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.
show comments
binaryturtle
I check by sampling a piece. If you chew on it and it sticks to your teeth then it's not done yet and can cook a bit longer. No need to make a science out of it. :)
notindexed
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
show comments
Night_Thastus
I'm not sure if anyone else runs into this, but I feel cursed by bad pasta.
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.
show comments
niek_pas
For people who enjoyed this post, I highly recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “The Food Lab”, which is a kind of science approach to home cooking. He also has a very good YouTube channel.
praash
Measuring pasta with calipers is prime HN material, thank you for posting this!
ekjhgkejhgk
Anyone know the name of that microscope? It doesnt look like it passes the light thru the way Im used to seeing [1]
Pasta is a bit like toast. It's undercooked for most of the time and only ready for a tiniest fraction of the time. The rest of the time it's overdone.
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.
dateSISC
If the advertised cooking times make your pasta mushy, the problem might be the quality of your pasta..
spiffytech
> I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time
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?
show comments
cudgy
Interesting. I live at low altitudes and I almost always have to cook noodles longer than the instructions on the box. Now I only use Italian pasta like DeCecco or Rummo.
show comments
kshahkshah
The cooking time is proportional to the thickness.
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
show comments
t1234s
There was a similar post in the past but had to do with getting the perfect hard boiled egg.
show comments
losvedir
Hopefully tptacek shows up... this is sort of offtopic but made me remember some comments of his from years ago here on HN. Something about the "rehydrating" step not having to be the same as the "cooking" step. I feel like he said you could end up with some pretty interesting and terrific pasta by _soaking_ it for a while (not cooking it), and then cooking it for a much shorter time later.
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I've been wanting to try it, but I can't remember the details exactly.
show comments
tracker1
LOL... I love how anal engineering types (like myself) can be at times.. going down rabbit holes like this and definitely appreciate it. Pasta is a hard thing and I tend to not rely on timers at all beyond around 8m... I just start testing a piece every 30-40s or so until I'm happy.
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.
It's funny because Americans love to overcook their pasta, even when it's 'Al dente'. Italians serve pasta so it nearly crunches in the very center of the noodle.
seeeeebt
In the UK pasta instructions tend to be 9-11mins. 15mins is nuts, especially for the small cheap pasts he's using here. "More for your dollar". Yum!
show comments
rhaps0dy
This is awesome. Measurement and experiment for a very quotidian thing is a great vibe.
octo888
You can feel when it's done by stirring it. It's not rocket science. After 10-20 times cooking pasta this method can be second nature
tirant
Another advice for cooking pasta:
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.
show comments
insane_dreamer
Don't forget that altitude is also a factor.
show comments
oulipo2
Also something I discovered recently: making home-made pasta is REALLY EASY, and quite delicious. For basic ravioli you need about 30min from going from raw ingredients (a bit of flour, one or two eggs, some salt) to a ravioli
show comments
jmclnx
Man, if you can shop at Market Basket, you must now the real Pasta cooking time is Wednesday :)
Nice article BTW.
show comments
Finnucane
Who needs a timer? When the pasta is about done, just pull a piece out and eat it.
LordShredda
Reminds me of nailing jelly to a wall
travisjungroth
There’s an American fear of “not enough”. I think the overboiled pasta is informed by a fear of undercooked food, but also just this general not-enoughness. It’s the same fear that makes someone buy a truck that can hold the biggest load they can imagine needing, rather than accepting they might need to make two trips or rent a bigger truck every few years (or never) and get a truck half the size.
show comments
nahumba
"I boiled some water, put in the pasta, and starting at 9min I removed a piece every 15s until I got to 14:30:"
When you remove pasta, you Cool down the water. So its not the same reault as actual 15 minutes cooking
show comments
saaaaaam
This is crazy. I cook my pasta for 9 minutes max. Often 8. Because by the time you’ve taken it off the stove, drained it and added it to your sauce any longer and it will be mush.
But this guy is starting at 9 minutes. I worry for American food.
show comments
comeonbro
There is a dry pasta I use that, long story short, comes without a listed cooking time, whose correct cooking time I have experimentally determined to be ~18 minutes (though remarkably flexible, good at a much wider range than "normal"). I like it quite a lot (even though it seems to have the teflon-die surface rather than the bronze-die surface).
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.
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.
I check by sampling a piece. If you chew on it and it sticks to your teeth then it's not done yet and can cook a bit longer. No need to make a science out of it. :)
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
I'm not sure if anyone else runs into this, but I feel cursed by bad pasta.
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.
For people who enjoyed this post, I highly recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “The Food Lab”, which is a kind of science approach to home cooking. He also has a very good YouTube channel.
Measuring pasta with calipers is prime HN material, thank you for posting this!
Anyone know the name of that microscope? It doesnt look like it passes the light thru the way Im used to seeing [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope#/media/File:Ukraini...
Pasta is a bit like toast. It's undercooked for most of the time and only ready for a tiniest fraction of the time. The rest of the time it's overdone.
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.
If the advertised cooking times make your pasta mushy, the problem might be the quality of your pasta..
> I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I'll set the timer for a minute below their low-end "al dente" time
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?
Interesting. I live at low altitudes and I almost always have to cook noodles longer than the instructions on the box. Now I only use Italian pasta like DeCecco or Rummo.
The cooking time is proportional to the thickness.
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
There was a similar post in the past but had to do with getting the perfect hard boiled egg.
Hopefully tptacek shows up... this is sort of offtopic but made me remember some comments of his from years ago here on HN. Something about the "rehydrating" step not having to be the same as the "cooking" step. I feel like he said you could end up with some pretty interesting and terrific pasta by _soaking_ it for a while (not cooking it), and then cooking it for a much shorter time later.
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I've been wanting to try it, but I can't remember the details exactly.
LOL... I love how anal engineering types (like myself) can be at times.. going down rabbit holes like this and definitely appreciate it. Pasta is a hard thing and I tend to not rely on timers at all beyond around 8m... I just start testing a piece every 30-40s or so until I'm happy.
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.
This post disappeared from the front page, what happened? https://hnrankings.info/45424704/
It's funny because Americans love to overcook their pasta, even when it's 'Al dente'. Italians serve pasta so it nearly crunches in the very center of the noodle.
In the UK pasta instructions tend to be 9-11mins. 15mins is nuts, especially for the small cheap pasts he's using here. "More for your dollar". Yum!
This is awesome. Measurement and experiment for a very quotidian thing is a great vibe.
You can feel when it's done by stirring it. It's not rocket science. After 10-20 times cooking pasta this method can be second nature
Another advice for cooking pasta:
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.
Don't forget that altitude is also a factor.
Also something I discovered recently: making home-made pasta is REALLY EASY, and quite delicious. For basic ravioli you need about 30min from going from raw ingredients (a bit of flour, one or two eggs, some salt) to a ravioli
Man, if you can shop at Market Basket, you must now the real Pasta cooking time is Wednesday :)
Nice article BTW.
Who needs a timer? When the pasta is about done, just pull a piece out and eat it.
Reminds me of nailing jelly to a wall
There’s an American fear of “not enough”. I think the overboiled pasta is informed by a fear of undercooked food, but also just this general not-enoughness. It’s the same fear that makes someone buy a truck that can hold the biggest load they can imagine needing, rather than accepting they might need to make two trips or rent a bigger truck every few years (or never) and get a truck half the size.
"I boiled some water, put in the pasta, and starting at 9min I removed a piece every 15s until I got to 14:30:"
When you remove pasta, you Cool down the water. So its not the same reault as actual 15 minutes cooking
This is crazy. I cook my pasta for 9 minutes max. Often 8. Because by the time you’ve taken it off the stove, drained it and added it to your sauce any longer and it will be mush.
But this guy is starting at 9 minutes. I worry for American food.
There is a dry pasta I use that, long story short, comes without a listed cooking time, whose correct cooking time I have experimentally determined to be ~18 minutes (though remarkably flexible, good at a much wider range than "normal"). I like it quite a lot (even though it seems to have the teflon-die surface rather than the bronze-die surface).
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.