Cooking Pasta A Guide To Making It Perfect Every Time
Would you cook Angel Hair pasta the same amount of time as cooking rigatoni or a thicker type of pasta? Heck no!
What if you're making a homemade pasta? If you cook it for 10 to 15 minutes, you'll end up with a flour soup.
Adding an al dente pasta to you Italian soup recipe and the pasta will expand soaking up all of the delicious broth that makes a soup, a soup.
So do you throw a piece against the wall to see if it sticks to tell if it's done? Not unless you just want to make a mess of your kitchen wall.
Let's talk about how to tell if the pasta is cooked.
Cooking dried Pasta:Add the dried pasta to salted boiling water.
It's that easy.
For a pound of pasta, I would fill a pot with 2 to 3 quarts of water, add a tablespoon or two of kosher salt and bring to a boil, add the pasta and stir for 30 seconds.
Don't waste your good olive oil by adding it to the water. Some say this makes the pasta taste better or keeps it from sticking together. It's better to drizzle a table spoon of olive oil over the cooked pasta for flavor or to prevent sticking.
When cooking pasta try to use durum semolina pasta cut with a bronze plated die. This gives it that porous look and is the sign of a good quality pasta. You can tell when a Teflon die has been used to produce the pasta because it has a shiny flat surface.
If you're cooking Angel hair pasta, don't leave the pot. Stand there, bring the water to boiling and add the angel hair pasta. It will be done in about 3 minutes.
Thicker pasta shapes like rigatoni could take up to 10 minutes to cook and pastina or tiny pasta take less then a minute. For pasta soups I don't cook it al dente.
Confused? Don't be.
Ultimately you just should stick close to the kitchen and test the pasta by taking out a piece from the boiling water and biting into it.
It should have a firm chewy texture but not crunchy. Look at the center to see if the pasta a slightly different color as shown here in this picture.
Cooking Fresh Pasta
Boil the water with salt, same as usual but this time when you add your fresh pasta noodle make sure to turn down the heat just a little. Fresh pasta tends to make the water foamy and it might over flow.
It only takes a couple of minutes to cook fresh pasta so again, keep an eye on it and take out a piece to test it after a minute or two. It shouldn't have a doughy texture or taste but it won't be Al dente either. For some types of pasta it will float when it's done.
I like to drain and rinse with cool water for 2 seconds and then toss in olive oil or toss in with your heated sauce to get it warm again. This helps stop the cooking process and if it's a flavored pasta it will help keep it's color.
So there you have it. A simple step by step quide.
Check out some great tomato sauce recipes from the cooking pasta page or go back to the home page to find so much more pasta info.