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Comment by notindexed | Hacker News Reader

You do not cook pasta by cooking time.

“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

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Cooking time can be a good indicator. If it says 10 minutes you can start to check it out by 8 and decide from there.

> You do not cook pasta by cooking time

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.

That would be really unfortunate if you were trying to make a pour over coffee at 205°F.

I see plenty of "glove box"-type lab equipment which has an airtight enclosure (often rated to some degree of vacuum), and gloves which allow handling of things inside. Surely it wouldn't be too hard to DIY such an enclosure, but pressurise it to 1 ATM instead? E.g. a small air compressor and a relief valve set to ~15psi or so?

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.

A strange way to reimplement a pressure cooker. Can work of course.

Well, Italian *nonnas rarely used more than one pan for cooking, and it was very common to just put pasta without the sauce in the plate, and a generous spoonful of sauce on top. This is what you used to find in restaurants, too.

The cooking water in the large pan is a rather new thing. Or maybe it's something just from my region :)

Can't speak for all italian regions as there are many differences; but this "spooning some sauce over naked pasta" right on the plate always struck me as positively un-italian. I would always expect the pasta and sauce to be mixed in the kitchen, and the pasta to be completely coated in sauce when the plate reached my table. Maybe it's something italian-american ?

It might be a potato culture thing as it was historically common when pasta showed up on shelves in Sweden that the older generation just went with the instructions separately, cooking pre-peeled potatoes loses so much of it's flavor so if boiled, it's done so separately, getting a new ingredient you probably do it as you've always done.

Many years ago I dated someone from an Italian family and they taught me to literally throw a strand of the pasta against the wall and watch how it sticks/bounces to test the doneness. To this day I think it’s a bit ridiculous but it does have some logic to it. Would be easier to just… bite into the pasta to test.

True facts. Make a pan sauce while your pasta is cooking then throw it straight inwith some of the starchy water to thicken things up.

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 die inside every time somebody dumps a jar of Ragu into a drained pot of overcooked spaghetti.

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.

As a brit growing up at a similar time I assumed that was an American thing - you saw it all the time on TV and adverts, but seems crazy to actually serve it like that. It was always served by my parents already coated in sauce.

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.

This was my experience growing up in Britain in the 90s. Fortunately one of my housemates at university worked in kitchens made a point of showing me how much tastier it was when the pasta was properly coated with the sauce.

> 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.

Friends (the US show) had a scene where a supposed CHEF did this when cooking for her parents, in the mid-late 90s.

I actually don't mind that. It allows me to choose the pasta-sauce ratio in every bite. The taste difference from when pasta is soaked in sauce is negligible IME.

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.

It's like white people tacos vs food-truck tacos. It used to be gauche but has now become its own standard. You can like white people tacos and food truck tacos.

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.

Don't know why this was downvoted.

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.

Isn't De Cecco pretty mid? It's found in every supermarket in the UK for example

It’s a high quality mass market brand. I have tried a large number of more expensive brands, but none have beat De Cecco for me in terms of consistency and quality.

Yeah, there's more to good (extruded and dried) pasta than bronze dies. The ingredients of the pasta, quality of the flour and drying technique are important too.

That said, taste is subjective.

Fair point. Ergo the other brands. I am partial to La Molisana and Garofalo, the latter mainly because I can get 1 kg packets of penne and spaghetti.

De Cecco is great for a big brand. The best way to know if a dry pasta is good is by the color. The more pale (i.e. less yellow) the better. This is because a more costly, slower drying method preserves the original color better.

Rummo is my favourite grocery store pasta.

Eye-talians probably downvoting this LOL. Confused by a bit of basic Italian

it's nonna* though ;)

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