The Pasta Dishes You'll Never Catch Giada De Laurentiis Ordering

Celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis is certainly no stranger to home cooking, and she has a few signature dishes she loves making — specifically, pastas. When she goes out to eat, De Laurentiis hardly ever orders any spaghetti in lemon-based sauce because she feels a restaurant doesn't do it justice. "I can make it better at home," De Laurentiis once told The Messenger. "Sorry." There's only one situation in which she might order it while eating out. As De Laurentiis added, "I only eat it at my restaurant, or if I make it." It's not the only dealbreaker dish for her, though. She's also prone to skip spaghetti or angel hair served with pomodoro, a classic tomato sauce.

While the lemon and pomodoro sauces are a hard no for De Laurentiis, she's also said you won't catch her ordering any pasta dish with truffle, but it's for a different reason. Truffles are one of those ingredients you should try at least once, but as she also told The Messenger, De Laurentiis feels that some truffle dishes are "just a way to charge more money" to the customer, so she avoids falling for it. The truffle industry reportedly has very little regulation in terms of quality, so restaurants don't always know whether what they're buying is truly worth the money. Then, they charge the consumer plenty of money to eat it without necessarily being sure of its actual value.

If she's not dining out at her own restaurant, but has a craving for this citrusy dish and prepares it at home, Giada De Laurentiis loves her lemon spaghetti recipe, and she's shared it for others to recreate. She calls it her "original" lemon spaghetti, which she plates in her genius nest shape. The dish requires just some basic ingredients; it's more about the ratios than the ingredients list. All you need are lemons, olive oil, and Parmesan, plus some oregano and basil. De Laurentiis has said the dish was first inspired by a similar dish she ate at a restaurant in Capri, Italy. "The salty cheese, tart lemon juice, and fragrant lemon oil all combined to make the most addictive plate of pasta I'd ever had," De Laurentiis revealed on her blog in 2019.

As for De Laurentiis' pomodoro recipe, she credits a Parmesan rind as being her secret ingredient, saying that simmering the rind in with the sauce's other ingredients — garlic, carrots, and plenty of tomatoes, among other items — takes the sauce's flavor to new heights. While every restaurant is different, both of De Laurentiis' recipes have largely positive reviews on her website and her lemon spaghetti is the most popular dish at her Las Vegas restaurant, suggesting it's hard to make a better sauce than she does.