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Oh God! Please never utter those two words in the same sentence where an Italian can hear you. I was about to barf on the keyboard! :-)
Then again, people (other than me, at least) don't usually binge on flat bread without toppings, either.
Are you saying that plain pasta and bread without toppings are super-stimuli for you? Are you not even using oil? :)
I can understand the bread part if it's fresh, but as far as I'm concerned pasta doesn't taste much like anything. Perhaps I've just eaten the wrong kind of bland crap.
When I was a kid, my grandmother had some trick that caused her bland spaghetti (possibly with some oils and stuff, but mostly things that weren't visible after it was prepared) to be the best food that I knew of. If not superstimuli, then close to it.
Unfortunately she's no longer alive, and she never passed the trick on to anyone else, so I can't say whether I would get the same pleasure out of it as an adult.
Do you know if it was fresh? I hear that fresh pasta is comparable to fresh bread.
Interesting. Links or stories? I am very much aware of the difference between fresh-baked bread and "plastic bread" from the supermarket. It's huge. Are people claiming freshly-made pasta is different to the same degree?
It appears not. [1] [2] [3] Fresh pasta has a more pronounced flavor, and is generally made with a superior variety of flour (that doesn't keep as well), which means less of the flavor work is done by the sauce.
(I don't think I've ever had fresh pasta, and so don't have any first-hand reports. I do think fresh bread is worlds better than supermarket bread, though.)
Also, in America at least, making fresh pasta is a very grandmothery thing to do, and so my prior was high enough to be remarkable.
Hmm... I am getting curious. Not yet to the degree of making fresh pasta myself, but I recall that there is WholeFoods nearby that sells it...
On the other hand pasta is basically boiled wheat dough and I generally find dough as bread to be yummier than dough as pasta.
No, unless I misremember terribly it was ordinary market spaghetti.
Hmm. Well, you can vary the taste by throwing salt into the pot, but I've never found a level of salt that I thought would raise the quality more than a point on a ten point scale. Adding spices while boiling, like powdered garlic, will alter the taste somewhat but I think they're more effective in sauces / applied afterwards, and are often visible.
If someone wants to experiment, my starting point would be this:
Take some good olive oil (extra-virgin, first cold press, etc.) and grate fresh garlic into it. Stir and let it stand covered for an hour or so. Once your pasta is ready, drain it, and then toss with the garlic-infused olive oil.
Apparently my mother tried to make some spaghetti according to my grandmother's instructions, but it never tasted the same to me. So either it was something really subtle, or there was a placebo effect involved (or both).
ETA: Though now that I think of it, I'm not entirely sure of the "bland" thing anymore - there might have been a sauce involved as well. Damn unreliable memories.
Olive oil, lots and lots of it. Thank me later. I have been drenching food with it and getting compliments on my cooking skills for years, and I also use to say it's a secret given my GF would freak out due to high calories. (disclaimer: I weight 260 pounds)
No, I eat pasta with sauces other than ketchup. And I do eat much more plain bread than the average person e.g. when I'm at the restaurant and I'm waiting for the dishes to arrive, but I think it's more got to do with boredom and hunger than anything else -- it's not like I have to refrain from keeping any bread at home whenever I'm trying to lose weight lest I binge on it, the way I do with cookies.
Anyway, my general point was that comparing pizza with toppings to pasta without toppings (in terms of how much people, in particular small children, enjoy them) isn't a fair comparison.