Pasta, with its various sauces ranging from white and red to pesto sauce, deserves the right to be called a versatile food. This food is also efficient to prepare as you need to boil pasta and add seasoning to eat. However, as a chef, who always needs to innovate and develop new food for your customers, you want to offer more than regular pasta and serve new flavours. With your knowledge of different ingredients, it becomes difficult to think of fresh ingredients. Here are a few unusual ingredients that you can put in your pasta, giving it a new, weirdly satisfying flavour.
Truffle oil
Oils not only help dishes get cooked, but they also add flavour to them. Truffle oil imparts a unique aroma and taste to food like pasta. Most of the time, it does not appear in dishes as the oil itself, but as a sauce. The sauce has an earthy flavour with a nutty scent. You can buy bottles of truffle oil in your nearest market; however, they come at a high price.
Semi-dried tomatoes
Tomatoes have been a constant in making pasta everywhere due to their diverse flavours. Dried tomatoes have a sweet taste, whereas fresh tomatoes have a balanced feeling of sweet and tangy. Now, how do semi-dried tomatoes taste? Indeed, they are tangy and sweet. So if you add these tomatoes in your pasta, they can work with your shrimp and orange sauce. You can get these quickly, as you can buy them in bulk online.
Eggplant
Eggplant is from the gourd family, and is somehow more acidic than your regular squash, making it an unusual ingredient for pasta. The slimy texture, when you cook eggplant, makes it a perfect partner for cheese, onion and tomatoes. Eggplants are in all grocery stores, so they are easily accessible.
Sardines
Sardines impart a dense and oily flavour to food, making your pasta different from usual. They can be paired well with oysters, shrimps, and leaves. Sardines come in packs or cans in grocery stores, so you can go and grab one for your dish.
Hibiscus flowers
Usually, chefs put leaves such as arugula, and spinach in most kinds of pasta, but only a few explore the possibility of putting flowers in pasta. Flowers, specifically Hibiscus, provide a berry-rich and lemony-tart flavour. If put in the pasta, you can surely pair this up with lots of cheese, and tomatoes. You can get Hibiscus in your garden or from a flower shop near you.
Chefs must always serve new and unique food to their customers as everyone’s taste buds are ever evolving. What you might like before might be something you do not like now. Pasta, one of the most common foods eaten in the world, needs to upgrade too. And as a chef, you need to include unusual ingredients in your recipes like oils, seafood, and even flowers. Who knows, you might invent a pasta recipe that millions of people will like?
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