Cooking Instructions
Dried Pasta
The cooking times for our different dried pastas can be found on the packet. The finer pasta take 4-5 minutes with the thicker ones taking around 6-8 minutes. Make sure you taste a small amount of pasta to see if it is cooked to your preference. Italians like to eat their pasta 'al dente' which means still with some firmness when bitten into. Make sure when preparing the water to boil you add salt. A good rule of thumb is "10-100-1000". That's the ratio of salt to pasta to water. So 10 grams of salt is the right amount to cook 100 grams of pasta in 1000 milliliters of water (1000 ml = 1 liter). The salt is very important as it helps with accentuate the flavour of the pasta but also prevents the pasta from getting water logged & soggy.
Frozen meals
Our frozen savoury meals have already been cooked. All they need is to be defrosted & heated. The best way to do this is to leave the container in the fridge to defrost slowly overnight. Not only is this the safest way to defrost the meal but the slow defrost helps keep the consistency of the ingredients .
Once defrosted the meal can be placed in an oven proof container covered and warmed in at 180 cº for 30 - 40 minutes.
Dishes such as Lasagne or Cannelloni can be sprinkled with parmesan for the last 10 minutes and cooked with the top oven grill on 10 minutes to brown the top of the dish .
The dishes can also be warmed in a microwave after transferring to a microwave proof dish 3-5 minutes on high should suffice.
The looser dishes such as spinach, mash potatoes, polpette and stews can be warmed in a microwave or alternately in a saucepan on a stove top.
Remember the dishes do not need extra cooking just warming .
Parbaked Bread
Our frozen bread is Parbaked . Parbaking is a cooking technique in which a bread or dough product is partially baked and then rapidly frozen for storage. The raw dough is baked normally, but halted at about 80% of the normal cooking time, when it is rapidly cooled and frozen. This technique allows you have freshly baked bread available at home at your convenience . For best results it is recommended the frozen bread is defrosted in you fridge overnight then taken out of the fridge & placed in a fan forced oven preheated to 200 cº for 18 to 20 minutes. The bread should come out crispy on the outside and soft and moist on the inside.
Food safety guidelines
Do not eat leftovers if refrigerated for more than 2 days.
Do not freeze leftovers.
Refrigerate food below 5 ºc
Reheat refrigerated food to hot, over 70ºc
Do not reheat more than once.