We dare to bet you make these mistakes as well when you’re cooking pasta!
Everybody loves pasta. At least, the large majority of us do. It’s one of the most delicious Italian dishes and most people will have their own go-to recipe they’ve been making for years. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Well, it turns out there just might be, because in most cases we make a couple of pretty big mistakes when we’re cooking pasta.
Cheap version
Don’t try to save money by buying a cheap dried pasta. A couple of the budget pasta brands choose to take a shortcut in their production process. This is why their products are cheaper, but this shortcut also means the pasta is of a lower quality. The lower quality is especially caused by the type of flour used by budget brands and the speeding up of the drying process.
Boiling water
A lot of people don’t have the patience to wait until the water is boiling completely before they add the pasta to the pot. Don’t drop the entire load of penne in the water as soon as the water surface starts bubbling a little. Wait for about half a minute after the water starts boiling properly and then add the pasta.
Too little salt
“Well-seasoned pasta water should taste like a well-seasoned soup,” is what chef Nate Whiting, a famous chef in the US, said about the topic. He suggests you should add 10 grams of salt to every 1000 ml of water. If you add too little salt, the pasta will taste bland.
Enough water
Make sure you’ve got more than enough water in the pot to boil the pasta in. “Pasta needs room to swim!” according to Nate Whiting. He says we should cook our pasta in a lot of salted, boiling water.
Rinsing the pasta
“One of the most commonly asked questions is ‘Do I rinse the pasta after I remove it from the water?'” says Carmine DiGiovanni, who is the chef at Aunt Jake’s in New York. He explains that it’s a big mistake to rinse your pasta, because the starch that’s left behind on the pasta after boiling it actually adds a smooth, velvet-like richness to the sauce once they’re combined.
Cooking method
One of the most important things when you’re cooking pasta is making sure it’s perfectly ‘al dente’. This is Italian for “to the teeth”, but it means “cooked to be firm to the bite.” Celebrity chef Devin Alexander says: “The biggest mistake anyone can make is serving up what I call ‘elementary school pasta.” Some people have gotten used to eating pasta that’s overcooked because it’s served to them at schools or organisations. They serve it like that because overcooking it can create more volume, meaning the pasta gets bigger. It’s much better to not do this, though, because pasta tastes a lot better when there’s still a little bit of a bite.
Cooking sauce along with the pasta
Are you in the habit of mixing through the sauce as soon as the pasta is done cooking? That’s a mistake. Chef Salvatore Marcello says: “Your pasta should be drained when it’s al dente so that you can finish cooking it in the sauce without it overcooking.” Next, simmer your pasta in the sauce for about 30 seconds and then remove it from the heat.