Heretical Pasta

jefftk

If you ask the internet how to prepare pasta you'll hear two things:

You must salt the water.
You must serve it mixed with the sauce.

I disagree on both.

I've been cooking pasta since I was a kid, and I prepare it the way my mother (who grew up in Rome) did:

Cook it way less than it says on the box, until it's no longer crunchy but not further.
Time dinner so that the pasta is the last thing to be ready, where you're eating it within 5min of it coming out of the pot.
Serve it in one bowl, with the sauce in another.

The primary goal is to keep the tastes and textures distinguishable, merging only as you chew. The pasta resists your teeth; the sauce flows. The sauce is rich and flavorful; the pasta is a hearty foil. Secondarily, by combining only on each person's plate you can handle a range of preferences in sauce-to-pasta ratio, and different dietary restrictions (ex: a separate vegan sauce).

Some people love pasta that finishes its cooking in the sauce, pulling in the flavor, and I do think it's neat that pasta can do this. But it's the opposite of what I want, since it makes the dish more homogenous.

On salting, I'm targeting a level of salinity in the mouth while also maximizing contrast between the pasta and the sauce. That means cooking the pasta in unsalted water, while making the sauce saltier than would be tasty if eaten on its own. I think unsalted pasta has ended up with a bad reputation because people are unwilling to make the sauce salty enough to bring the combination into balance.

I don't know how people ended up thinking there was only one way to cook pasta, but to my taste the standard approach is a big missed opportunity.

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Some of this does feel heretical.

I mostly don't salt the water but depending on the sauce (green pesto comes to mind), I have found it to be much better than salting afterwards.

The cooking times in your first link feel borderline insane to me. Up to 15 minutes to cook pasta?? I have never seen a cooking time over 11 minutes in 30 years in France and that was for bulkier pasta than the rigatoni in the link. 9 mins is usually considered a pretty long cooking time. I have noticed that cooking times in Canada seemed a bit longer, like one additional minute, sometimes two? This might be a NA problem.

The sauce part is the really heretical one to me. The practical advantages are interesting, especially the sauce to ratio part although I feel like this is likely often more of a skill issue on the part of the cook? The line between not enough and too much sauce is not that large. On the different sauces, sure but this has never been an issue in my life? You simply split the pasta in two bowls with different sauces. I may be missing something here but everytime it has happened in my life this was very easy to handle.

I wholeheartedly disagree that the taste of the pasta and the sauce should be distinguishable, (at least to the level I understand from your post, maybe there's a cultural divide here and we actually agree) your pasta is supposed to be not cooked enough once out of the water because you're going to cook it again quickly with the sauce instead of the water which will end the cooking. Basically the only divide I ever heard on this is whether you put the pasta in the sauce (the correct one from what I understand) or the sauce after the pasta when cooking them together for 1-2 minutes. This step allows the sauce to get into the pasta, which won't be possible in your plate.

The cooking times in your first link feel borderline insane to me.

Agree! To be fair, though, this wasn't one I was counting as a heresy. It's pretty widely acknowledged that the high end of cooking time on boxes here will make your pasta badly mushy.

This step allows the sauce to get into the pasta, which won't be possible in your plate.

Yup, I don't want that. It's neat that it's possible to do this, but to my palate it makes the dish too homogenous.

Funny that you say this because I recently stopped making the sauce and pasta seperately and it's made me so much happier with how the pasta tastes. Nowadays, I just cook the sauce and pasta in one pot--right after simmering my marinara, I put uncooked pasta in and let it simmer away till the pasta is done. The sauce fully coats the pasta, which I love.