Pasta Cooking Time
jefftk.com
jefftk.com
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."
You'll probably need some extra water just to ensure even heating, but if the pasta is already rehydrated, then you no longer have to include a safety margin for water to be absorbed.
I realize baked ziti (your link) and lasagna are basically the same thing, but it felt worth calling out. It makes for a much faster prep stage. I do the prep work after my family leaves for the day in the morning, then dinner is just preheating and popping it in the oven
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.
Some people like to create rules and systems for things, some people like to grow their intuition. Everyone can cook how they want.
If you strive for excellence, pasta cooking time is the least of your concerns, selection and knowledge of ingredients is. It gets internalized and feels just like intuition.
If you don't, generally just put pasta into boiling water and wait for T-1m where T is what's written on the package. It will be good enough.
I substitute the can of sauce for a 28oz can of tomatoes, and cook some onion and garlic in with mince instead of adding onion and garlic powder.
If you use a microwave oven for cooking, then for rice, pasta or any other kind of cereal-based ingredient, e.g. maize meal or semolina, you just need to determine once the correct amount of added water (e.g. for rice or maize meal I use water that is 4 times their weight, while cooking in a covered glass vessel), of microwave power and of cooking time in your oven.
Then you can cook forever always using those parameters and the result will be just right every time.
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.
I guess that means you don’t want the first pasta order of the day.
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.
“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
My best pasta comes from when I start testing it roughly 9 minutes in. Pasta softness depends on water softness, salinity, even ambient air pressure (though I am decidedly a low-lying person). Also pasta shape, and even quantity of pasta in the container (unless you have one of those huge boilers used in restaurants).
The instructions on the box tend to overcook my pasta well beyond al-dente.
Also, to all pasta lovers: please try trafilata al bronzo pasta from places like La Molisana, De Cecco, Garofalo, Rummo, and more.
That said, taste is subjective.
it's nonna* though ;)
I die inside every time somebody dumps a jar of Ragu into a drained pot of overcooked spaghetti. Hell, there are ways to dress up jar sauce in a one-pot fashion that only take a few minutes more but a lot of people simply aren't interested. Conversely I'm sure there's stuff that I do that others cringe at - my guitar-playing buddy probably feels the same way every time I drag my digital rig onto stage instead of real amp and pedalboard.
I can give you even worse than that. It was common in the 00s in Britain, maybe still is, to serve pasta as a bowl of plain, dry boiled spaghetti with sauce poured on top.
Looking back, I suspect it was more that the contrast of the sauce and spaghetti colours made it "pop" more onscreen. Though it's possibly unsurprising that could feed /back/ into how people thought it "should" be served.
Friends (the US show) had a scene where a supposed CHEF did this when cooking for her parents, in the mid-late 90s.
Plus, I freeze my sauce separately from the pasta. Freezing pasta and then reheating it makes it mushy. Whereas I can always reheat the sauce and cook fresh pasta in minutes. Which also allows me to use a different type of pasta every time.
Try dumping the pasta into the strainer, then putting a layer of olive oil across the bottom of the dry pan like youre about to shallow fry something. Then shallow fry the canned sauce in teh olive oil. It should splatter and hiss. Then dump the pasta in.
Is it legit? No. Is it good and easy? Yup.
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.
I am thinking that you would put a kettle of water inside, pressurise the container, and then boil the kettle (would need a power or gas line installed) and make the coffee using the handling gloves. Then depressurise the container and retrieve the beverage.
I'm no engineer so I would be interested to know if this would set me down a path of "you'll accidentally maim yourself", but I wouldn't think you'd need anything fancy or hazardous in terms of materials or engineering, given most human-made structures exist at 1atm.
Would probably need to be careful to let the coffee sit for a few minutes to avoid flash-boiling it though, unless you're adding cold milk.
The cooking water in the large pan is a rather new thing. Or maybe it's something just from my region :)
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.
We've noticed that dry pasta almost always takes significantly longer to cook than the packaging suggests. I don't think we are overcooking, but I suppose that could be true. It could also just be bad instructions on the packages, but I think there is something more.
We are at a slight altitude (2000 ft/ 600m) which has some effect, but cooking times are sometimes 50% longer than claimed, and I'm doubtful the 4F / 2.2C boiling difference would have this large an effect.
We also have quite acidic well water. I know that this affects cooking times for dry beans, but I haven't seen much about the effect on pasta. Has anyone looked into this? My quick attempt at searching didn't turn up much.
That could actually be a lot of what I'm seeing! I live in Somerville (just outside Boston) with MWRA water, which is kept at a pH of 9.0 to 9.5 to reduce lead leeching from old pipes. Reading a bit, it seems like that could indeed cut a couple minutes off the cooking time.
Even at ~15F / ~7C lower it only takes a few min more for pasta for me usually, I can always just use the max on the package and then test from there.
ETA: That is with a silicone boil over lid at full rolling boil, which may impact the time also.
People who live in mountain areas are used to changing elevation quickly, and you really notice the difference. They will know their altitudes.
There are better and worse ways to do things, any things. Pasta preparation was perfected by Italians and its not a trivial process everybody groks in 2 mins. I strongly suggest visiting Italy and tasting how real pasta should taste, an experience rarely seen outside of the country, regardless how 'italian' given restaurant tries to look like (exactly same with ie south asian curries who are in the west usually a far cry from original food).
If you prefer doing things in non-ideal way and thus have inferior tasting experience that's your own choice. Don't expect applause for that, not in international forums full of people who know better.
And getting overly defensive when people suggest better approaches... not the best form, is it. Do you consider such approach a best one to general criticism, rather than ie some introspection and pinch of critical thinking?
Been there, done that. I understand. I still cook my pasta beyond al dente.
> getting overly defensive
Mr Pot, meet Mr Kettle.
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?
I guess at a really low boil there could be cooler parts of the water.
Much of cooking is physics and chemistry. "The science of YUM"
In the US, there are major cities that are at 1500m elevation (like Denver CO). Water in Denver boils at ~94C. For most of the UK it's more like 98->100C
13-15 min for that rigatoni definitely sounds excessive.
The "throw it at the wall, and see if it sticks" test is about right!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope#/media/File:Ukraini...
The cheap USB ones work pretty well for home use, just get one that either has a monitor or can hook up to a monitor, the eyepieces tend to suck. For top of the line professional ones, Mantis makes the best ones I've ever used. I think they are in the 2k+USD range though, I definitely don't have one at home.
See https://www.microscopemuseum.eu/catalogues/LOMO_1970s_Micros...
But thanks for the link, such a cool find :-)
fwiw one can make a microscope out of a webcam and a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlarger with some duct tape and thermal glue. It won't do 3500x, but will be comparable to those small USB ones.
Edit: I actually have one where focus is contolled by the camera being mounted on a 3.5" floppy drive chassis in place of the drive head. that was some fun project to do. But don't use polish enlarger lenses, soviet are the best.
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
that's basically what I do
with French quality brands, it's between 9-11 min for dry pasta, when I make my own ravioli, it's more 2-3min
That strategy relies on the box being off by at most one minute, so the results from the article seem highly relevant.
Please eat the pasta al dente. Overcooked pasta is really awful, trust me
I will never ever ask for a well-done steak, but I won't judge someone for enjoying it that way.
(I get what you're saying, spiritually, your pasta water from your giant pot of one box of pasta isn't gonna do much to thicken your sauce. But it's not a myth, just a matter of degree)
For the type of rigatoni (smaller) in the article and my local brands it varies between 11 and 15m recommended cooking time depending on brand, and from experience the recommended time is when its ready to be put in a sauce, so not fully cooked. My favorite but more expensive brand says 14m, I usually set a timer to 13 and then try it until its ready to be cooked in the sauce.
Speaking of, wonder if using seawater for cooking would have good results. Pasta or otherwise!
I never do that, I start the timer as soon as I put the pasta in the water, and usually the cooking times on Italian brands are spot-on. If I have to finish the cooking in a pan (depending on the sauce) I take out 1m or 1m30s, and it's "al dente".
For whole grain pastas I find this really helps get a more satisfying flavor and consistency.
Sometimes I'd put the whole pot in the fridge after it cooled to room temperature and it'd keep for a bit so I could use it for brown rice, or for more pasta later.
Finally, you can also use that water to water your plants because it has a ton of healthy nutrients in it, but you have to be really careful cause of the salt so I always water it down heavily and don't apply it as frequently as I have a pasta water that I'm going to drain.
I just go by smell, you can definitely tell when the water has turned.
Does the bacillus not die during the reboiling? That's some hearty stuff
ie, 2-3 minutes before the box time, possibly more, depending on what finishing means for your case.
> * do not put oil in your cooking water, it will NOT help it not stick.
It will not hurt, and may help. Oil will stop the super starchy water, if you followed the reduce the water volume step as suggested, from boiling over - as it will help reduce the surface tension. This is real, and particularly important for some types of noodles and dumplings.
> Remember to reserve one cup of the starchy cooking water before draining your pasta entirely
At least- again, depending on what sauce you're putting it in, and how underdone you took it out. Particularly if you'll have leftovers (as any good homecook often will!), the 'al dente' pasta will absorb all your water, and you'll need to add some before you put it in the fridge, or it will be super dry when you reheat it.
> it does not need to be "salty like the ocean"
despite what Nigella might tell you, it should be no where near ocean water. (just to reinforce this, because I'm not sure if people just think it is a thing to say, or they just have no idea how salty the sea is)
Well sea saltiness levels vary wildly, and although the Mediterranean is much too salty, I'd say salty like the North Sea seems about right to me.
Using oil has never been about preventing it from sticking, despite so many people repeating this myth. Anyone can plainly see that the oil floats on top of the water and never touches the pasta.
The only purpose of the oil is to prevent foaming so it doesn’t boil over.
If you turn the heat down to a reasonable level, then yes, the oil will do a lot to help prevent boil over.
coupla quibbles, one of which you may not be guilty of:
toothsome means delicious, not any sort of mouthfeel (though I agree, it would be a great word for al dente, which means "to the teeth")
the bit of white in the middle is raw, and not al dente. al dente is the "rubbery snap" of biting a noodle and not the "concrete snap" of a raw interior. somehow (like all across NYC) there are so many chefs who think al dente means uncooked center. it does not. handmade egg noodle pasta (which has no dry interior) and extruded hard durum wheat pasta both can both be served al dente.
I did this once or twice and decided I was not that into pasta to justify making my own.
Every time I boil it, I inevitably get pasta that is under-cooked in the center while mushy on the outside. I've had some times where I've had to boil it for several minutes more than recommended just to get the inside to cook fully.
And even a few minutes in, the pasta seems to split apart into pieces.
I've tried 'quieter' more simmer-y boils, I've tried cranking it up as far as it goes, I've tried salt, I've tried different stoves, nothing has seemed to help.
Maybe it's just low-quality noodles, I don't know.
(On the other hand, I really like pasta with very different texture on the inside and outside, and so strongly prefer thicker shapes. Angel hair is one of my least favorite s.)
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I've been wanting to try it, but I can't remember the details exactly.
There's so much superstition and ritual around food preparation (especially coffee). Tested processes are extremely rare.
(I mention this so people can know the list exists, and hopefully email us more nominations when they see an unusually great and interesting comment.)
The rehydration thing is still a killer trick --- especially for Mac and Cheese.
Nice article BTW.
But this guy is starting at 9 minutes. I worry for American food.
> I worry for American food.
Gastronomic bigotry helps nobody, and just paints you as a dick. Hold off on it for your own sake.
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 important for efficiency and speed is to use the least amount of water possible.
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.
Pasta that is not married to its sauce has not done its job. The point of putting a bunch of wheat-based filler into a food is that the flavors of the sauce and other liquids are absorbed and adopted by that bread/pasta/sponge type stuff. Then when you reach the end of the sauce, you still have pasta that is infused with its very essence.
I die a little inside, every time someone slaps some breadsticks on my plate and not enough sauce to soak up. The whole point of a breadstick is wiping that stuff up and sponging it out of the dish!
I die a little inside, every time I see a frozen "TV dinner" that has a little sauce on top of dried-out rice. You mean I am supposed to heat this up and it will magically be delicious?
I've been ordering rice bowls from a fun "healthy foods" restaurant in the college area. They dump a bunch of cooked Jasmine rice into a bowl and then whisper a curry sauce over the top. I gave up after 3 extra sauce orders didn't cover all the rice. And you can't "resuscitate" a dish by applying sauce afterwards: that is what the cooking in the pot is for. Marry the sauce to the rice or dump it in the rubbish.
One time, America's Test Kitchen published a photo of how to rescue old stale bread by dumping pasta sauce over it, while it's frozen. I told them, that's the dumbest thing I ever saw.
The whole reason for leavening bread is so that it becomes like a sponge! For God's sake, the whole reason for inventing the sandwich, the pita, and the Cornish pasty were to save the hands while the sauces absorbed into the bread! That you actually had good-tasting bread in the end, or for a tin miner, bread you could toss in the rubbish!
At this stage, I am convinced that 95% of "gluten intolerance/sensitivity/allergy" is induced by people who are improperly eating all these grains, just dry, just no sauces or liquids inside it. It's fundamentally stupid and ignorance of cuisine, and it's all based on industrial-scale food production and cost-cutting even in the nicest kitchens.
Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.
"Mahkit Baskit" (as we say it) is a discount grocery store. Even though it's clean, there are often lots of mistakes that happen with low-wage, untrained labor. IE, one of the few times I went there, the bosc and d'anjou pears were all mixed together because they are green. (But they are obviously different in taste and shape if you are smarter than ChatGPT, and have stickers on them to make it obvious to whoever's stocking the shelfs.)
So it's no surprise the directions on pasta are wrong!
I'm Canadian and I don't think this is an American thing at all. Certainly my lifestyle is nothing like stereotypical US lifestyle.
Also: there's a certain kind of machismo associated with liking steak rare, which is hard to reconcile with overcooking other things habitually.
When you remove pasta, you Cool down the water. So its not the same reault as actual 15 minutes cooking
I was putting in a slotted spoon, and removing one piece at a time. The water remained at a full boil throughout.
Did you factor that in to your next tasting?
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.
So, there's this thing that I heard, but I never found confirmation, maybe someone here can help.
Apparently bronze by itself can't be used as a cooking utensil since it loses material too easily.
When they use bronze for extruding and such, they have to coat it in teflon to have a legal bypass.
But it all remains kinda brittle, and now you are eating teflon and bronze!
I simplified it all, but I am not a material expert nor a law expert, so could anyone debunk or confirm?
The bronze (and even brass) are uncoated and don't seem to lose material, on the contrary, they seem to get a patina with use. From what I read, bronze pasta is extruded at lower speed and temperature to account for the material (and the desired texture of the pasta). From an engineering point of view, this article give more insight [1].
[0] https://flavor365.com/pasta-die-materials-the-ultimate-guide...
[1] https://pastasty.com/the-engineering-of-extrusion-how-bronze...
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.