Associate Director of Drinks Joseph Hernandez.
Hey, Joey.
Joseph Hernandez: Hey, Jamila.
JR: Oh, it's so great to have you here. You took the hosting chair this week for a really funny conversation with Comedian Matteo Lane. How was that?
JH: It was wonderful. I've been a big fan of Matteo Lane's standup for years. During the pandemic, he blew up with some hilarious YouTube videos about pasta. Just like me, he's from Chicago, he's extremely funny. He has a podcast called I Never Liked You co-hosted with his friend and comedian Nick Smith. Twist, he's also a cookbook author. I caught up with him to talk about his new book, Your Pasta Sucks, his love affair with Italy, and his feelings about Olive Garden.
JR: The title just makes me laugh. Well, I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Thanks for taking the hosting chair, Joey.
JH: Thanks for having me.
JH: Hello, Matteo, welcome to Food People.
ML: Ciao, buongiorno, grazie.
JH: I've been a big fan of yours since, I think the pandemic, you started doing a lot of pasta videos on your Instagram and YouTube, railing on how people screw up-
ML: Yeah, I'm a comedian, too.
JH: Yeah, no, no.
ML: It's not going to be ... We're not really learning much, we're making fun of more.
JH: Well, you have an opinion, a very strong opinion.
ML: I'm Italian Mexican, I'm a comedian. There's going to be lots of opinions.
JH: Does that come from being a picky eater or being a purist about the foods that you love?
ML: Just because we're being an asshole. I don't know. I am a picky eater. Yeah, it probably comes from that.
JH: Okay.
ML: And also, just being opinionated and growing up with very opinionated women around me.
JH: I recall in your cookbook, you had mentioned that a lot of family dinners were everybody talking over each other because that's the nature of your family. Is that true?
ML: Yeah. Can you imagine, I made it up? I grew up in a small family.
JH: Some people can fact check.
ML: Well, it was weird because I would go to my friend Mark's house, and I love my friend Mark, but it was culture shock. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and then moved to Chicago in my teens. My friend, Sophia, she's Greek. I grew up with an Italian culture, so we're used to screaming and yelling. We would go eat dinner at my friend Mark's house and the silence, it was painful. It was painful because her and I are used to ... I would go to her house and I was so comfortable, because Greeks, they're just always yelling. Her mom would read our fortune in her Greek coffee cups. But I felt like she would read my fortune and she would be like, "I see the letter E and some money coming," and this and that. Then she would read her daughter's and she goes, "This says that you're a bitch!" It felt very biased.
JH: Yeah. Did you have similar traditions of that in your family?
ML: Well, no. In every Italian or Latin family, specifically Mexicans, there's aways one aunt who talks to dead people. Mine is my Aunt Nicky. Sometimes I say that at shows. It's a 2000-seat theater and I'm like, "This question is only for Italians or Latinos. How many of your family members speak to dead people?" They're laughing and everyone else is like, "What?" I was like, “I can't get into it.”
JH: Did your Aunt Nicky have any spirits around you guys all the time, or just regular ghosts that she spoke with?
ML: A little bit of everything.
JH: Yeah, okay.
ML: Just some extra color in my family, because my family certainly needs more ridiculousness, yeah.
JH: Well, what would a typical family dinner look like? What were you cooking, how were you helping and getting in the mix?
ML: Let's do a Sunday night. My Aunt Cindy, she buys a cauldron I think from a witch's store to start the sauce. A Sunday red sauce, like meat sauce, bolognese. You cook that starting around 8:00 or 9:00, and then that cooks all day. Then we just take bread and dip into it all day, as the day is going through. Because it fills the house, the smell fills the house. Then around 5:00, whatever family member can come over comes over. Usually, anywhere from eight to 15 of us will be there.
JH: Oh, wow.
ML: We all just fit around the table. Yeah, then it just becomes like Hunger Games of who can tell a funnier story, who can tag on a funnier story to that, repeating stories, hearing family stories. Usually, it would end with my Uncle Mike, he's not Italian or Mexican, he was Irish and he was obsessed with cleaning. The last drop of sauce would be off my plate, it's in the dishwasher, he's cleaning.
Then my Aunt Cindy would do her nails every thousand shade of red, so then she sits there and does her nails. Then it was another three hours of sitting and talking, so you sit and talk. Then she has about 18 boxes of ice cream in her freezer, she's obsessed with ice cream. She would let them all just thaw out, and then we'd pick which one we're going to do and which one we're going to eat. Then you'd sit there and eat that, then you'd keep talking. Then my Uncle Mike would order, I'm from Chicago, so he would order a grilled chicken from Jewel.
JH: Oh, yeah.
ML: He'd be like, "You know, Matteo, I didn't grow up with pasta and I prefer chicken. I'm not trying to insult my wife's cooking. I love my wife, please, Cindy!" It was a lot of that, us making fun of him and him being dramatic.
JH: That's very sweet.
ML: Yeah.
JH: Were there ever any territorial battles about who managed the sauce?
ML: My Aunt Cindy makes the sauce.
JH: Okay.
ML: That was that.
JH: That was that, no discussion.
ML: But she makes, in my opinion, in my family, she makes the best red sauce. I keep begging her to jar it and send it to me, so I can just have it on a Sunday. But everyone has their own version of their sauce. It's the same base, and then it changes. Now, if I'm making a bolognese, I've moved into traditional bolognese.
JH: Okay.
ML: The very classic sofrito with the pork and beef, and all that. My pomodoro is my favorite because it's quick, it takes 20 minutes, it's got enough flavor into it. Yeah, that would be more so what I make. Because the bolognese, it takes all day.
JH: Right.
ML: It's just me.
JH: Right.
ML: Whose going to eat it?
JH: Yeah, because it sounds like she's feeding…
ML: Hundreds, an army.
JH: Right.
ML: Then because you don't use all the sauce, then you put the sauce in the fridge, and then you eat in on Wednesday. Then you finish that off, and then you restart the cycle on Sunday. You could really eat pasta three or four days a week.
JH: What's the backbone of Aunt Cindy's sauce recipe?
ML: Heavy meat in the beginning, fried up with garlic, olive oil. Pretty basic. Then tomatoes, tomato sauce. Hers, for some reason, is a bit sweeter. I don't know, the canned tomatoes that she's using, I don't know, but it's a bit sweeter. I always liked that. I like a little bit of a sweeter sauce, I think.
JH: Okay.
ML: Yeah. The right texture of meat and the fat from the beef, and the red sauce, and cooking all day. Usually on a Wednesday, after it's been in the fridge for two days, it tastes even better.
JH: It's married a little bit?
ML: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
ML: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You reheat it. Then, she and my Uncle Mike have a house in Vegas. When I go to Vegas, she has frozen red sauce in the freezer. When I was doing the Comedy Cellar in Vegas, I'd stay at their place for a week and then I just had sauce with me.
JH: Oh, I love that. That's very sweet.
ML: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. You are a comedian.
ML: I hope so.
JH: What was the journey like to making a cookbook?
ML: Honestly, it just came from after 2020 and as we entered 2021, comics, Schulz in particular, started putting their stuff online. His friend Mark who's on the show with him was like, "Oh, you cook and sing, there's a bunch of stuff you could do if you had a YouTube channel." My friend Chris Caso, who is my producer and does everything with me, he and I decided, "Let's just do a weekly cooking show. I know how to cook pasta." Less for teaching people how to cook, and more so for just having another platform to do comedy. It was another medium where, if you watch the videos … That's how the book came along, because it's not a Martha Stewart, "Here's 85 recipes when you're having cocktails." I'm not a chef. I'm a cook, my mom taught me how to cook, but I'm a comedian. It was a hybrid of funny stories and cooking at the same time, and that's just how it came from. But then, people started making the meals and I thought, "Oh, that's kind of fun," so I just kept cooking.
JH: Yeah. I remember one of your early videos, it featured you and your friend and podcast co-host Nick Smith, going to Olive Garden?
ML: Yeah, that video has really taken off.
JH: Tell us more.
ML: Well, we went to the Olive Garden because that's Nick's-
JH: The Times Square Olive Garden, right?
ML: The Times Square Olive Garden, that's right. It's Nick's favorite restaurant. Nick is trash. He's from a small town outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, it was 700 people, his dad's the mayor. He never ran, they just made him the mayor. They have no Italian food. His only concept of Italian food was going to the Olive Garden or Pizza Hut, which he worked at for two years. It's his other favorite restaurant. We decided we'll go to the Olive Garden, because we had done this video of me making pasta al pomodoro and he made his own version, which was a Prego jar and too much pepper, and butter. It was just gross. So, we went.
I can't even believe it happened. I thought it was just going to be a funny video of us sitting at the Olive Garden and me complaining about the food. Then this waiter, this poor gay waiter recognized me carrying all this tray of stuff, and he got excited and dropped every plate.
JH: No!
ML: Then Nick is like, "Oh my God, it's World War III! Jesus Christ!" Then there's just smashed plates all over us. Then after a while, there's so much sodium and oil, you just feel sweaty. It just was a perfect way to encapsulate our friendship and our humor with each other. It was just by an act of God this this poor waiter dropped everything. It made for a great video.
JH: Yeah.
ML: Then he messaged me and was like, "I'm so embarrassed." But I'm like, “Don't be embarrassed!”
JH: “You're famous now, babe.”
ML: Yeah, it was great. It was honestly very fun, but the Olive Garden is terrible. Then we went back with my friend Francesco De Carlo.
JH: Right.
ML: Who's an Italian comic from Italy, one of my best friends. He was really culture shock at how bad the food ... The lasagna at the Olive Garden is particularly bad.
JH: Why?
ML: Why? Have you been? What is this? I thought this was a food channel?
JH: I haven't been in 12 years, 13 years.
ML: Everything is sugar, and oil, and salt, and bad. Obviously, it's made in a factory and then heated up there. I don't even think they own a microwave at the Olive Garden. It's bad. It's just salt. How many different ways can you put salt together? I guess if I did the Alfredo, it's all right. It's not the worst, but it's bad. It's bad food.
JH: That's the pinnacle of bad restaurant.
ML: But to some people …
JH: Right.
ML: The reason I'm shitting on it is because obviously I come from an Italian family. But for some people in a small town, that is a nice restaurant. They don't have access to Italian food. They don't have access to ... Like Nick. Nick grew up in a small town of 700 people, to go to the Olive Garden was an event. I'm not shitting on it in that sense, I'm just shitting on it because it's shitty.
JR: We're going to take a quick break. When we return, more with Comedian Matteo Lane on the pasta pitfalls tripping up American cooks.
JH:: Welcome back to Food People. Matteo, what are the common crimes Americans commit against pasta?
ML: Well, I think I want to make it very clear, I love Italian American food. Especially in the tri-state area where Italians immigrated, so you find a lot more authentic Italian American food. It's not supposed to be food from Italy, because that's not where it's from. It's from Italians immigrating here, and you had Italians from all over. From Napoli, Calabria, Bari, Puglia, Cecilia, all these different southern regions with all new ingredients, all homogenized into a community trying to make a living in serving American people who felt, "We need protein, and carbs, and vegetables all in one plate." That's not how Italians eat.
That's where spaghetti and meatballs come from, because you get your protein. You had an abundance of ingredients that they didn't have in Italy. Chicken Parmesan probably came from cotoletta, which you throw on top. Everyone just threw everything on pasta. Pasta was seen more of a background, where in Italy, it's more the forefront. It is the forefront, it's the star of the dish, the sauce comes second.
But a lot of mistakes that I see people making that I think are easy mistakes are just the preparation of the pasta. I really, truly believe that you should treat pasta like a steak. It's not a sponge that you dump sauce on and it becomes a soup. Think of it as a steak. When you order a steak, the first thing they ask you, “How do you want it cooked?”
JH: Yeah.
ML: You say, rare, medium-rare, well-done, whatever. You have to think of pasta the same way. You want it al dente, meaning to the bite is the literal translation, but it has to have a bite to it. Romans eat it very al dente, almost to the point where Americans think it's not finished cooking.
JH: Right.
ML: But it should have a bite. Dry pasta, I should say, should have a real bite to it. It should be properly salted and seasoned the same way you would season a steak. The water can't season the pasta. Pasta is flour and water in and of itself, dry pasta. Really, a lot of salt to give it that flavor, to also help enrich the flavor of the sauce as well.
Then if you make a red sauce, even if it's from a Prego jar, take that starchy pasta water and bring it into to when you mix the pasta and sauce together. Don't just dump the sauce on dry pasta, and then mix it in the bowl. It should be cooked and mixed together.
Those three or four things can really help elevate your pasta. It sounds ridiculous and over-complicated, but it's really not. If you do it, even just a few times, you'll find that it drastically changes how you approach pasta. Then you become a pasta snob, like me. You go to places and you can just see the pasta. You're like, "It's over-cooked. It's not salted enough. Bad pasta, too much sauce. Bad sauce, too much sugar." Just stuff like that.
JH: Yeah, I find that people under-salt their water. The common wisdom, at least in food circles, is the water should taste like the sea. How much are you salting?
ML: Depending on the sauce. If it's a red sauce, I really do a handful of salt and throw it on. You should really mix it in the water and then taste it, and see how salty it is, whether you should add more or less. Because a lot of times, I think I'm adding enough salt, then about three minutes into cooking, four minutes into cooking, if I'm making spaghetti, that's about halfway done, I'll try the pasta. "This needs more salt," I dump a little more salt in. That's pretty normal, you see that all the time in Italy. It needs to be a little more salted, less salted, whatever. But that's usually how I do it.
JH: For cooking dry pasta, since people tend to overcook, what's around your time? Let's say spaghetti, dried spaghetti.
ML: The box tells you.
JH: Right.
ML: De Cecco, even if you get De Cecco, it says seven to eight minutes for al dente, just for an example. At six minutes, try it. That's about the point where you can start playing around with it.
JH: Are you throwing pasta on the wall?
ML: I can't even imagine where that came from. Because it's starchy enough, I don't even understand how that came to be.
JH: I never understood it.
ML: No, it's not a thing people do.
JH: Yeah. Okay. Your book is titled Your Pasta Sucks.
ML: Do you think it's funny?
JH: I think it's funny.
ML: Okay.
JH: But it's also an unusual tactic, because so many cookbooks are Gather for Love or The Joyful Plate.
ML: What about me ... Can you imagine?
JH: Yeah.
ML: Based off my material, if I wrote a cookbook and it was called Gather with Love: Cooking with Matteo Lane. I'd rather be face down in the river. I also thought too, I'm a comedian. It's a bit of a wink. I'm insulting you, but it's also letting you know there's jokes in this book. I'm also shoveling pasta in my underwear into my face on the cover. Nothing about this is being taken seriously.
But it is funny to be walking around in the cookbook section and all of a sudden, there's a book that just says, Your Pasta Sucks. I'd be like, “Excuse me?”
JH: You said what about my mom?
ML: Your Mom's a Piece of Shit: A Cookbook with Matteo Lane. It's half funny stories, that's what it is.
JH: Yeah.
ML: I'm not Hemingway.
JH: Right.
ML: I'm not going to write a book from beginning to end with a whole arc and stuff. It's recipes, and then a series of short essays. I'm a huge fan of Fran Lebowitz and I just think of it that way. These are just short essays, like Metropolitan Life, these stories of New York. You're not going to get a through line with me.
JH: Yeah, it's very voicey.
ML: Is voicey good or bad?
JH: Good, good.
ML: Okay, sorry.
JH: As an editor, it's something that I'm looking for all the time is hearing somebody write the way they speak.
ML: Okay, yeah.
JH: Yeah. Something that pops out at me is there's a real gay sensibility to the book.
ML: Shocking.
JH: Shocking.
ML: The cover has me in my underwear.
JH: Well, that, but I'm thinking of your anecdotal story about tortellini being made in Modena and Bologna, and there's inherent horniness to the origin story of that pasta.
ML: Pasta in general, it's just all different dick shapes. See what I mean?
JH: Yeah.
ML: Even fusilli.
JH: Yeah.
ML: I don't know. Yeah, the book's not overtly tacky gay jokes.
JH: No, no.
ML: Every once in a while, you have to say the joke that exists.
JH: Yeah.
ML: But it's not a book that's Pasta For Gays.
JH: Yeah.
ML: It's pasta for anybody, and then this is also the life that I live.
JH: No. I only bring it up because I think lots of cookbooks hold back on that part of our lives.
ML: Sure.
JH: It was nice to see it front-and-center and visible.
ML: That comes from standup. I started 17 years ago and I'd get so many questions like, "Were you out at first on stage?" I'd say there's no dumb questions, but there are, and that's a dumb question. It's like, "Yeah, what about this voice was hiding it?" I started with a mullet and a deep-V, I'm not sure what you thought I was hiding. Again, it's a cookbook, but it's a funny story book. It's a series of short essays. It's meant to be funny. It's meant to be stories and an homage to my family, making jokes. I have a whole section of why your pasta sucks, or what you're doing wrong, or the rules of eating with an Italian family. It's meant to be fun. It's meant to be something that you enjoy reading and you can learn a little bit from it.
JH: Yeah, and it has a real point of view. Particularly your love for Italy is clear throughout the book.
ML: Yeah.
JH: Where did that love affair start?
ML: I think it started, my friend Giovanni, he's a family friend at this point, we call each other cousins. My grandfather's family is from Montevago, which is a really small town outside of Agrigento. When you go visit them, they basically just show you where the earthquake was and where everyone died, and then you sit and stare at a donkey. My friend Giovanni, who is a cousin to me, lives in Messina, which is a big city, nightlife, friends, family. He was a foreign exchange student at my school, so I went to visit him when I was 15 or 16. 16 is when I first went to Sicily.
It was also a bit of a clean slate for me. I was also dealing with internalized homophobia. I was having to confront that at school and was made fun of a lot. I was not popular. To go to Italy with this completely different culture and completely different life, it was an escapism. I attached my love of Italy, specifically Sicily, I attached it to a sense of freedom I would say, an escape to freedom. I got to eat amazing food and see a different life.
Also, Sicily, Messina, no tourists. It's not like I'm in Venice, or Rome, or Florence, or these already established tourist destinations. I'm in Sicily, where we'd wake up and see fires across in Calabria because the farmers wouldn't pay the mafia tax, so the mafia burns their crops. Then they're on fire, and then the Sicilians are cheering that Calabria is on fire. That was how you started the morning. You could hear the guys screaming for the fruit, "[foreign language 00:19:19]." I'm like, "I'd rather a cock-a-doodle-do." You'd go to sleep and it's 110-degrees, and they don't have air conditioning.
JH: Famously, yeah.
ML: Yeah. It was great. It was great for me to get out of the suburbs of Chicago and to see life completely different than what I knew.
JH: Since then, how often are you traveling to Italy?
ML: Four times a year.
JH: Oh, wow.
ML: I have a really strong group of friends in Rome. I talk about my friend Elena, my friend Francesco. I have a crew in Rome. My friendship with Francesco De Carlo has really allowed me to be in Italy a lot just to hang out. I go to the same hotel. It's not like I'm doing tourist stuff. I get there and we're cooking at Elena's house, or we're just going out to dinner at my favorite place, The Umberto. Or we're just going to friends' house, my friend Eleta. We're just hanging out. I don't speak English for a week, and we eat great foods, and that's it. It's still my little escape.
JH: Well, I know you speak Italian quite well.
ML: Am I fluent? Yes.
JH: No, but Italy can be intimidating. I think Europe in general can be intimidating if you don't speak another language.
ML: Yeah.
JH: And places like Rome, which have high tourist populations, can feel limited to just the tourist spots. What's some advice that you would give to somebody traveling to Rome for the first time?
ML: My advice is I think Americans are very task-oriented and feel that they have to get every bang for their buck. When they go to other countries, I see people ... I was in Rome last summer and a woman was sitting there with I think 18 luggages around her. Obviously, her and her family were traveling. I started talking to her and she's from Chicago, too. I was like, "Did you just get to Rome?" She goes, "Well, no, we're in Rome for two days. Then we're getting on a train, then we're going to Florence for two days, and then we're going to go to Verona. After Verona, we're going to go Bologna. After Bologna, we'll go to Milan. After Milan, we're going to go to Venice." I thought, “You are wasting your money.”
Okay, cool, you saw all the frescoes, you saw all the art museums. This is the antithesis of Italian culture. People go to these other countries and expect their country there. Italy, if you're going to go to Rome, go to Rome and go there for one week. Meet your local barista, meet your local trattoria. Meet locals, enjoy the Italian lifestyle. It's slow. Eat when they eat, they eat at 9:00 and then do a passeggiata, take a walk around the city, enjoy the piazza. Enjoy the life. Take a nap after your two-hour lunch. Go actually be in Italy.
The idea of having a million tickets, and a million train rides, and a million hotels, and a million this, you saw nothing, you met no one. You waited in a bunch of lines and you exhausted yourself. Why would you go? I just don't understand it. It seems so arrogant, do you know what I mean? It's good if you want to go to Venice and see those things, you want to go to Florence. Americans only get two weeks off a year, it's not like they get all of August off like Europeans. Do you want to go to the country just to check off that you saw a bunch of shit and rushed through it? Or do you want to go to the country and make memories, and meet people, and have a reason to go back?
I think that that's the biggest mistake that a lot of Americans make when they're traveling to places like Italy. Places like Italy, and Spain, and Greece, these places are not meant to be run through.
JH: Right.
ML: They're meant to be enjoyed.
JH: Right.
ML: It's a different lifestyle. I think some people have a very difficult time adopting another culture because they're so soaked in their own.
JH: Right. It sounds like you have adopted the culture.
ML: Even when I get to Italy, it takes a couple days for the New York to wash off me.
JH: Oh, really?
ML: I feel anxious. I'm like, “I should be something!”
JH: Yeah. How do you shake that off?
ML: You have a bunch of cigarettes and eat pasta, and then it goes away pretty quickly.
JH: Espresso.
ML: Yeah, yeah. But also, because I'm speaking Italian, there's also that period too, 4:00 PM hits and my brain's exhausted. Because now, I'm ... Do you speak Tagalog?
JH: Yeah.
ML: Do you have the same experience? If you are with family, after a while, the amount of translating you're doing in your head, you get tired.
JH: I don't get a lot of that, just because I don't speak it with my family that often. When I'm in Mexico for instance, if I'm traveling, I have very little Spanish and I'm trying really hard. Same going to Spain, or whatever. Yeah, that exhaustion is real.
ML: Yeah. I'm fluent in Italian. Yeah. Spain, Mexico, same thing for me when I'm speaking Spanish, but they all laugh at me because I have an Italian accent. They say I sound like Mario and Luigi.
JH: That's pretty funny.
ML: Yeah.
JR: We're going to take another break. When we're back, Matteo Lane talks about how his love of food is a gateway to his creativity.
JH: Welcome back to Food People. You have a standup special coming out on Hulu.
ML: Yeah.
JH: On May 16th called The Al Dente Special.
ML: Yes.
JH: Obviously, the cookbook is coming out. Why is food so prominent in your work right now?
ML: Well, honestly, I couldn't think of a better special title, because I had a tour called The Al Dente Tour.
JH: Okay.
ML: It was last minute and I was like, "The Al Dente Special!" I really have no reason why I picked that.
JH: Okay.
ML: I don't even think I mention pasta in the special. But why is food so important to me?
JH: Yeah.
ML: Well, I think that my relationship to food was my relationship to opening up creativity. When I was a kid, my mom lined me and my sister and brother up, we're all one year apart. They're actually 11 months apart, they're Irish twins. We didn't have a lot of month growing up, so for us, things to enjoy were not vacations, they weren't sports, they weren't extracurricular activities. They were at home, doing things like watching the pizza dough rise and my mom making it fun, or making meatballs with her, or cooking pasta, or making the sauce. She had a very good way of taking what could otherwise be considered pretty boring domesticated things that are just for eating and made them a fun experience.
As a result, I feel very comfortable in the kitchen. I was able to express myself by drawing and singing. My sister's an amazing chef. My sister blows me out of the water. She has a garden the size of my apartment. She grows everything. She can make oxtail in meat, and make her own bacon, and this. Homemade ricotta, and homemade bread, homemade pasta, everything. She's just a complete expert and that all stems from my mom making it accessible to us as kids. I'm 38, I'm going to be 39 soon, and I am just still blown away by my friends who walk in the kitchen, they have absolutely no idea what to do.
JH: Yeah.
ML: They have no interest in cooking. It feels like homework to them. They have no idea. It's like, yeah, that makes sense. They probably just didn't cook as kids. There's so many families that didn't. Whether it's economical reason or whether it's just how that family works, or whether the dynamics of that family were different than mine, fine. I find that being able to cook as a young person has helped me feel more open and strong in a lot of my other creative outlets as an adult.
JH: Do you feel like you have muscle memory? What are some skills that you walk into a kitchen-
ML: Pasta is muscle memory.
JH: Yeah.
ML: I could do it in my sleep.
JH: Fresh pasta?
ML: Yeah. Fresh pasta, yeah. Well sometimes, it's like I have to find the right counter space.
JH: Yeah.
ML: That's a thing.
JH: And it has to be clean.
ML: It has to be clean, I know. My sister and I, we usually make homemade ravioli for Christmas. I put that in the book as well.
JH: Yeah, I saw that.
ML: She has enough space, she has an island, so we can just lay out the pasta, and then we make the homemade ricotta. Then we can just dollop it and fold it. The more space you have, the easier it is.
My friend, Chef Marco, he's a huge chef on Instagram, he's amazing. He'll come over to my apartment just on a random night. We're like, "Okay, we're going to cook gnocchi tonight." We made spinach ricotta gnocchi. My counter is full of flour and he's very messy. He's like, "Okay, yeah, we'll make it well. Okay, it's fine." I'm like the nervous person cleaning behind him. Yeah, sometimes the space is necessary.
JH: I don't know if you've observed this with your friends who don't cook, but I certainly have. Everybody uses the smallest knife available, the smallest cutting board.
ML: Yeah.
JH: Use the big stuff.
ML: Well, my friend Nick has no talent.
JH: Yeah.
ML: He can't cook anything. He can't even make a smoothie. He somehow managed to take good ingredients, when blended together, he ruined it. He can't cook for shit and he can't bake. He has no interest in it. Watching him do it, he has full panic attacks. He looks like a woman sinking on the Titanic, that's the behavior he has when he's cooking. I've tried so hard to teach him, he has zero interest in it. But then, he likes my cooking.
JH: Right.
ML: He won't say it, but he's like, "Are you going to make that cacio e pepe again?
JH: Right.
ML: I'm like, yes. "Okay." He'll eat it.
JH: Also, a great Squidward voice.
ML: He literally sounds like that. Hello. That's Nick's voice. It sounds like Squidward.
JH: Circling back to the cookbook real quick, you wrote in the intro, “Carbonara is the reason this cookbook exists.”
ML: Yes.
JH: Is that your favorite pasta?
ML: Yes, yes. Yes, with an ellipses.
JH: Okay.
ML: It just depends. My favorite pasta could be pasta de la mama because that's my favorite thing my mom made when we were kids. I also just every time I eat at Zi Umberto in Trastevere Roma, when I eat the bucatini amatriciana, I don't know what they're doing because I've asked the whole staff, they all know me now. Every staff member has given me a different reason why the pasta is so good. Last summer he said, "Our fire." I was like, “I don't think that the heat is changing ... Fine, whatever.”
JH: Right, right.
ML: Whatever, they're just Italian. They're all smoking on the table while we're ordering food. But then, it can come down to I love struffoli at Christmastime, it just invokes so much memory. When I eat it, it reminds me of my great-grandmother.
There's so many different foods that just bring up so many different memories, so it's hard to pick.
JH: Okay.
ML: I guess I would say carbonara just because I love the presentation of it, the evolution of that dish. That was the first dish that I didn't know anything of before I went to Italy, and then had it for the first time in Rome. Then every time I would go back and forth between Chicago or New York and Rome, I was learning more about the dish and perfecting it. Until I really learned from Luciano in Campo de'Fiori, who has a restaurant Luciano, and he's the Re of Carbonara, he's the King of Carbonara, and he brought me to his kitchen to show me.
That pasta dish has traveled with me from the beginning of my trips to Italy to now, and perfecting it, and I feel quite proud that I've perfected that dish.
JH: It's like your anchor.
ML: Kind of, yeah. It has the basis of all Italian cooking, in a way. The simplicity, but also it just has to be added in the right way. It has to be made the right way. Does that make sense?
JH: Yeah.
ML: Pasta dishes are quite simple, but then the assembly can be quite difficult because it's about the timing, it's about the temp-
JH: And the technique.
ML: That's right. I think that that dish for me represents my love of Italian cooking.
JH: What's your go-to pasta order at a restaurant when you don't know what else to order?
ML: Usually ... Well, it depends. If I'm just at a New York Italian American restaurant, I'll just go red sauce.
JH: Okay.
ML: Yeah. You can judge a restaurant by how their red sauce is.
JH: Are you being super judgey about that?
ML: Always.
JH: Or are you just like, “I just need to eat?”
ML: No, I'm always judgey. There's no mistake.
JH: Can't turn it off.
ML: I'm always judgey. I vocalized it, but I am.
JH: Yeah, yeah. We love games here on Food People, so just a quickfire.
ML: I know you can't really come at me from mind games.
JH: Yeah. Welcome to the jungle. You can only save one.
ML: Okay.
JH: Just going to rattle these off.
ML: Oh, I love this!
JH: Tiramisu or gelato?
ML: Gelato.
JH: Pasta or pizza?
ML: Pasta.
JH: Chicken parm or spaghetti and meatballs?
ML: Spaghetti and meatballs.
JH: Mozzarella or Parmesan reggiano?
ML: I guess I'd go with Parmesan because it goes on everything.
JH: Fresh pasta or dry?
ML: Dry.
JH: Dry. What is your favorite pasta shape?
ML: Spaghetti.
JH: Yeah?
ML: Classic spaghetti. I love spinning it on the fork, I love everything about it. I love spaghetti.
JH: What's your show-off dish?
ML: Carbonara, I think. People aren't really used to it, so when you make it they're like.
JH: Yeah.
ML: Then it's a new flavor for them. They've never had it really before.
JH: What makes a perfect carbonara for you?
ML: To me, it has to be guanciale and it should be imported from Italy, not New Jersey guanciale. There's just a huge difference, I don't know how to explain it. Also, don't use pancetta, don't use bacon. Use pecorino Romano, use only the egg yolk. Then you use the starchy pasta water to smooth that out. You can take the oil from the guanciale and bring it into your base sauce, essentially.
Then what I like to do is put it in a big bowl and have my sauce already made, and then take the hot pasta and bring it right in and mix it there. The heat of the pasta can emulsify with- The sauce, that's right. Because when you put it back in the pan, you might scramble those eggs. I think for someone who's not used to cooking like that, just put it in the bowl and use it that way. Reserve a little pasta water in the end if you need to thin it out a bit.
JH: Great. Matteo, thank you so much for being on Food People.
ML: Thank you so much for having me.
Jamila Robinson: Thanks for listening to Food People. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice. Hit that follow button so you never miss an episode.
I'm your host Jamila Robinson. Special thanks for Joey Hernandez for guest hosting today's conversation. Our producer is Emily Elias. Our associate producer is Abi Lieff. Pran Bandi was our studio engineer. This episode was mixed by Jake Lummus. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Conde Nast head of global audio. We'll be back next week with more Food People. See you then.