Big Deal and Deep Cut are an amazing combination. As a professional chef, one of my biggest gripes is how home cooks execute pasta: they tend to boil the pasta in one pot, drain the whole thing, then put that pasta into a bowl — maybe with some butter or olive oil — and then plop the sauce on top. You'll never get Italian-style or restaurant-quality pasta that way.

You need to have a great big stockpot full of salted water. Then you just want to take your noodles from that pot and put them directly into something smaller that's really designed for tossing. You don't want to use a frying pan; you want to use some kind of pan with three-to-four-inch sides and a curve and an elliptic on the side, so that you can really get that rocking motion when you're tossing your pasta. So the key here is making the sauce in Deep Cut.

In this case, it's a simple sauce, but it really teaches you how to execute this fundamental pasta cooking technique. I get my sauces boiling and bubbling away, and then add some of the pasta water to that, and when the fat and the water boil together, you get emulsification before you even add the noodles. Then you can go ahead and put the noodles directly from Big Deal into Deep Cut and start tossing them.

1. In Big Deal, boil water with kosher salt.
2. When you are ready to eat, drop the pasta into the boiling water.
3. When the pasta has been boiling for 7 minutes, foam the butter in Deep Cut but do not brown.
   
   
   
4. Check the pasta at the 8-minute mark; it should be al dente.
5. Transfer the pasta and a ladle of its water to the Deep Cut, and vigorously toss or stir over high heat. The water and butter will combine with the starches from the noodles to create a luscious, buttery sauce.
   
   
   
6. Turn off the heat and stir in the Parmesan. Add a touch more pasta water, if required.
7. Serve immediately!