The right way to sauce pasta (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The right way to sauce pasta (2016)

seriouseats.com

77 pointskqr65 comments

Much of this is overengineered. My entire wife's family is from Sicily, and I lived there for 5 years. The important step is to add the pasta to the sauce skillet after the pasta is al dente, and cook it for another minute or so while turning it. This is called "mantecare" in Italian. If you want, you can add a few lines of oil after you turn off the fire ("al crudo" i.e. "raw"). I have never seen anyone do the other steps.

Adding pasta water to thicken the sauce and tossing so that the water and oil forms an emulsification is important unless you want oily, watery pasta. The only step I see worth skipping is adding more fat, that one makes no sense and just suggests there wasn't enough fat used when making the sauce in the first place. I guess ultimately it really depends on the sauce that is being prepared.

My mother is Sicilian and she always keeps some of the pasta water aside to add if the sauce ended up too dry.

Serious eats does amazing writing and research. Always a great reference and I go back often.

If your going to follow the pasta directions, then make some cookies for desert: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip...

It seems to be pasta day today on HN. So I heartily recommend Spaghetti all’Assassina - eschew the boiling step altogether and cook the pasta directly in the pan with the sauce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_all'assassina

I have made this and a non-stick pan is essential. Otherwise, you have a very annoying mess to clean.

The relevant Cook’s Illustrated/ATK recipe: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/article...

Unfortunately the materials coating the non-stick pans are well-established carcinogens. Cast iron stuff is a good alternative and needs only a bit more care.

You can't cook tomato sauces for any significant time in cast iron unless your intention is to remove all the seasoning of the pan. So for the proposed recipe, cast iron doesn't really cut it.

Yes, for that type of thing you can use stainless steel pans/pots.

My first take was stainless steel…

Silicone coatings are significantly better after the initial bakeout:

https://www.nontoxicforhealth.com/is-silicone-cookware-safe....

But I have two kids and a partner with crippling ADHD, otherwise I'd be more conservative about things like this.

Tradeoffs, as we say in the engineering dungeon.

I did buy a new Teflon pan for this “project”. It’s a calculated risk, like eating red meat cooked on a barbecue. That also is full of carcinogens, but can be enjoyed with moderation.

Not bad advice. Another good tip is to use the right pasta for the right sauce.

As any Italian would explain, Spaghetti Bolognese is not actually a thing at least not what you think it is. You wouldn't use spaghetti for a meat sauce but a bit more chunky kind of pasta like tagliatelle or papardelle. You'd use spaghetti for a fish pasta; which is what you risk getting in Bologna if you are ordering a spaghetti bolognese. Basically, they'd serve you a tuna & tomato sauce. Nothing wrong with that of course. But if you want their famous meat sauce, order pasta alla ragu. Very different experience.

Italian food done right is pretty yummy and not that hard to master for a home cook. Half the success is using good ingredients. The other half is mastering some simple techniques. Pasta especially is not that hard and doing it right makes a huge difference.

Anthony Bourdain said: “Encapsulate the essential Italian philosophy of cooking here: Get a very few excellent ingredients, then proceed to not fuck them up.”

The main reason for tagliatelle/pappardelle is to get "fresh" pasta. "Pasta Fresca" or "Pasta all'uovo" is made of different ingredients than spaghetti. It's usually soft wheat and eggs versus hard wheat (durum wheat, semolina) and water.

I agree that finding the right pairing of pasta and sauce does make a difference, but I would also say not to overthink it. Most italians will use whatever's available in the pantry, even if it's sub-optimal.

The last line is so true. Italian cooking is a really good way to measure your progress as a cook, because you can use the exact same ingredients and get a completely different result with better skills. The simple recipes are a great testbed for the techniques you are picking up.

Surely the correct-correct response is "however the eater likes it"

Example, my kids. If it isn't separate they won't touch it.

As a kid, I thought that that was the proper way to serve pasta, thanks to Big Pasta indoctrination via tv shows and ads.

I'm happy to announce that I'm now saved and that I've been enjoying my pasta as it was supposed to be enjoyed: pre-sauced!

I like good food, so I’ve started to follow recipes on sites like this one.

However the thing that no one talks about is that cooking “properly” takes a huge amount of time cumulatively for a single person or even a small nuclear family.

A blogger will talk about a quick little dish. First of all it is going to take you longer because you haven’t spent the last decade chopping onions. Second, even as written this “quick dish” is 15 to make, 15 minutes to eat, and another 10 minutes of cleanup. That’s 40 minutes per meal for a total of 2 hours a day.

Uber eats is just 5 minutes to order and clean up plus 15 minutes to eat, for a total of 1 hour a day. That doesn’t even get into the extra time shopping for high quality and sometimes obscure ingredients, learning these recipes in the first place, and so on. And again that’s assuming only quick little dishes.

So best case scenario net one hour a day every day to eat high quality home cooked meals. That’s 6% of your waking life that’s not available for work, exercise, dating, playing with your kids, calling your parents, reading a book, etc, etc, etc.

Like so many things in our atomized world, the math has gotten worse as we’ve discarded large, extended families. If that cooking time is divided among several people, feeds even more, and is often taken as an opportunity to teach and bond, then things start to look a lot different.

You get better at it the more you do it, and naturally with experience you'll notice it takes less and less time.

That being said, I agree with you, it does take a lot of time. To me, the switch occurred when I stopped considering this time "wasted" and instead consider it fulfilling. I actively look for the time I'll spend cooking each day, I believe it's a good use of my time and I don't try to rush through it.

> To me, the switch occurred when I stopped considering this time "wasted" and instead consider it fulfilling.

This is how it works for me also. We involved our children from a very early age, so they can also perform basic tasks like watch a pan or cut soft things into pieces (with only a little supervision), which frees up even more time.

Cooking every meal from scratch is a recipe for disaster.

Despite what this blogger tells you, reheated, next day pasta is still delicious, so you are allowed to cook more than one serving per person.

My go to pasta takes maybe 45m to cook, and it results in 4-5 servings, which is two meals for two people:

1Kg of tomatoes, that you blanch beforehand (pour boiling water over the tomatoes after you score their skins in a cross, leave to sit). Peal the tomatoes and dice them into as small chunks as you want.

In a wide pan (even a wok), fry some bacon cubes (or pancetta if you want to be authentic) in oil or butter, whichever. When they have reached a level of crispiness you're OK with, dump the cubed tomatoes in and cover with a lid. (If you're feeling fancy, you can take the bacon out and add at the end, I rarely do)

Put a pack of pasta to boil - I usually use 500g of fusilli (don't buy Barilla, those guys are assholes), and as the guy says, make sure the water is very salty, but not bitterly so.

In small bowl crush 5-6 cloves of garlic. Pour about a spoonfull of oil and stir with some rough salt until it becomes a little like mayo in consistency. Dump another spoonfull of sour cream and homogenize.

Take the lid of the pan and use a potato masher to crush the tomato cubes into a nice sauce. It does not need to be perfect, but make an effort.

By this time, the pasta should be close to done. When that happens strain the pasta (keep some water if you want). Dump the garlic cream in the sauce, homogenize (maybe with the water) and then add the pasta. (The longer the garlic cooks, the less impact it will have on the overall flavour, my preference is full garlic)

Stir vigorously until pasta is well covered in sauce then take off the stove.

Dump a bunch of grated hard cheese on it (I use about 250g of Grana Padano, or in dire straight some sharp Cheddar) and stir until it coats everything evenly. Ta-da, you have pasta!

PS. Apologies to any nonne that I offended with my interpretation of authentic pasta.

>> So best case scenario net one hour a day every day to eat high quality home cooked meals. That’s 6% of your waking life that’s not available for work, exercise, dating, playing with your kids, calling your parents, reading a book, etc, etc, etc.

For me cooking (generally, making stuff to eat) is a hobby. I don't have kids but that just makes it a little less enjoyable because I don't have a large family to share my cooking with. Otherwise I'm happy for the chance to get away from a screen and have some me-time doing something that satisfies my senses (I especially like adding each spice separately to the pan and taking a biig sniff as it cooks - I'm a food hedonist). In any case I really don't experience it as wasted time. If I'm tired from work or I'm late at home, I just cook something simple or make sure I have left overs.

And it doesn't need to be a hobby. Any way you see it, cooking a good meal is just a great way to care about yourself and your loved ones and make them happy. Uber Eats can't do that.

> I don't have kids but that just makes it a little less enjoyable because I don't have a large family to share my cooking with.

If you're planning to have children at some point, you should know that some days they will do their utmost to ruin your cooking time and when you finally pull through anyway they will ask to eat something else. ;)

There's still cleanup for Uber eats, unless you want splatters and garbage everywhere. I find unwrapping stuff and setting on the table takes time too.

Looking for good restaurants also takes time, sometimes I start doing an order and find out the Italian restaurant doesn't have the pasta or sauce I want and have to restart my search.

Also, note that you shouldn't heat up ANY kind of plastic components in the microwave. They are not "microwave safe" since they release the plastics into the food anyway. If I have to transfer to another plate and heat it up, there goes the clean-up time argument, I have to wash that dish later

You get faster/more organised at doing the preparing steps for cooking with practice, and if you clean as you go it can be quite efficient.

You don’t need chef level knife skills, but you can become competent quickly enough and with good sharp knives it’s not hard.

The one thing I will say though is a lot of the time estimates in recipes are absolute bollocks - my biggest annoyance is when it comes to caramelising onions. “Oh ten minutes” the food blogger says. lol no. That’s a muuuuuuch longer job!

If it takes you 10 minutes to clean up after cooking a 15 minute meal you must be cooking like the Swedish chef from the muppets.

I guess some people don't touch their food without a complete physico-chemical analysis, at the molecular level.

For myself, I would not be able to tell the difference between pasta (cooked by myself) with the sauce added before or after. I suspect this is true for many of those "the right way to <cook something>" advice.

The article even says they have "done the tests to prove" that pasta is better when mixed (and cooked) with the sauce before serving but clicking through to that link the "test" is one guy trying three different pasta dishes. That's one down, a few more billion sets of taste buds to go.

I'm German, what do I know about pasta, but reading that article and just a single step is dedicated to the pasta: What a disappointment. The sauce is where you create the taste, and you can be creative in that step. I prefer adding pasta water before adding the noodles, give it a minute and then add the noodles.

One Youtuber to recommend in all sorts of food exploration is Alex aka @FrenchGuyCooking. Be it making your own fresh noodles or dry noodle, discovering Umamni, sourdough bread or Ramen, he has made all the mistakes so you don't have to.

This is almost a religious matter among my Italian colleagues and I see a few blasphemies on this video already. The recipe I was taught on the hills of Tuscany 30 year ago is so perfect and simple I'll never prepare pasta in a different way.

* First slice garlic and put it a pot together with excellent quality olive oil

* Fry it until garlic becomes slightly yellow but nor brown, and in the meantime in a separate pot boil pasta

* Add tomato sauce to oil/garlic and boil them together

* When the pasta is ready, add it to the mix

It's absolutely delicious in spite of its simplicity.

Cooking the garlic from the start makes it lose all its flavour, unless you use a tonne. Using tomato sauce is a very small convenience (maybe 40minutes worth, which mostly is waiting) vs making the sauce from scratch from fresh tomatoes.

The main issue with making sauce from scratch is getting rid of the skins, and in order to do that you can blanch the tomatoes: get 1Kg of fresh tomatoes, score them in a cross from side to side and place them in a pot (stem down), pour boiling water on them until they're fully covered. Wait until the water cools down, then peal the tomatoes and dice them in cubes. Place the cubes in a pan and cook with a lid for about 10-15m, then crush them with a potato masher. You now have tasty tomato sauce from scratch.

> Cooking the garlic from the start makes it lose all its flavour, unless you use a tonne.

Yes and no. It does lose its typical flavor but gets transformed and this new flavor is transferred onto other ingredients.

As for sauce vs tomatoes, you are probably right, but only when you have full flavor tomatoes available - and unfortunately where I live they are not that great in the winter.

Personally I _always_ got better taste in the sauce if I make it from tomatoes, even supermarket bought ones in the winter. But it might be just some bias that I haven't done it from a can in a long time. :)

Some suggestions, take it or leave it: - delay the boiling of the pasta until after you added the tomato sauce to the pan. Tomatoes enjoy spending a bit more time on the stove, it makes a difference. - when adding the pasta to the mix, add a bit of the pasta-water (the water in which the pasta cooked). It acts as a very powerful emulsifier and will make the sauce stick better.

Thanks, I'll try and see how much difference it makes.

What's your tomato sauce?

I do something similar but add pepper flakes with the garlic, use canned tomatoes and finish with some butter.

Well, everybody around there bought the same thing, it was 100% tomatoes without any salt or basil etc. added in. The advantage of using it over fresh tomatoes is that where I live now the fresh ones tend to lose flavor in colder months.

This is awesome! A question for Italians in the audience though: is using butter as a fat something that’s commonly done? Being Portuguese and fond of Mediterranean cuisine, I always saw butter as a fat as being a more American thing but maybe that’s just the wrong perception and it’s totally fine if you use a dab of butter? PS: I do it myself, reason being that usually I’ll use extra virgin olive oil while preparing a sauce and I like to add butter to save on the oil, which can be quite expensive.

The answer is... complicated:

- Using butter for pasta is something that is typically reserved for people with upset stomach (understand diarrhea). It's not scientific at all, but just something that is commonly done.

- Fettucine Alfredo[1] is a real italian dish invented in Rome. It's made with butter and cheese. It was originally popular in the touristy areas, targeting foreigners, but over time I notice it slowly appearing in "real" restaurants.

- "Pasta Fresca" (tagliatelle, raviolis, tortellinis, etc) is often served with butter-based sauces (like a lot of the traditional northern cuisine).

A simplistic way to think about it is that butter is a rich luxurious ingredient used in the North, whereas the South is more likely to use Olive oil.

Note that other fats can be used, it's not just olive oil: - Carbonara / Alla Gricia will use the animal fat from the _guanciale_ (the cured pig meat) and avoid using any oil or butter - Cacio e pepe will use neither and use the cheese itself as fat for the sauce. It's a simple pasta, but it's difficult to get right, since parmesan/pecorino are diffcult to emulsify. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettuccine_Alfredo

Yes. For a long time, butter and cheese were the _only_ toppings for pasta. If you're interested, I'd really recommend reading The Discovery of Pasta by Luca Cesari, which traces the development of a few well-known pasta dishes through historical documents, cookbooks, etc.

Depends where in Italy and what you're doing. In the north where I'm originally from we used to use butter more. In the south oil is king. But that's just "historically". Nowadays there's been a big push towards olive oil in the whole country.

Not commonly in my (Tuscan) experience but there is regional variation, in some areas (mountains, some northern areas) it's used; the French use a lot of it.

I would avoid using it as a partial substitute of olive oil, however. Use butter if the recipe calls for it.

> I always saw butter as a fat as being a more American thing

French cuisine famously uses tons of butter. Depends _which_ French cuisine of course, the Mediterranean south tends to favour olive oil, but holds true for the stereotypical idea of French food

This is pretty standard cooking stuff, I thought. At least in Australia I haven’t seen pasta sauce served on top of pasta in a restaurant for decades.

Utilizing pasta water is something that Italians have been doing for ages but until recently wasn't a common feature of American pasta recipes. I'm sure restaurants were doing it, but your average mass market cookbook only started mentioning it in the last 5-10 years or so.

> Your other option is to purposely undercook the pasta by a few minutes before adding it to the sauce to let it finish.

This is super important. I don't know why the article presents it as optional. It is a vital step for success in my experience.

The degree to which you undercook is really about how scared you are of overcooking. The phrase I've heard used is that removing pasta from boiling water and putting it in the sauce is like "pasta bullet time". It slows the cooking enough that you now have lots of extra time to play with.

So it's not that you need to pull the pasta very early. You just can, for greater insurance. But pulling it just shy of al dente and then finishing it in the sauce over a few minutes will result in an al dente pasta. If your sauce needs lots of reducing, you're making a huge batch with an undersized burner, or anything else that would greatly prolong the cooking time, then yes, you'll need to pull the pasta earlier.

Agreed.

I pull it out undercooked so I have time to add enough pasta water in the pan and let it reduce. If it's already al dente by the time it's added to the pan, then I find I have to rush through the mixing.

ps. make sure you get bronze-nozzle extruded pasta, not teflon extruded .. [ if you get dried pasta ]

It creates a nice rough micro-texture on the pasta surface when extruded, which helps it cook easier, and hold more sauce.

Swear, not making this up ..

More importantly, they seem to release more starch and lead to nicer sauces.

Tbh I’m still skeptical about the difference in sauce holding, but bronze die pasta are usual higher quality and worth it if only for that

I'm Italian and I fully subscribe to everything written in this article. Thanks for sharing!

My basic pasta recipes:

- olive oil & salt + pepper

- olive oil & cheese

- olive oil & garlic + tomato sauce

- olive oil & onions + salami

call me mad, but i like the sauce both dumped on top, or mixed in the pan. i do like controlling the cheese myself though. and the pepper - can't stand those waiters coming round with giant phallic grinders!

Never figured grinders as particularly 'phallic', but beauty, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder.

take it from me, in London at least they really are!

Ah shit, here we go again.

> which translates to around 1 or 2 tablespoons of kosher salt per quart or liter.

Yes.

> You also don't need a huge amount of water—just enough to be able to keep the pasta moving

That's highly depends on the pasta itself. There are some cheap local brands what greatly benefit from having way more water (1L for each 100g of dry weight) than usually needed for a proper one. Sure, if you want some soggy mess what you need to rinse, because otherwise it would cook itself to a single slob in just seconds after draining in a colander - it is all up to you.

> Pasta water gets added throughout the process in order to adjust consistency. Don't be afraid of it!

Can't agree enough. There is no one true recipe what would always work.

> Pasta don't wait around for nobody

Yep!

Amusingly just an hour ago I did a variation of 'pasta with sauce' what would be heart-attack inducing to anyone snobby enough about Italian cuisine: two big onions, chopped, steamed, fried, a bit of soy sauce, leftovers from a veg salad, harissa, tomato paste.

I can do 'a proper' one, but I can do 'not a proper' one too. And I can be just lazy enough today.

> Amusingly just an hour ago I did a variation of 'pasta with sauce' what would be heart-attack inducing to anyone snobby enough about Italian cuisine: two big onions, chopped, steamed, fried, a bit of soy sauce, leftovers from a veg salad, harissa, tomato paste.

Just declare it as "Indian", "Phillipino" or something other south-Asian and it will be fine. There is a huge variety of cuisines there and there are less self-proclaimed experts on them in the western world.

Today I learned that Americans cook pasta with the sauce. Just when I thought I could not be more appalled after how Americans make tea. >_<

If you're referring to the article they say to finish cooking in the sauce, which is not bad advice at all.

Happy to learn that I'm not the only one who hates the volcano pasta thing. For some reason people think it's fancy and sophisticated, but it's nonsense.

Sauce is an integral part of the dish and not some optional garnish. The two components of the dish must be properly fused together for optimal experience!

eh, that dirties too many dishes. Get the pasta cooked in salted water, drain it, put the pot that you cooked the pasta in on the turned off stove, add a few spoons of sauce from the jar in the fridge. The sauce will warm up from the residual heat of the pan. Add in pasta and stir it around. Your pasta is cooled from the sauce and the sauce is warmed from the pasta. Serve. Works fine with pesto and tomato sauce.

As an italian who is told he's pretty good at cooking, some of this is on point but a few things sound "wrong" to me (I use quotes because there's really no objective way to do this literally right or wrong, I'm just comparing with my experience / what I perceive "we learn from grandmas"):

- Put the pasta into the pan with the sauce (which I guess is the main point of the article which starts off with "italian" restaurants putting sauce on top of the pasta in the plate): defintely yes, but...

- Add pasta water: it depends on which sauce you prepared and how you prepared it (and the type of pasta... not just shape, but fresh -vs- dry, and what it's made of). When one uses "pasta water", it's usually in the making of the sauce, not before putting the pasta in the sauce pan; sometimes cooking water is added to the sauce if it "shrinked" too much or the ingredients are not of amongst those which attach to the pasta well, but these are their own cases. All that "adding water and stirring" to get to the "perfect texture" might appear to make sense, but I'm pretty sure it will take too much time and it will mess your pasta consistency because it will get overcooked. Sure you can under-cook the pasta alone a bit to compensate, but what's the point in that? What I'm trying to say is that this trial and error thing might make sense for someone who does it for the first time, but after a while you figure out how the sauce ought to be in the first place, you put the past in, jump it (as in, move the pan to make the pasta "jump" in it so it doesn't attach to the pan) to the right consistency and everything gets where it needs to be pretty easy without all that fuss. At least this is what I do and what I see others that seem to really know how to cook (based on the results) do.

- The bit about using cooking water (that's another way we call the "pasta water") to adjust the consistency which turned bad because of the cheese thickening and liquids evaporating... well, unless we are talking about sauces which have significant cheese quantities in it (e.g., the "cheese and pepper", or "4 cheeses pasta") and have a different process on their own (as does the mentioned "carbonara", which I guarantee you'll screw up if you follow this process because you'll cook the egg too much), cheese usually goes on top of the pasta in the plate as a garnish. For some sauces (e.g., the "amatriciana"), you're even supposed to make the plates (with pasta already mixed with sauce) get a bit less hot before putting in the cheese, to avoid it melting too much. Putting cheese in the pan for a non-cheese based sauce and make it melt and then thick is sort of a cardinal sin (you can add all the "pasta water" you want, you'll never get it back to where you need it to be and it will mess up your dish)

- Add fat: what? Just, no. Olive oil is of very common use, but you don't add it "to the sauce" for texture, for most sauces you use it as the base for the sauce. Butter? Unless we are talking about a butter-based sauce (e.g., butter & sage), which are not that many or very common anyway in regions but the northern ones, nope. Not like that. Some add olive oil as a garnish, but again really depends on which sauce you are using, and it ain't that common

No offense intended, but all of your suggestions sound very stereotypically Italian, which is to say they put an enormous emphasis on the traditional ways that pasta and sauces are made in various places in Italy. There's nothing wrong with this, celebrate tradition and heritage all you want, but that's very different to what Kenji goes for in general and what Serious Eats goes for in general. Their goal is usually to provide techniques that are then used in recipes to achieve a desired outcome.

Whether that outcome is considered traditional or correct by anyone is not something that is considered. The techniques are a tool to achieve an outcome, and how much or little you use those tools is left to the cook, rather than being dictated by tradition or custom.

Pasta water contains starch, which helps to thicken sauces. If you want a thick and glossy sauce, it is one way to do it. End of story. It is a technique to achieve a desirable goal, nothing more. Whether anyone traditionally in Italy does this or not is immaterial.

Similarly, fats are flavorful. Adding flavorful fat to increase flavor in a sauce is desirable. Whether anyone traditionally does this is immaterial if people think it tastes good.

None taken!

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to contribute though, since I was not attempting to celebrate anything nor to emphasize on traditions. I was just saying those "goals" have well known solutions that differs for some good reasons with what is described in the article, which claims (by its title) to explain "the right way" on basis that are unclear to me.

I do not know "Serious Eats" nor the author, so I'm sorry if I am antagonizing (not my intent, but I get it might be seen this way) a celebrity or his fans and in this upsetting people. I'm just contributing things I know from experience, whereas arguments like "this is one way, end of story" seems brittle to me, because you are basically dismissing the points that I probably didn't even explain decently (on your examples: you add pasta water, you get starch in the sauce which helps thickening things but you dilute other ingredients and will need to cook for more time to have the liquids evaporate thereby overcooking the pasta; you add "fats" like butter or oil at the end and you change the flavour of the dish significantly, other than its nutritions). Then again, if that's what you are looking for, great, I think I said at the beginning there's no objectively right or wrong, it's food we are talking about, if you are happy with eating the outcome good for you.

I mean, by all means please try it, and with that I mean actually get in the kitchen and do it, I think you'll realise there's a lot more than just "using a technique that makes sense in theory, end of story" to get your goals.

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