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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.
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Bravo. * set your timer for a minute less than the cooking time on the box, check for doneness, then give it another minute if needed Please eat the pasta al dente. Overcooked pasta is really awful, trust me
No need to trust you. I tried it myself. Food preferences are subjective and I prefer overcooked pasta to al dente...
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.
I find it highly depends on the maker of the pasta, and the variety in use. 9 minutes followed by immediately serving is actually quite conservative for some brands. It also depends on the cooking method and how long you intend to finish them in the sauce (or just cook them in the sauce - heresy, I know, but it fucking works). > I worry for American food. Gastronomic bigotry helps nobody, and just paints you as a dic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it highly depends on the maker of the pasta, and the variety in use. 9 minutes followed by immediately serving is actually quite conservative for some brands. It also depends on the cooking method and how long you intend to finish them in the sauce (or just cook them in the sauce - heresy, I know, but it fucking works). > I worry for American food. Gastronomic bigotry helps nobody, and just paints you as a dic…
Oh dear. I think you’ve taken a frivolous comment rather too seriously. Calling people “a dick” online is a self fulling prophecy. Sorry if my gastronomic bigotry upset you.
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…
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 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 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…
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."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope#/media/File:Ukraini...
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-br…
Bronze-cut pasta holds sauce much better, especially for thinner sauces. It also makes your pasta water more starchy, since it loses more material during cooking. These things seem very obvious to me via my observations as a cook who uses both from time to time (but mostly the bronze stuff).
Both properties can be very useful (the first to everyone, the second just to those who use their pasta water in the sauce step).
It's good to question our assumptions from time to time, but there's no reason to just deny something like this with absolutely nothing to back it up.
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