How Not To Cook Pasta

As you can see, there are two types of noodles in this pot: elbows and farfalle. While these two shapes take similar cooking times, no two shapes cook at exactly the same duration, thus you should cook different noodles in separate pots of water.

Additionally, you’ll note how little space there is in the pot. The noodles aren’t really even immersed in water anymore, after having soaked up much of the excess during the cooking process. Noodles should be cooked in a large pot with copious amounts of water. The general guideline is a gallon of salted water per pound of pasta. Otherwise, the noodles don’t have any room to move, you don’t have any room to stir them, the water surrounding them gets saturated with starch, and they wind up getting stuck together.

As for the allegation that the bubbles are indicative of residual detergent in the pot, I’m not so sure about that. My interpretation of the bubbles is that they result from over-starched water as a byproduct of an overly stuffed pot, especially since no similar bubbles were observed when the water was boiling on its lonesome.

2 Responses to “How Not To Cook Pasta”

  1. julia Says:

    Aside from the obvious, multi-colored (and presumably -flavored) pasta - especially in a form as small and blessed with surface area as elbows

    at that high a boil
    for as long as it’s going to take to cook the farfalle
    in water which, based on how much of the starch has escaped, has not been adequately boiled and salted

    is going to come out beige as well as gluey and not tasting of anything in particular.

    Unless it’s very good flavored or multicolored pasta, I don’t really see that it’s worth the premium (paglia e fieno is sort of my outside limit). That said, if you’re going to spend the money, it seems pointless to cook it so that you can’t tell what it is.

  2. julia Says:

    ack. oiled and salted. sorry.

Leave a Reply