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Pasta Cooking Time

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Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#161

Post by ThrownOffGame »

Herein we find a fundamental flaw in the way society today treats gluten-based grains, bread, pasta, rice, etc.

Pasta that is not married to its sauce has not done its job. The point of putting a bunch of wheat-based filler into a food is that the flavors of the sauce and other liquids are absorbed and adopted by that bread/pasta/sponge type stuff. Then when you reach the end of the sauce, you still have pasta that is infused with its very essence.

I die a little inside, every time someone slaps some breadsticks on my plate and not enough sauce to soak up. The whole point of a breadstick is wiping that stuff up and sponging it out of the dish!

I die a little inside, every time I see a frozen "TV dinner" that has a little sauce on top of dried-out rice. You mean I am supposed to heat this up and it will magically be delicious?

I've been ordering rice bowls from a fun "healthy foods" restaurant in the college area. They dump a bunch of cooked Jasmine rice into a bowl and then whisper a curry sauce over the top. I gave up after 3 extra sauce orders didn't cover all the rice. And you can't "resuscitate" a dish by applying sauce afterwards: that is what the cooking in the pot is for. Marry the sauce to the rice or dump it in the rubbish.

One time, America's Test Kitchen published a photo of how to rescue old stale bread by dumping pasta sauce over it, while it's frozen. I told them, that's the dumbest thing I ever saw.

The whole reason for leavening bread is so that it becomes like a sponge! For God's sake, the whole reason for inventing the sandwich, the pita, and the Cornish pasty were to save the hands while the sauces absorbed into the bread! That you actually had good-tasting bread in the end, or for a tin miner, bread you could toss in the rubbish!

At this stage, I am convinced that 95% of "gluten intolerance/sensitivity/allergy" is induced by people who are improperly eating all these grains, just dry, just no sauces or liquids inside it. It's fundamentally stupid and ignorance of cuisine, and it's all based on industrial-scale food production and cost-cutting even in the nicest kitchens.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#162

Post by kqr »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #90

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 rem…

> 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.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#163

Post by kqr »

foofoo12 wrote: post #40

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.

This is one of the reasons to finish it in the sauce. It spends slightly longer ready when finished in the sauce.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#164

Post by kqr »

dekhn wrote: post #124
niek_pas wrote: post #100

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.

Also: all the Alton Brown Good Eats books, and On Food and Cooking (McGee). Much of cooking is physics and chemistry. "The science of YUM"

Oh those are on my wishlist. I can also recommend Cooking for Geeks (Potter) as a lighter introduction.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#165

Post by fscaramuzza »

notindexed wrote: post #6

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 y…

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 :)

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#166

Post by adrian_b »

themafia wrote: post #136
jillesvangurp wrote: post #90

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 rem…

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.

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.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#167

Post by tmountain »

kqr wrote: post #162
jillesvangurp wrote: post #90

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 rem…

> 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.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#168

Post by wodenokoto »

tmountain wrote: post #167
kqr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#169

Post by imiric »

walthamstow wrote: post #95
alexjplant wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Pasta Cooking Time

#170

Post by psini »

fscaramuzza wrote: post #165
notindexed wrote: post #6

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 y…

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 ?
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