Or just use less water to cook the pasta? What’s the downside?
Second, clumping. You want the ability to freely stir and get water between pieces of pasta, or if the heat is on for the boiling bubbles to stir, in order to avoid the pasta sticking together.
Third, use 80% less water and you only get a 5x higher concentration of starch. I don't have measurements in front of me but I suspect this simply isn't starchy enough to take a tiny portion of that water and use it as an effective emulsifier. The article pins 1% starch as a threshold of effect, and I doubt I'm losing 0.2% of pasta weight when cooking to al dente.
Note: This is all for dried durum wheat-flour pasta, the generic industrial 'macaroni' of American agribusiness. Egg pasta is a very different product, with different cooking characteristics, that happens to share the name. Durum semolina pasta, whole-wheat pasta, gluten-free "pasta", rice pasta... no guarantees that this is applicable.
- It's still not going to be enough starch
- You can't rely on box cooking times even as a starting point. Your pasta will take significantly longer to cook, since it will bring down the temperature of the water when you put it in, since there's so little water
2. This has been thoroughly debunked. Kenji did a full write up of this but suffice to say that starches absorb water starting at 180 degrees. As long as you have the water above that temp it will cook in the same amount of time.
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi...
Unless you're extremely familiar with the exact brand of pasta, temperature of your stovetop, etc., you should be tasting your pasta toward the end of cooking to decide when to stop cooking it.
> - It's still not going to be enough starch
I'm inclined to disagree, but only have anecdata on this, so I can't really get into an extended debate over it. So I guess now I get to look forward to experimenting with starch additions the next few times I cook pasta.
As I said I don't get clumping, it is absolutely possible to cook noods in minimal water without clumping because I do it so try switching some thing up if it's happening to you.
While small pasta shapes are relatively easy to stir such that they break contact with anything nearby right from the beginning, long pasta tends to move together when stirring until they’ve softened - at which point they’ve already started sticking together.
You can try to stir it so that the pasta isn’t all running parallel before it softens, but then you get ends start sticking out of the water until it softens more, leading to uneven cooking.
For long pastas, I’ve found using more water and just adding a little flour while cooking to be a lot easier.