Cooking Dried Pasta
Ingredients
Half a cup per person. Depends how much you want to eat, up to a cup for fusilli. Spaghetti is best measured by one of the round hole measures.
Method
Big pot, same amount of water as pasta and half. Pasta needs to float about. But see ‘variations’
Salt a lot. They say should taste like seawater. Of course, everyone who reads recipes knows what seawater tastes like. Like, two tablespoons per pint
Throw in pasta. Stir at this point, as it can initially stick, but do not stir enough to break the pasta
Get the pot to a boil again. Not simmer, boil, so at least the water is rolling
Twelve minutes
Stir if you need to
Sieve out, and catch the water
The water, or a few spoons of it, goes in your sauce
Don’t add oil—makes the pasta slimy. Don’t pour cold water over the finished pasta—you want it sticky, but not stuck together.
If you are using a sauce, undercook the pasta and then throw it in the sauce and mix to finish. Don’t go for the sauce on top thing. It looks good, but is not best for food.
The box or packet will tell you how long to cook for. But for most dry eggless pasta, twelve minutes.
Variations
Lots of water in a pot is the classic. But you can cook pasta with just enough water in a frying pan. Do this from cold. It works fine, the problem is, few people have a frying pan big enough for, say, spaghetti