Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

I don't tend to look at the clock for pasta. I just eyeball it and sample it. You can sort of see the pasta turning whiter from the outside in. Especially with my regular goto brands, I can see when it is done. I fish some out with a fork to verify usually when it's getting close.

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.

> Speaking of pasta water, use less water for boiling past[a]…

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."

I prefer to cook pasta like rice and starting it in cold water brought to a boil and then a simmer: https://altonbrown.com/recipes/cold-water-pasta-method/

If you do that aren't you just eating uncooked flour and egg?

It cooks in the liquid from the surrounding ingredients. You can do this with a sufficiently wet enough Lasagna quite easily.

Indeed we regularly eat "oven pasta", the raw pasta goes in to a sauce into the oven. 30-40 mins and it is al dente (with crispy cheese on top).

Ah ok I missed that your link was for ziti. I thought you were talking about spaghetti or other non-baked pastas where you typically just pour sauce over.

Sounds like a way to trade preparation time for energy expenditure, if it lets you minimize the amount of water you need to boil.

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.

It would be interesting to let it absorb water at ambient temperature, then let koji do the job with the proteins.

This is how I lasagna. Warm water soak to rehydrate (I do use my kettle to speed things up).

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

With long pasta it's not hard, with a tiny bit of experience and attention, to learn how it physically behaves when it's either done or close to it. It's about as easy to learn (experientially) how much it changes minute by minute at that point.

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.

> 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.

There is too much variation in ingredients for any sort of formal rules.

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 hear your point on formalization, but I do find that understanding the science behind various techniques has helped my ability to Freeform in the kitchen significantly.

While it's an interesting article, I don't think there's much science going on. There's one variable barely controlled for, compared to the dozen or so variables which weren't controlled.

This is responding to Food Lab.

> use less water

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.

Most pasta labels specify what seems like a ridiculous water to pasta ratio. Something like 4-6 quarts of water for a pound of pasta. Does anyone know if there's a good reason for this? I never use that much.

It’s what you’d use in a restaurant where you are cooking pasta in the water all day and therefore built up a lot of starch in the water. At least according to Kenji Lopez.

I guess that means you don’t want the first pasta order of the day.

Large amounts of water also ensure the rolling boil is retained (ie the pasta doesn't cool the water much on insertion). I generally consider that rather more important for, say, a ravioli than plain pasta though

The water will indeed cool down when you put the pasta in. Using a lid can help with this though and bring it back to boiling quicker. I usually don't bother with this. And the pasta will still absorb water if it's close to boiling instead of boiling. And since I check visually and by tasting whether it is done it's not that big of a deal. Stirring is part of that. I do that in any case to make sure things don't stick to the bottom.

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.

After cooking many pasta dishes over the years, I’ve gotten good enough that I know when it’s done just by feeling it through the stirrer handle. One can even distinguish between al dente vs done.

There should be a spaghetti cooker that works like a rice cooker. I put in the precise amount of water and then when it's all absorbed it signals me that it is done.

I've been cooking variations on this lazy Instant Pot spaghetti recipe for a few years now. I expect Italians would be horrified but it's extremely low effort and very tasty! https://thesaltymarshmallow.com/instant-pot-spaghetti/

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.

The pictures are not selling that well at all. Looks about 2min overcooked.

Instant Pot pasta is fun when you nail it but it’s so difficult to get right because the cook times vary so much with the quantity of food being cooked. If you’re like me and you vary the number of servings you cook all the time then the Instant Pot is pretty bad for this.

You do not really need a cooker with fancy sensors to achieve perfectly reproducible cooking.

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.

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