Pasta and sauce are not meant to be separate. Once you cook the pasta, drain it, and immediately toss with the sauce. This is part of the reason it was meant to be al dente, to absorb and deliver the flavor of the sauce better. Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce; it expands when freshly cooked but not when cool.
Also most sauce recipes are probably overcomplicated. Most need less than 5 ingredients. You probably don't need all that onion and garlic, but one of them. Definitely not two tablespoons of dried oregano.
The way you cut onions and garlic changes the flavor a lot too. Finely minced garlic, from a food processor or garlic press can be overpowering yet not deliver the flavor. One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor. Half an onion can work really well in a sauce you cooking for half an hour.
1) Salt your pasta water! Pasta is meant to be cooked in salty water that, according and excellently-put by Samin Nosrat (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) - "is reminiscent of the sea".
2) Save and use a splash of ("dirty") pasta water - aka the water the pasta was just cooked in - when you're tossing the pasta with the sauce. The water is filled with delightful liquified starch from the pasta, and it helps the sauce coat the pasta more thoroughly.
Had lots of funny moments in my life relating to salting pasta water. Almost all the people I know put like two pinches of salt into the water. Which causes them to look at me like I'm a psycho when I pour salt in for almost a full second, straight out of the container.
I can +1 both of your tips, I follow them both since I learned to cook and they're a (small but effective) game-changer.
I agree it's kind of absurd to "salt" your pasta water with a pinch of salt (you're doing nothing!), but for me it's a lot more efficient to let the sauce to have the saltiness than to waste handfuls of salt going into water that I'm going to dump out.
INB4, "save your pasta water." I don't have a big kitchen or freezer, a pot full of water is a giant waste of space for me.
Most people just dip a coffee mug in the pasta just before they drain it to keep some water back. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone freezing pasta water.
As for "salty water vs. salty sauce", the better way from a culinary perspective is both. Over salting one thing to compensate for another thing often leads to uneven flavor; if everything is salted roughly appropriately it all kinda comes together without any extra effort. I suggest trying it, hell maybe even do an A/B test. It's subtle, but salt penetrating the pasta during cooking makes it taste that much better.
The thing about saving pasta water is about not throwing it all away when draining the pasta - just keeping a little back to toss in with the pasta and the sauce. It's not saving it for later.
- Lots of salt in the sauce means you'll have very salty sauce with undersalted pasta. It might work out fine if the sauce coats really well, but will still be slightly different.
- Ingredients cook differently when salted. Not sure about pasta specifically: I _think_ I can taste a difference between pasta cooked in salted water and pasta salted after being cooked, but I'm not certain.
- Definitely don't keep pasta water around, it's just for the sauce you're currently making
This is missing the forest for the trees. The point is not to make restaurant quality pasta and sauce, it's to not have to buy salt from the store every week. It's wasteful for little benefit.
I can't ever say I've felt like cooking pasta without salt is "under salted." Is it as savory and delicious as what I'd buy at a restaurant? No - but having done it like that in the past I just think the benefits are marginal for how much you waste.
I wouldn't say it's "forest for the trees", but I see the point that it's a choice of trade-offs.
I make pasta _very_ often, I love it and want it to be as good as it possibly can, so I'm very happy optimising for taste. FWIW I use a tablespoon of salt per portion, and get a 1.3kg pack of salt every few months: hardly a huge waste!
Unless you really love salt, you want much less salinity in pasta than the sea (1-2% for pasta, 3.5% in the sea). Kenji Alt-Lopez says that you want your pasta water "as salty as you remember the sea is", not as salty as the sea actually is because it's way too much!
If you’ve ever been at sea and tried to use seawater to cook pasta, you’ll realize that it’s too much salt. 1:1 seawater to fresh water turns out perfect (and saves your fresh water).
- A good ratio of salt/water is one tablespoon per litre (or gallon). Reduce if the sauce is going to be very salty already (eg carbonara). We're talking kosher salt here (specifically Diamon Crystal), if using table salt it's probably going to be half of that: salt density varies a lot depending on the type.
- Cook your pasta is _as little_ water as possible. For some reason there's some myth that you want to cook pasta in a large volume of water: that's BS. What makes pasta water "liquid gold" is the starch that comes from the pasta, you want that as concentrated as possible.
A good ratio of salt/water is one tablespoon per litre (or gallon)
A gallon is 3.5-4 litres. This doesn't seem right.
Cook your pasta is _as little_ water as possible.
This advice is worthless without some baseline like g of pasta to l water or how much water to cover your pasta with. You should cook your pasta in a large volume of water so the water will still be hot when you add the pasta and the pasta will be cooked as quickly as possible. Too little water and you risk the pasta sticking to itself as well. All this in mind, properly cooked pasta with diluted pasta water is a better outcome than starchy pasta water with pasta that has an odd texture. Maybe that last bit is personal preference, but when eating pasta, the first thing I notice is the texture of the pasta, not the starchiness of the pasta water. Hell, maybe we're thinking about the same amount of water, and you've just seen people try to cook with comically large amounts, I dunno.
Oh god please don't to 1 TB of salt per gallon you need way more. I would do 4TB because although it's more than 1% salt it's easy to remember and close enough. As long as you stay less than 2% you're probably good for average salt tolerance.
+1 to the as little water as possible tip, that's worked well for me. The emulsifying properties transmit flavors really well, I like to infuse a tiny bit of oil to stir in.
What does salting your pasta water do, other than aligning with how it was "meant to be"? I've never noticed a difference, but also didn't salt it that extensively, and this was years ago.
In college I got into an argument about this, believing this was the primary reason to salt the water. I was wrong -- at best it raises the boiling temp by 2F which is negligible.
Ah OK, so the same reason I use salt elsewhere - I thought it might affect the cooking process somehow.
Any idea why the pasta carries it better? I usually add it to the sauce, the idea being both that I need to use less salt (healthier), and that it interacts with the herbs I added to the sauce.
You need to salt it enough that the pasta itself becomes salty. So the sauce you use doesn't have to have much salt, a pinch or two, and the pasta carries the saltiness instead.
> Add a small amount of olive oil as extra help for that
It really doesn't. Oil doesn't mix with water. The only thing it does is oiling your pasta when you drain the water, which prevents the sauce from sticking correctly.
Pasta naturally don't stick together if you use a pot large enough, with enough water. And even then it doesn't stick, I honestly don't know how people make their pasta stick.
Cheap pans. Thin-walled that doesn't distribute heat evenly. So hot spots burn the pasta to the walls.
Secondly, not stirring at all. Boiling will do some circulation, but you have to keep some amount of stirring to prevent a small sticking turn into a burned to the pan problem.
Not sure who said it, but I've had the advice "enough salt to scare your guests" in my head for years. Adding the salt after the water boils is also very, very satisfying.
I really thought I hated spaghetti growing up. My parents would boil the noodles and then pour room temp sauce from a jar at the table individually. It was inedible.
I was visiting a friend and had it all cooked together in the pan for the first time and it was eye opening.
My parents were on the lower end of rural middle-class so on the rare occasion we went to a restaurant, steak was avoided as the most expensive thing on the menu, and as kids, we didn't have the option of steak anyway. Our meats while growing up were mainly fish, chicken, pork, and hamburger. When I was a teen, my mom got a deal on a big box of steaks somehow and cooked them on the grill every other night for dinner. She made it sound like we were living like royalty but no matter what kind of sauces or seasonings I slathered on, they were always dry and tasteless. I voluntarily skipped a lot of dinners that summer and thought I just hated steak.
In my mid-20s, I befriended a Brazilian. He invited my spouse and I over for a barbecue. When we got there, I found out the only thing going on the grill was steak, a.k.a. Brazilian Beef. Basically thick chunks of steak "marinated" in rock salt then cooked over open coals to sear the outside, but never long enough to get the inside more than medium-rare. I probably mentioned not caring for steak but he assured me I was going to like it. And wow, he was right. So tasty, so juicy. Decades later, I still make it every chance I get.
My wife and I sometimes talk about how our parents basically ruined whole categories of food for us until we got out into the world and experienced (or learned for ourselves) how things were _supposed_ to be cooked.
Growing up I went through the same thing and eventually talked to my mom about it and we came to the conclusion that it all went back to her parents who lived the Great Depression. When you grow up on Bread and Butter pickle sandwiches and then have industrialized food thrown at you post WWII you don't question it, but it has impacts on subsequent generations.
Funny enough the other day I had a liverwurst sandwich, something my Grandmother would have easily recognized, except I bought it from a local whole animal butcher. What was once one of the cheapest forms of meat is now rare gourmet sandwich.
I've picked up on habits in my parents that resemble Great Depression era practices and their relationship with food is the most noticeable. Even my Dad who liked to cook as a hobby had very poor attention to detail when it came to quality. My mother basically made horribly seasoned slop and thought it was perfectly edible. My grandfather was extremely concerned with my mother having a full belly, probably at the cost of quality (a rational worldview when you've experienced starvation firsthand).
At this point, when I meet people my age who describe themselves as "picky eaters" my internal response is "Your parents were probably just bad cooks." At least the experience taught me to take responsibility for what I put into my body.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer burns his tongue so bad he becomes a super taster. And the only food he can eat is Bart's cafeteria food because it's so bland haha.
Interestingly, the wikipedia page for super tasters mentions that "some studies also show that increased sensitivity to bitter tastes may be a cause of selective eating." Interesting potential feedback loop.
Pesto burns really easily and its flavors after cooking are generally regarded as worse than when it's uncooked. Heating it a little probably doesn't hurt, but it's intended to be kind of a fresh sauce, so, little or no cooking. Doesn't come through as well with the jar stuff vs. home-made, but still.
I got through college on this, it actually wasn't that bad. I added little sauce (Most expensive part of the dish! I didn't buy cheap sauce.) and folded it into the boiling hot noodles immediately after draining. Brought the whole dish almost immediately to serving temperature, so I could eat right away instead of waiting for it to cool.
To mix or not to mix? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer, the soaking of pasta in outrageous marinara, or to take arms against a sea of sauce.
I remember Anthony Bourdain asking his Sicilian family this question, and the table erupted in hot debate. I'm not sure you are "wrong".
Mixing and finishing the pasta in the sauce results in better tasting food. I don't care if some angry Sicilian claims that's not "authentic" or some garbage. They don't own the concept of pasta in tomato sauce anymore.
I always found this to be extremely amusing, so much of our cultural food touchstones are less old than we think. Tempura for example, is originally Portuguese. Salmon was not used for sushi until pretty recently (needs to be flash frozen to be safe for this one). Japanese curry? From Britain! By way if India.
By way of Britain is correct. British ‘curry’ is anything cooked with ‘curry powder’ which is an entirely British invention which is not used in India. It’s this curry powder from which Japanese and Korean curries are made.
He meant historically, tomatoes are native to South America before being brought everywhere else. So ie a Sicilian getting angry about not doing some red sauce pasta dish due to feeling this is their heritage original dish and they have patent on the proper procedure... it depends how far back in time you look.
Same ie potatoes in eastern Europe, a base in many many 'traditional' dishes. Yes if we look maybe 10 generations back, not so much for say 30 generations
Exactly. Use of red sauce in Italian cuisine is what, if it were invented today, we would call "Ibero-Italian fusion cuisine"; and the Spanish and Portuguese red sauces were developed after their early exploration of the Americas.
So much of creativity is the result of mixing diverse elements in unique ways. And it's especially rich to rant about "purity" or cultural "ownership" regarding something that is fundamentally the result of such a fusion.
EDIT: Speaking of which, if you haven't tried pasta or pizza with a Portuguese pepper-tomato sauce, you're missing out.
What they mean is that they originate from the Americas, not that it's the only place they grow, meaning it's not an ancient Italian dish. It didn't become popular in Italian food until the 18th century [1]
While they might not have been making tomato-based pastas until the 17/18th century that's still earlier than the founding of the US - I think we can credit Sicily with having some impact on tomato based pastas!
I meant the Americas as a continent not the US specifically, and yeah I agree that Italy gets to be an authority on the subject. I was mainly replying to the other person taking "tomatoes are 100% American" to mean all tomatoes are grown in America because that wasn't at all what the comment they'd replied to was saying.
I've switched to his method. It works really well. Doesn't take as long to boil, uses less gas, uses less water, uses less salt (b/c you waste less in the water). Now I just heat the water to boiling, throw in the pasta, let it come back to a boil, stir a bunch, turn off the heat, and put the lid on. Works every time.
Obvious in retrospect: once the water is boiling, any other increase of energy will only be used to evaporate the water. The temperature won't increase. And water can stay hot long enough to cook the pasta. Also less vapor in the environment.
I'll try it next time.
Someone introduced me to making red sauce by basically just cooking tomatoes for as much time as I have, and it's now my go-to red sauce. Really amazing how good just well-cooked tomatoes are. https://www.seriouseats.com/frankies-tomato-sauce-recipe
If you have a recipe in mind to make, look it up on Serious Eats. Their MO is to give you ideas on how to level up each recipe (compared to food network or similar) and explain the principles behind the techniques.
And really do look them up. In my experience they've completely lost the SEO game, so SRPs are not a reliable entry point to their (wealth of) content.
> One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor.
I usually sauté garlic in oil separately, discard the garlic and then use the oil as a sort of super garlic flavor concentrate.
I used to believe the actual ingredients were ~80% of the puzzle of cooking. I now believe they're closer to ~20% for most cases. The process you follow is way more important than anything else.
Just take a sweet onion for instance. The difference 2-3 minutes makes in a hot pan is incredible. If you simply chopped it up and threw it directly into whatever, you will wind up with something that tastes substantially less flavorful.
Rice can almost fully disintegrate if left in water, and will become something that disintegrates even more if stirred or agitated. In many other applications it replaces a pleasantly tactile and textured starch with a sort of sludge slurry, but as is often the case if you know and expect this it can be used in some applications advantageously. Thickening a stew is one of them. It's actually my favorite stew thickener. We discovered this the hard way once, though. We just "threw some rice" into a stew, and, well, if you put enough "sludge slurry" into a stew it starts to dominate... since then, though, it's been something very useful, especially since I'm allergic to flour, one of the traditional choices.
Same. Also to make risotto you cook the rice with everything else and keep stirring so the rice absorbs all of it whilst releasing starch to make that creamy texture.
It's not bad, per se. It depends what you're going for. There's a lot of different ways to cook rice "properly" depending on the end dish. Congee, risotto, paella, sushi, etc. all have you cook rice differently while adding various degrees of liquid at different times.
It doesn't work well with most Asian dishes with sauces. Such as butter chicken, curry, the stuff with coconut milk, sambal.
I think stew might be an exception, because you want it to be porridge-like. But for many sauces, that's too soggy. You usually want it to soak for a few seconds to minutes but not an hour.
Relatedly, I spent far too long cooking my pizza sauce, treating it like other red sauces.
You can just mix tomato sauce, oregano, salt, and pepper, then slap it on the pie. It cooks in the oven. No need to pre-cook it.
[EDIT] unless you're gonna use it for dipping. There's a reason places have a separate "marinara", often, for that purpose. Even giving your pizza sauce a quick simmer will make it a lot better for dipping. Raw pizza sauce is... palatable, but not great, for dipping.
The following is well known by Italians, but apparently not the rest of the world so I'll post here. I'll use italian names whenever I don't know the english ones so you can search them and make a cool impression on friends. This is the base of any tomato based sauce:
1. Choose your soffritto base. Onion or garlic are fine, more exotic variations include scalogno or porro.
2. Choose your tomato. Canned, fresh, whatever, just keep in mind that fresh ones may need longer cooking times. As for canned, check that they contain no seasoning at all!
3. Choose your grease. Oil or butter are fine, the standard is olive oil though. It may be hard to find proper olive oil outside of Italy I'm told.
4. Start cooking. Put your oil in a large pan, enough to contain all the pasta you plan to use afterwards. Not too much oil: just enough to cover the pan with a thin layer. Don't start heating the pan.
5. Cut your onion or whatever in small pieces and add them to the oil. Now turn on the heat at a reasonable level. Not too high but not low. Don't touch the onion!
6. When the onion looks a bit browny (not dark brown), add the tomato and lower at minimum the heat. If you have a thermometer, ideally you don't want to cross 60 degrees celsius over all the cooking period. This period can vary between 10 minutes and 60 minutes, it gives different tastes (all good) to the sauce. If you opt for the shortest time, go back at step 5 and at the same time start the next step.
7. Put 1l of water for every 100g of pasta in a pot. Add salt. With experience you'll get the right amount, usually I use about a small fist for two people (160-200g). Heat up the water and wait until boiling.
8. Drop the pasta in the water. Start a chronometer. Almost immediately mix it or otherwise it will stick. Wait a couple of minutes and mix again.
9. Meanwhile the sauce will start bubbling and, depending on your kitchen, you may need to mix it. If you see large discrepancies in texture, definitely mix. Otherwise don't. If it becomes too dry, add some water from the cooking pasta to the sauce.
10. When the chronometer is at cooking_time_on_pasta_packaging - 2 minutes, take a glass of water and fill it with water from the pasta pot. Dry the pasta, and put it in the pan with the sauce. Make the heat level for the pan a bit higher.
11. Cook it until "al dente", that is still a bit hard at the inside, but not completely. If the sauce dries too much (it should, if not turn the heat higher), add the water you kept in the glass. This step is where science stops and art begins: you need to calibrate your taste to your desired results and in turn calibrate water and heating. During all this step, mix your pasta in the same direction continuously. This is called "risottatura". Taste the pasta while cooking often.
11. Take everything off the fire, serve, add parmisan.
Edit: look at maccard comment for water and salt because I don't recall the right quantities. After a while you go by eye.
Edit 2: preventing more comments on oil, that is merely my very limited experience and I'd say, as a rule of thumb (not incontrovertible truth), that if you like your oil alone with bread it is a good oil.
> Canned, fresh, whatever, just keep in mind that fresh ones may need longer cooking times.
Unless you know you've got _excellent_ fresh tomatoes, canned ones will win.
> Oil or butter are fine
Cooking your onion in butter is going to give a very very different result to using oil. Personally speaking, not one I would recommend.
> It may be hard to find proper olive oil outside of Italy I'm told.
High quality dop/docg olive oil is readily available all over the world, and there are plenty of places all around the mediterranean that have olive oil as good as Italian oil.
> Put 1l of water for every 100g of pasta in a pot. Add salt.
This is way too much water. serious eats[0] has an excellent article that is well worth reading if you care about pasta. You also should give an indication of how much salt to use - it's way way way more than you think it is. Like, tablespoon of salt per litre of water salty.
>> > It may be hard to find proper olive oil outside of Italy I'm told.
> High quality dop/docg olive oil is readily available all over the world, and there are plenty of places all around the mediterranean that have olive oil as good as Italian oil.
There's a whole rabbit hole you can go down here. It's not clear cut AFAICT.[0]
Nowhere in that link does it say that it only happens on exports. It's also true of pretty much any product, e.g. wine [0], parmesan [1], champagne [2]
.
I'm not saying it only happens on exports, nor am I arguing it happens with only olive oil. I'm responding directly to your claim that "high quality dop/docg olive oil is readily available all over the world."
It may be available, but readily available seems like a bit of a stretch to me. It can be deceptively difficult to obtain.
> It's reliably reported that 80% of the Italian olive oil on the market is fraudulent.[0]
I disagree about tomatoes, you're right that to have a difference in taste of tomato alone you need very good tomatoes, but I was assuming the good taste of all the ingredients used. Anyway, using fresh tomatoes, especially if small, changes a dish completely because of its texture.
About oil it's clear, I think, if not sorry, that that is my experience, and as such should be interpreted. If you have good oil, all is good. I like to use butter, it's not standard but it's used. Of course you need less butter than the same amount of oil you'd use.
As for water/salt, you may be right and I will update my comment. I go by eye because I'm accustomed to the right quantities (or I taste the water for salt) so I was going by memory.
Again on butter: historically it was used in the north of Italy a lot, especially in the mountains, where oil wasn't available. My father didn't know what oil was when he was a boy. It was used in the center and south of Italy before it spread to everywhere. Today you will almost always find oil used, but I think it's an interesting variation. You can also do a split of oil and butter.
Roughly the dividing line between use of oil vs. butter (or lard) in traditional regional cuisine was slightly north of Bologna, until relatively recent times (I would say until post 2nd world war).
South, oil.
North, butter.
My grandmother (from Parma) firmly believed that olive oil was to be used uncooked for salads and similar.
> but I was assuming the good taste of all the ingredients used.
In that case your entire post can be replaced with "use high quality ingredients, cook them".
> Anyway, using fresh tomatoes, especially if small, changes a dish completely because of its texture.
The texture is different, but "fresh" tomatoes that are readily available to most people even in season from their greengrocers are a poor substitue for even supermarket tinned tomatoes. My experience in Italy (and france/spain/croatia) is that excellent stuff is _available_, but it's not necessary "just" to use italian tomatoes - there's plenty of awful tomatoes available, and a large amount of the high quality tomatoes that _are_ grown in italy are canned and available outside italy; again DOCG San Marzano Tinned Tomatoes are available in supermarkets here in the UK.
> About oil it's clear, I think, if not sorry, that that is my experience, and as such should be interpreted.
It _really_ didn't come across as that to me, it came
beware of labels, because they can sometimes mislead. A whole lot of reports of fraudulent italian products exist (another thing we italians do great is fraud). Many things labeled as X DOC, DOP, DOCG don't necessarily equal high quality. Anyway, I sometimes buy Spain grown tomatoes and they're not that bad.
Another point: I don't think my whole comment can be reduced to the quality of ingredients. Of course better ingredient better your plate, but the process is important. Take good quality ingredients and mix everything in a pot, you don't get a good pasta (specific recipies excluded, general rule of thumb)
>> Canned, fresh, whatever, just keep in mind that fresh ones may need longer cooking times.
>
> Unless you know you've got _excellent_ fresh tomatoes, canned ones will win.
I would agree on this one. I live in France, so not that far from Italy, and our fresh tomatoes suck compared to Italian fresh tomatoes. Italian cuisine use simple products with few transformations because their products are amazing. If I try to do something as basic as tomato-mozzarella at home, it'll never be as good as the same Italian recipe because our tomatoes don't grow in the same weather.
Italian cuisine is very hard to make at home as well as they do it because of the quality of their raw products.
In this case yes, canned is better. Also longer cooking times. A trick for canned products is checking the indications of when they were harvested, for Italian products you have letters for the year of production, I bet there are similar rules in other countries as well. Better to get tomatoes harvested in summer and not too long ago
It wasn't meant as a criticism for other countries oil, I just am not aware of them and I haven't heard of them. If you like your oil with bread alone, the oil is a good oil.
This is the basic: many variations are possible, like heating oil before putting in the onion, onion cooking temperature, adding spices (but the only one I really like added is pepper). Also risottatura times can vary: some recipes are so extreme as cooking the raw pasta directly in the sauce, but unless you're making those specific recipes this is not recommended. A good time is 4 minutes, also 1 is good, if you want you can skip risottatura but at least do a copule of turns to pasta with sauce to mix everything together.
I can't remember the specific recipe name, but putting uncooked pasta directly in the sauce is a thing you can do (well, you can do anything, as long as you make it taste good). But if unsure, mine is pretty close to the average recipe people do in their home.
Personally, I prefer cooking first for 5-6 minutes and then putting it in the sauce. Just my personal preference of course.
And if you're making a red sauce, simmer a little anchovy paste or a couple anchovies (till they melt down) first with bay leaf, olive oil, and garlic before adding anything else into the pot. Broken up kalamata olives, basil, and onion are good around that point/shortly after too.
And when you add in the tomato puree (or your preference), add a tiny bit of sugar. If the sauce looks like it has a sheen, it's ruined. Just a tiny amount will do.
Do this and your sauce will taste 10 times better. Not a fan of anchovies, but you won't even be able to tell.
I agree that people need to learn to combine them (add a little butter, too!). I like both variations, honestly. With most things, it's not either or, and there are different taste profiles. It's like variations on pizza where the sauce is added last.
Heat your plates (e.g. with the cooking water) and rub dry to prevent your your delicious meal get cold too soon.
This is of course not only good for pasta.
Also most sauce recipes are probably overcomplicated. Most need less than 5 ingredients. You probably don't need all that onion and garlic, but one of them. Definitely not two tablespoons of dried oregano.
The way you cut onions and garlic changes the flavor a lot too. Finely minced garlic, from a food processor or garlic press can be overpowering yet not deliver the flavor. One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor. Half an onion can work really well in a sauce you cooking for half an hour.