“La pasta vuole compagnia”
Pasta needs company! Never leave it alone, keep stiring once in a while and keep testing them.
Best to drain it before you think it's "good" or al dente cause paste keeps cooking after beeing drained due to the heat and moisture/vapor.
Also, most good pasta dishes get their final cooking in a large pan in the sauce with some cooking water. So usually you drain em when they are still a bit hard in the inside and finish the cooking in the pan.
Italian nonas are rollin in the grave.
Good HN article nontheless
I learned this the hard way moving to an altitude where water boils around 200°F. Just threw out the timers and started obsessively tasting. Flip side is I make fresh pasta more often because the active work of kneading and shaping is more interesting than standing around eating uncooked pasta.
Well, Italian *nonnas rarely used more than one pan for cooking, and it was very common to just put pasta without the sauce in the plate, and a generous spoonful of sauce on top. This is what you used to find in restaurants, too.
The cooking water in the large pan is a rather new thing.
Or maybe it's something just from my region :)
Many years ago I dated someone from an Italian family and they taught me to literally throw a strand of the pasta against the wall and watch how it sticks/bounces to test the doneness. To this day I think it’s a bit ridiculous but it does have some logic to it. Would be easier to just… bite into the pasta to test.
The cooking time is proportional to the thickness.
General advice on pasta:
* a quality dry pasta (dececco e.g) will have ~14 grams of protein per 100 grams dry weight, this is really essential
* bronze die cut will help soak up more sauces
* you do not need the full volume of water the box says, but start your timer once the water has returned to a boil
* once it has gotten to a boil, keep it boiling, but it doesn't need to be a raging boil, that'll tear apart the pasta, especially a stuffed one
* heavily salt your water, but it does not need to be "salty like the ocean"
* set your timer for a minute less than the cooking time on the box, check for doneness, then give it another minute if needed
* if you're finishing in a sauce, take the pasta out a minute before it is done. Remember to reserve one cup of the starchy cooking water before draining your pasta entirely
* do not put oil in your cooking water, it will NOT help it not stick. Just stir after you put it in, and then again a minute or two in
* if you're struggling to tell if it's "done", take a bite of a single piece, and look at the cross section a bit of "white" in the middle means that hasn't hydrated fully. Maybe you like a bit of "toothsome"ness ('al dente'), maybe you don't
There’s an American fear of “not enough”. I think the overboiled pasta is informed by a fear of undercooked food, but also just this general not-enoughness. It’s the same fear that makes someone buy a truck that can hold the biggest load they can imagine needing, rather than accepting they might need to make two trips or rent a bigger truck every few years (or never) and get a truck half the size.
The water does not need to be boiling the whole time.
You can boil the pasta just 2 minutes, turn off the stove, close the lid and leave the pasta in the water for the rest of the time until reaching the desired cooking time, plus around one more minute.
The result will be the same and you would have saved round 80% of the energy.
Also something I discovered recently: making home-made pasta is REALLY EASY, and quite delicious. For basic ravioli you need about 30min from going from raw ingredients (a bit of flour, one or two eggs, some salt) to a ravioli
It's funny because Americans love to overcook their pasta, even when it's 'Al dente'. Italians serve pasta so it nearly crunches in the very center of the noodle.
Pasta is a bit like toast. It's undercooked for most of the time and only ready for a tiniest fraction of the time. The rest of the time it's overdone.
Although I heard a reason for the toast thing the other day. As it slowly toasts it gets a tiny bit darker. Once darker it doesn't reflect as much energy, hence absorbs it and result is exponential roasting levels.
Hopefully tptacek shows up... this is sort of offtopic but made me remember some comments of his from years ago here on HN. Something about the "rehydrating" step not having to be the same as the "cooking" step. I feel like he said you could end up with some pretty interesting and terrific pasta by _soaking_ it for a while (not cooking it), and then cooking it for a much shorter time later.
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I've been wanting to try it, but I can't remember the details exactly.
I don't eat a lot of pasta these days, but I did spend a couple months getting decent at Cacio e Pepe, and one caveat I've picked up in the last 10 years is that some pasta dishes (the Roman ones in particular) really want you to finish cooking in the sauce, so the pasta takes up some of the flavor of the sauce while it finishes rehydrating.
The rehydration thing is still a killer trick --- especially for Mac and Cheese.
> I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time
Interesting! I generally add three minutes to the recommended cooking time, otherwise the pasta still feels stiff. There's no accounting for taste, is there?
Interesting. I live at low altitudes and I almost always have to cook noodles longer than the instructions on the box. Now I only use Italian pasta like DeCecco or Rummo.
There is a dry pasta I use that, long story short, comes without a listed cooking time, whose correct cooking time I have experimentally determined to be ~18 minutes (though remarkably flexible, good at a much wider range than "normal"). I like it quite a lot (even though it seems to have the teflon-die surface rather than the bronze-die surface).
I think greater pasta thickness is underexplored, and the teflon-vs-bronze die thing as the highest determinant of pasta quality, while not nothing, is slightly-overstated r*dditry.
Bronze-die pasta has an obvious and substantial textural difference from teflon-die pasta. The stickiness of the bronze requires more force from the extruder, but results in a rougher surface on the pasta, because it literally sticks to the die.
Bronze-cut pasta holds sauce much better, especially for thinner sauces. It also makes your pasta water more starchy, since it loses more material during cooking. These things seem very obvious to me via my observations as a cook who uses both from time to time (but mostly the bronze stuff).
Both properties can be very useful (the first to everyone, the second just to those who use their pasta water in the sauce step).
It's good to question our assumptions from time to time, but there's no reason to just deny something like this with absolutely nothing to back it up.
This is crazy. I cook my pasta for 9 minutes max. Often 8. Because by the time you’ve taken it off the stove, drained it and added it to your sauce any longer and it will be mush.
But this guy is starting at 9 minutes. I worry for American food.
LOL... I love how anal engineering types (like myself) can be at times.. going down rabbit holes like this and definitely appreciate it. Pasta is a hard thing and I tend to not rely on timers at all beyond around 8m... I just start testing a piece every 30-40s or so until I'm happy.
This will also vary by final application, if I'm going to rinse/cool to stop cooking, etc... if it's going into a bake after being made (mac and cheese, casserole/hot-dish, etc). It will just depend on a lot of factors beyond how done it is in the pot.
Edit: also, altitude, pureness, salinity, etc of the water will also change things dramatically.
I don't tend to look at the clock for pasta. I just eyeball it and sample it. You can sort of see the pasta turning whiter from the outside in. Especially with my regular goto brands, I can see when it is done. I fish some out with a fork to verify usually when it's getting close.
And I generally mix it with some sauce and it might sit in there for some minutes. So the cooking process actually continues after you remove it from the water. Cooking a bit longer in the sauce and shorter in the water is going to help the flavor and texture. There's no point in being hyper precise about the cooking time and then letting it sit for five minutes or whatever in the sauce. Nobody ever measures that time. Add pasta water to loosen the sauce if it absorbs too much.
Speaking of pasta water, use less water for boiling paste; not more. Many TV cooks get this completely wrong. They'll dump 100 grams of pasta in a gallon of water. Complete waste of time, energy, and salt (assuming they season the water correctly).
Especially if you plan to use the starchy water for your sauce, you need to use as little water as you can get away with. If you use too much water, there's not going to be a lot of starch in there. If it still looks like clear water by the time your pasta is cooked, you used way too much water. You might as well just use tap water for your sauce. The water should be cloudy not clear. As long as it doesn't cook dry, it's fine. About 2-3x the dry weight should be plenty for most pasta types. Restaurants tend to reuse their pasta water for multiple batches of pasta so they'll use more water. But the water has lots of starch after a few batches.
"But who's to say that these two phases, water absorption and protein denaturing, have to occur at the same time? H. Alexander Talbot and Aki Kamozawa of the fantastic blog Ideas in Food asked themselves that very question, and what they found was this: You don't have to complete both processes simultaneously. In fact, if you leave uncooked pasta in lukewarm water for long enough, it'l absorb just as much water as boiled pasta."
With long pasta it's not hard, with a tiny bit of experience and attention, to learn how it physically behaves when it's either done or close to it. It's about as easy to learn (experientially) how much it changes minute by minute at that point.
I will stir it to see how it behaves, as soon as I catch it behaving like pasta which is may be al dente I will sample it, if it's still a bit too hard, I can more or less tell if it's going to be one or two minutes. I'm aiming for almost-too-hard al dente to compensate for any further cooking.
Stop even a bit early if you'll be finishing the pasta in the sauce.
I think attempting to formalise cooking techniques is a funny sort of thing... The people trying to do it are clearly into cooking, but if you really enjoy cooking, you're probably better off learning these things intuitively and spending your time learning other skills to expand your general cooking ability.
There should be a spaghetti cooker that works like a rice cooker. I put in the precise amount of water and then when it's all absorbed it signals me that it is done.
After cooking many pasta dishes over the years, I’ve gotten good enough that I know when it’s done just by feeling it through the stirrer handle. One can even distinguish between al dente vs done.
I agree, but want to note that this requires more actively stirring the pasta. The reason for the suggestion of lots of water is it allows the pasta to move freely on its own, meaning it stirs itself with the motion of the boiling water.
Stirring the pasta is important to make it cook more evenly and to help it release starch into the water.
The water will indeed cool down when you put the pasta in. Using a lid can help with this though and bring it back to boiling quicker. I usually don't bother with this. And the pasta will still absorb water if it's close to boiling instead of boiling. And since I check visually and by tasting whether it is done it's not that big of a deal. Stirring is part of that. I do that in any case to make sure things don't stick to the bottom.
Anyway, that's just my process. There is no wrong or right here. And you brought up a fair point of the pasta cooling down the water. My mode with this is that a lot of Italian nonnas wouldn't have a lot of fancy kitchen equipment anyway. Like fancy timers or even a clock. A lot of Italian recipes is primarily about good ingredients and celebrating those. Not about tools, techniques, or Michelin star nonsense. So, I try not to overthink it. If it tastes good, I'm happy.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 84.4 ms ] thread“La pasta vuole compagnia” Pasta needs company! Never leave it alone, keep stiring once in a while and keep testing them.
Best to drain it before you think it's "good" or al dente cause paste keeps cooking after beeing drained due to the heat and moisture/vapor.
Also, most good pasta dishes get their final cooking in a large pan in the sauce with some cooking water. So usually you drain em when they are still a bit hard in the inside and finish the cooking in the pan.
Italian nonas are rollin in the grave. Good HN article nontheless
I learned this the hard way moving to an altitude where water boils around 200°F. Just threw out the timers and started obsessively tasting. Flip side is I make fresh pasta more often because the active work of kneading and shaping is more interesting than standing around eating uncooked pasta.
The cooking water in the large pan is a rather new thing. Or maybe it's something just from my region :)
General advice on pasta:
* a quality dry pasta (dececco e.g) will have ~14 grams of protein per 100 grams dry weight, this is really essential
* bronze die cut will help soak up more sauces
* you do not need the full volume of water the box says, but start your timer once the water has returned to a boil
* once it has gotten to a boil, keep it boiling, but it doesn't need to be a raging boil, that'll tear apart the pasta, especially a stuffed one
* heavily salt your water, but it does not need to be "salty like the ocean"
* set your timer for a minute less than the cooking time on the box, check for doneness, then give it another minute if needed
* if you're finishing in a sauce, take the pasta out a minute before it is done. Remember to reserve one cup of the starchy cooking water before draining your pasta entirely
* do not put oil in your cooking water, it will NOT help it not stick. Just stir after you put it in, and then again a minute or two in
* if you're struggling to tell if it's "done", take a bite of a single piece, and look at the cross section a bit of "white" in the middle means that hasn't hydrated fully. Maybe you like a bit of "toothsome"ness ('al dente'), maybe you don't
The water does not need to be boiling the whole time.
You can boil the pasta just 2 minutes, turn off the stove, close the lid and leave the pasta in the water for the rest of the time until reaching the desired cooking time, plus around one more minute.
The result will be the same and you would have saved round 80% of the energy.
Although I heard a reason for the toast thing the other day. As it slowly toasts it gets a tiny bit darker. Once darker it doesn't reflect as much energy, hence absorbs it and result is exponential roasting levels.
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I've been wanting to try it, but I can't remember the details exactly.
The rehydration thing is still a killer trick --- especially for Mac and Cheese.
Interesting! I generally add three minutes to the recommended cooking time, otherwise the pasta still feels stiff. There's no accounting for taste, is there?
When you remove pasta, you Cool down the water. So its not the same reault as actual 15 minutes cooking
Nice article BTW.
I think greater pasta thickness is underexplored, and the teflon-vs-bronze die thing as the highest determinant of pasta quality, while not nothing, is slightly-overstated r*dditry.
Bronze-cut pasta holds sauce much better, especially for thinner sauces. It also makes your pasta water more starchy, since it loses more material during cooking. These things seem very obvious to me via my observations as a cook who uses both from time to time (but mostly the bronze stuff).
Both properties can be very useful (the first to everyone, the second just to those who use their pasta water in the sauce step).
It's good to question our assumptions from time to time, but there's no reason to just deny something like this with absolutely nothing to back it up.
But this guy is starting at 9 minutes. I worry for American food.
This will also vary by final application, if I'm going to rinse/cool to stop cooking, etc... if it's going into a bake after being made (mac and cheese, casserole/hot-dish, etc). It will just depend on a lot of factors beyond how done it is in the pot.
Edit: also, altitude, pureness, salinity, etc of the water will also change things dramatically.
And I generally mix it with some sauce and it might sit in there for some minutes. So the cooking process actually continues after you remove it from the water. Cooking a bit longer in the sauce and shorter in the water is going to help the flavor and texture. There's no point in being hyper precise about the cooking time and then letting it sit for five minutes or whatever in the sauce. Nobody ever measures that time. Add pasta water to loosen the sauce if it absorbs too much.
Speaking of pasta water, use less water for boiling paste; not more. Many TV cooks get this completely wrong. They'll dump 100 grams of pasta in a gallon of water. Complete waste of time, energy, and salt (assuming they season the water correctly).
Especially if you plan to use the starchy water for your sauce, you need to use as little water as you can get away with. If you use too much water, there's not going to be a lot of starch in there. If it still looks like clear water by the time your pasta is cooked, you used way too much water. You might as well just use tap water for your sauce. The water should be cloudy not clear. As long as it doesn't cook dry, it's fine. About 2-3x the dry weight should be plenty for most pasta types. Restaurants tend to reuse their pasta water for multiple batches of pasta so they'll use more water. But the water has lots of starch after a few batches.
Or skip the boiling completely: https://www.seriouseats.com/food-lab-no-boil-baked-ziti-reci...
"But who's to say that these two phases, water absorption and protein denaturing, have to occur at the same time? H. Alexander Talbot and Aki Kamozawa of the fantastic blog Ideas in Food asked themselves that very question, and what they found was this: You don't have to complete both processes simultaneously. In fact, if you leave uncooked pasta in lukewarm water for long enough, it'l absorb just as much water as boiled pasta."
I will stir it to see how it behaves, as soon as I catch it behaving like pasta which is may be al dente I will sample it, if it's still a bit too hard, I can more or less tell if it's going to be one or two minutes. I'm aiming for almost-too-hard al dente to compensate for any further cooking.
Stop even a bit early if you'll be finishing the pasta in the sauce.
I think attempting to formalise cooking techniques is a funny sort of thing... The people trying to do it are clearly into cooking, but if you really enjoy cooking, you're probably better off learning these things intuitively and spending your time learning other skills to expand your general cooking ability.
I agree, but want to note that this requires more actively stirring the pasta. The reason for the suggestion of lots of water is it allows the pasta to move freely on its own, meaning it stirs itself with the motion of the boiling water.
Stirring the pasta is important to make it cook more evenly and to help it release starch into the water.
Anyway, that's just my process. There is no wrong or right here. And you brought up a fair point of the pasta cooling down the water. My mode with this is that a lot of Italian nonnas wouldn't have a lot of fancy kitchen equipment anyway. Like fancy timers or even a clock. A lot of Italian recipes is primarily about good ingredients and celebrating those. Not about tools, techniques, or Michelin star nonsense. So, I try not to overthink it. If it tastes good, I'm happy.