You're probably doing it wrong.
Anyone can grab a handful of pasta and throw it in a pot of boiling water, that's easy.
A delicious
bowl of pasta perfectly cooked
take a little bit of technique.
Most people don't use enough water when
they cook pasta. Four to six quarts
per pound - what that looks like is your
pasta's in the pot covered by about four
inches of water. That pasta's got to
have room to move while it cooks so
doesn't clump, it doesn't stick and it
needs a lot of salt - like, a lot of salt.
It's about a cup per four quarts. A lot of
people say "salty like the sea" - what they
mean is you really gotta use way more
salt than you think you should.
You're not eating all of it - most of it
stays in the water.
You need a big pot of water. Don't think you're going to take this much pasta and cram in a little pot
and leave it hanging like this until it
falls in all on its own. Big enough pot to
fit it all in and then stir it so that
it's down in the water. We got to keep
that moving around a little bit - that's
when the pasta sticks: right when it goes in.
While that pops is cooking it's
releasing starch - that's what makes it
stick together. Stir it around, move those
starches - your pasta's not going to stick.
And make sure your sauce is ready. Pasta
shouldn't be waiting for sauce.
Dry: usually eight to ten minutes.
Fresh: three to four minutes. But you don't want to
cook the pasta all the way through in
the water.
You want to get that pasta out of the water a minute or two early and
let it finish cooking in the sauce.
That's what the pros do, from chefs to
Italian grandmas, it's the right way to do it.
The pasta water here: liquid gold. Don't
dump it down the drain.
In fact you don't even really need a colander
Just scoop your pasta directly into the sauce.
You might think that pasta water thinned out your
sauce but it's actually going to wind up
thickening it because that starch is
going to mix with the sauce and it's going
You don't need any oil on your pasta. Oil makes
things slick. The noodles are slick: they
don't hold the sauce. Go from the pot
straight to the sauce.
The pasta and the
sauce need a little time to get to know each other here, okay.
You put your pasta here
and pour some sauce on top it's not
getting all up in those little nooks and
crannies - the sauce is actually getting
absorbed into the pasta while it's here in the
pan which is the essential part of
finishing pasta properly.
This is perfect. It's pasta and sauce
they've become one, they love each other
and they're very very happy together and
this is what pasta was always meant to be.
