Tips and FAQ

All Italians will give you the following answer:

• with coarse, thicker pasta you give a firm meat sauce.
• thin pasta is delicious with a light sauce based on oil or tomato.
• hollow pasta needs to be combined with a sauce with many pieces (vegetables and/or meat).

Since there are more than 600 different pasta types, we limit ourselves in this answer to the large families, namely long cut pasta, tubular and short curly pasta.

Long cut pasta such as spaghetti and linguine don't go well with thick tomato-based sauces. The strands easily "drown" in the sauce, leaving the vegetables and meat at the bottom of your dish. An arrabiata, primavera or puttanesca sauce, a pesto sauce or a Neapolitan sauce are more suitable for this.

Penne, fusilli, rigatoni and macaroni easily tolerate heavier sauces with a lot of meat. Small pieces of sauce are absorbed through the hollow part of these pastas, creating a perfectly balanced bite. These pasta types are also an excellent choice for cheese sauces, because the cavities ensure a smooth spread of the cheese.

Short pasta such as serpentini, conchiglie and farfalle are ideal for a cold pasta salad with a sauce or vinaigrette depending on the ingredients of the salad.

No, really not! Additives, preservatives and artificial colours and flavours are not used in our pasta: it is produced “pure nature”, then frozen. The freezing itself is done so quickly that the cell structure of the pasta is optimally preserved and that virtually no nutrients are lost during regeneration. In the freezer, our pasta has a shelf life of 18 months from production date and without preservatives.

The answer may sound strange and has to do with physics: the capillarity of the sauce is in fact the villain for this statement. We certainly will not initiate a physics class now, but give you a simple explanation that you have certainly noticed yourself. Thin strands such as spaghetti and cappellini ‘drown’ easily in a thick sauce containing e.g. vegetables and meat, leaving the latter on the bottom of a plate. A simple tomato sauce or a sauce with garlic and olive oil (such as pesto sauce) is more suitable for thinner strands.

You certainly can! Our pasta is always 100% cooked before freezing. This allows you to put them frozen in the steamer and heat them up to perfection in a few minutes.

That is not a problem! We prefer an "al dente" pasta as any Italian would like it, but heating the pasta a little longer will soften it. That choice is entirely yours.

This is probably freezer burn. Not such a big problem, but freezer burn is a phenomenon that occurs when the pastas have been thawed slightly and partly and then were re-frozen. This is common with freezers that open and close regularly. A solution to this is not to store the pasta in the freezer for too long, so that fluctuations in temperature do not affect the product. Preferably choose to store the pasta in a top-opening freezer or freezing room. But don't worry, freezer burn is not dangerous.

At least 2 to 3 days in the refrigerator. If you can seal the doypack, you can stretch the time a bit.

Not one preservative! Thanks to the pasteurization or sterilization of our sauces, they have a long shelf life outside the fridge, and this completely without preservatives. So you don't have to worry about that shelf life, that's only an advantage.

Our sauces are completely ready-to-use and do not need to be diluted. Should one of our cheese sauces would be a bit thicker, you are always free to dilute it with some cream or milk. You can also easily personalize our sauces. After all, we have produced them according to our own wishes. If you would like to give your own touch to a particular sauce, feel free. But to be clear: simply by heating as such, you can serve them perfectly!

certainly! Most of our sauces are gluten and/or lactose free. We also have vegetarian or even vegan sauces in our range. In this matter you can contact info@dlisfood.com to receive the digital version of our sauce folder. It contains all the requested information.

Bolognese is by far the most difficult sauce! And there are 1001 different recipes for this sauce, depending on the meat, the vegetables, the seasoning, etc. With our different Bolognese sauces we deliberately want to offer a wide range of options:

• our H1 and H4 are produced with minced chicken and packed in 1 or 3 kg bags.
• our reference H22 is made with pure beef, while our H2 is a HALAL variant.
• our H38 is perhaps our most chosen Bolognese sauce in Belgium and is produced with pork meat.

Impossible to make your choice? Please feel free to contact us at info@dlisfood.com, in order to make an appointment and have you taste the different versions.

That is quite understandable! They are not originally intended for this either. Our sauces are deliberately conditioned in 1 kg to avoid a lot of left over. If you would like to keep a left over in the fridge, it might be easier to pour the sauce into a jar.

All sauces from The Smiling Cook are freshly made, conditioned into doypacks and then pasteurized or sterilized according to the rules. If there were eggs in the sauce, the egg yolk would form lumps due to the high temperature during sterilization and the sauce would no longer be smooth. If needed, eggs can be added in finishing the sauce.

All our white sauces have indeed a firmer structure for obvious reasons: after all, it is easier to dilute a sauce than to thicken the sauce! And by diluting a sauce, there is of course also a gain in profitability. You should preferably dilute these sauces with some cream or milk.