Italian food is "easy" to find all over the world, there are many Italian restaurants that are open day after day both in large cities and in small towns, but how many of these manage to transmit and serve real food and true culture Italian? Not many.
But why is all this happening?
Like all mass-produced products the replica of the product itself emerge and the same also applies to Italian cuisine.
Over the years, millions of tourists have arrived in Italy with the expectation of eating a plate of Fettuccine Alfredo or a Carbonara with sour cream (cooking cream) and they have been told "we do not serve Carbonara with cream" or "fettuccine Alfredo does not exist/are not part of our menu ".
For this reason, we decided to tell you which are the most famous Italian dishes abroad.
Let's start with one of the most famous Italian dishes in Italy: Carbonara. By now everyone knows the fantastic 5 ingredients of Carbonara: pasta, bacon, pecorino, eggs, and pepper but abroad the recipes used to see the presence of ingredients that break the hearts of Italians such as garlic or onion, chives, cooking cream at will and bacon instead of bacon. The Carbonara recipe is very simple and just follow a few steps to be able to make a real delight, in case we recommend our guide to the perfect Carbonara complete with a video recipe.
Abroad there is always the tendency to cook pasta in white and then serve it in a nice mountain of sauce with meat - a very serious mistake! We know that to flavor the pasta you need to dedicate the last minutes of cooking (creaming) to combine the sauce with the pasta, that's where the pasta dish is born.
Among the various dishes that present this style abroad, we find different specialties, including Spaghetti with meatballs (spaghetti with sauce and meatballs). The dish, albeit wrong, has a small Italian origin, because in Puglia we eat orecchiette with sauce and meatballs, the small ones not the big ones - here you can find a guide on pasta cuts. The second is perhaps the Italian dish - in name but not in fact - more famous abroad, we are talking about the fettuccine Alfredo. Pasta, butter, and parmesan are the 3 ingredients that made Americans fall in love, first of all, and then the whole world. Although there are several legends about this dish, there are no clear references to the Italian origin of the dish and, for this reason, if you love a simple dish with a lot of cheese we recommend the famous Cacio e Pepe - easy to make and available in all restaurants in Italy and especially in Rome. Still, on the subject of cheese, Mac & Cheese or Macaroni Cheese is a dish that abroad believes Italian, but reality teaches us that it is not.
Another dish that is having great success abroad - also in programs such as Masterchef - is Penne alla Vodka. The dish, even if it wants to appear as Italian, is not we could define it as a fusion dish between Italian and Russian cuisine.
Another sauce very present in the idea of Italian cuisine abroad is Marinara Sauce (marinara sauce) which, however, is not reflected in our culinary tradition and fact if there is a desire for the marinara sauce (tomato, garlic, and oregano) we recommend eating a nice pizza marinara or if you want to make an excellent first course with a tomato sauce we recommend a Bolognese or Neapolitan ragù. If you want to make a Bolognese sauce, avoid the spaghetti and then the famous Bolognese spaghetti and choose the noodles that go perfectly with this type of ragù.
We close the first section and move on to the appetizers and side dishes where we find the Garlic Bread (bruschetta with garlic) and chicken parmesan, chicken cooked in tomato sauce with plenty of stringy cheese that is also combined with pasta. Italian cuisine passes us two dishes that perfectly replace these two: an appetizer of tomato bruschetta, instead of garlic bread, and the only eggplant parmesan.
Unfortunately, pizza is also the victim of this distorted view of Italian cuisine, I remember that Pepperoni pizza was very popular in America, but it does not have peppers but salami - in practice, it is a diavola - literally translated as devil pizza, but this name is used cause the pizza is spicy and devil usually reminds the fire which is the easiest connection to the spicy food -the in American format.
Let's close with two rules to respect when you want to eat real Italian: cappuccino only for breakfast (never with a first course) and bread should not be eaten together with pasta but afterward, why spoil the flavor of a very good shoe in the pasta sauce?