Hacker News Reader

Comment by mertd | Hacker News Reader

You can reduce the energy consumption drastically by boiling way less water than "a large pot" as every packet recommends. Just enough to cover the pasta + some evaporation margin is good enough.

View on HN

That's why I tend to avoid spaghetti these days. A smaller pasta fits in the small pot better.

Just stick one end in, wait a few seconds, push, flip it over, repeat.

That said, since I discovered bucatini I don't think I have any desire ever to eat spaghetti again. (And also much more desire to eat 'long thin tubular pasta'.)

just rip it in half

(runs!)

Angel hair will soften pretty quickly. You can fold it in half once its steeped a short while from one end.

I always snap the bundle in half.

Is that something that even needs to be said?

Does any functioning adult actually cook pasta in such a way as to use way more water than necessary?

It's pretty common. Most pasta cooking directions say to use 4-6 quarts of water for a standard 1-lb pack of dry pasta. Many Italian grandmas (I'm making a guess off n=1 person with Italian heritage who learned it this way) do it like this. Because this technique is so ingrained, it's less obvious to reduce the amount of water.

easy to say if you are not italian

This is a mistake though from a cooking perspective. You use a lot of water because you want to have a very high ratio of thermal mass of water to thermal mass of noodles. You want the noodles to heat up as fast as possible so that the outside gets soft while the inside stays a little firm (al dente) and if you use less water, you’ll take longer to cook the noodles, allowing more even heat transfer because it’s a diffusion process. Basically what you’re going for is the opposite of sous vide/low temp cooking.

And with with more water, you’ll remove more of the starch from the pasta, making it less gummy.

A big pot is, of course, less energy efficient but the results are noticeable if you care about noodle quality.

I've tested this a bunch and you can reliably get nice al dente pasta using a low volume of water. If you boil a small amount and add the pasta, then bring it back to a boil the whole process is faster. Kenji has a good article about it, and I assure you that it always works for me.

Interesting, I’ll check it out. I guess returning to a boil really only has to do with the thermal mass of the pasta itself.

I’m also thinking in terms of spaghetti or noodles like that since that’s what I cook most and you couldn’t submerge them in a small pot.

You can do those long noodles in a pan, but honestly they sink down in a small pot by the time the water returns to a boil. At least for pappardelle it works.

You could probably do some quick math and experimentation to determine ratios of water volume and temp to weight of pasta and not even bring the water all the way to a boil and still get an al dents noodle.

All these reasons were disproven by Kenji on SeriousEats. Search the comments for the link.

Pasta are cooked in boiling water over a heat source. The water stays at the boiling point all along. There is no loss of temperature due to cooking the pasta. The thermal mass doesn’t matter only the surface covered so as long as all the pasta are covered you are fine.

The water does not stay at the boiling point when you put the pasta in if it’s a small amount of water. That’s why instructions always say to return to a boil.

I recommend doing your own blind test. There is no noticeable difference for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com