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FOOD AND DRINK

Ask an expert: Ten golden rules for cooking pasta like an Italian

A very good way to lose friends in Italy is to mess with pasta. Fiddling with the tried and trusted Italian methods can also affect the taste of the dish, but many foreigners don't even realise their technique is unorthodox.

Published: 17 July 2017 08:32 CEST
Updated: 16 March 2023 15:32 CET
Ask an expert: Ten golden rules for cooking pasta like an Italian
Are you sure you're cooking your pasta properly? Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

Food writer and artisan pasta writer Silvana Lanzetta shares her golden rules for perfect pasta to ensure yours ends up cooked to al dente perfection.

Browsing the internet, you come across many opinions on the best way to cook pasta.

I’ve seen everything: soaking dry pasta for a hours to give the impression of eating fresh pasta; toasting pasta in the oven before boiling it; cooking it in a frying pan without boiling the water first; and the passive method, consisting of boiling the pasta for the first couple of minutes, then switching the heat off to finish the cooking by soaking it in the hot water.

Usually, these suggestions are followed by a string of comments from indignant Italians who cannot stand to see the butchering of their beloved food.

But why do we get so upset? After all, ‘it’s just pasta’, people say in their defence.

The fact is that all of these methods affect the pasta in ways that many cannot even imagine, and some of them are even potentially dangerous to health.

READ ALSO: Why do Italians get so angry if you mess with classic recipes?

For instance, soaking the pasta and the practice of not cooking the pasta in boiling water prevent the gelatinization of the starches, which is an essential process if we want to make our pasta digestible.

And toasting the pasta destroys the lysine and all the B vitamins which pasta is so rich in. For the passive method, you need to use a lot of water- about five litres- to keep it hot enough for gelatinization to happen.

But if you want to eat a plate of delicious pasta al dente, the way Italians enjoy it every lunchtime, then you have to learn how to cook pasta like an Italian.

So here are ten golden rules for cooking the perfect pasta al dente.

Silvana Lanzetta is a food writer and artisan pasta maker. Photo: Private

1) Never add oil to your water 

The oil separates and floats on the top of the water, and won’t keep your pasta from sticking together. Also, when you drain the pasta, the oil will coat preventing the sauce from sticking to it.

The only way to avoid having blobs of pasta sticking together is to use a lot of water. This way, the starches will disperse in the water and won’t act as glue. You will need one litre of water for every 100 grams of dry pasta.

2) Bring the water to boil

If you want pasta al dente, then boiling the water is essential, as the pasta has to be in contact with the water as little as possible. Another important aspect is that boiling water will gelatinize the starches contained in the pasta, making it digestible.

3) Add salt once the water is boiling

If you add the salt to cold water, it will delay the time it takes for the water to reach boiling point. However, when added to the boiling water, the salt will raise its temperature: the water is now as hot as possible.

4) Never simmer

Keep the temperature high on boiling. It will cook the pasta quicker, and it’s the only way to achieve pasta al dente. As soon as you lower the heat to simmer, you’ll end up with mushy pasta.

5) Don’t break spaghetti or other long pasta

The length is important. When you wind the spaghetti around the fork, it will help you catch the sauce more efficiently. Put your spaghetti together in the boiling water, then gently push it down.


Freshly made tagliatelle. Photo: Timothy Vollmer/Flickr

6) The only way is to bite.

To check whether the pasta is cooked, flicking it at the wall and waiting for it to stick is pointless. You just end up with a messy wall.

Other pointless methods include touching the pasta or breaking it to check whether the colour inside is uniform. The only way to be sure is to bite it. The pasta should be soft enough to bite without feeling a crunch, but still quite hard.

READ ALSO: What’s the difference between Italian tortellini and tortelloni?

If you want the pasta al dente, look at the section of the bit pasta. In the middle, you should be able to see a thin segment that is paler than the rest. That is called the punto verde (green point) in Italian and indicates that the pasta is al dente. Once it is gone, the pasta is no longer al dente.

7) Don’t rinse it

Before you drain the pasta, you might want to reserve some of its cooking water in case your sauce is too dense. Drain the pasta, but never rinse it: you want to keep the starches on its surface, to help the sauce stick to it. Also, you don’t want to stop the cooking process, which continues until the pasta is plated.

8) Have your (large) pot of sauce ready 

Put the pasta into your cooked sauce, turn on the heat, and sauté for a couple of minutes. If your sauce is too thick, then add some of the reserved cooking water, which has plenty of starch, enriches the sauce, and makes it stick to the pasta.


Photo: Simon Law/Flickr

9) Serve immediately

Pasta is best served hot and freshly cooked. You can enhance the flavour of your dish by adding grated Parmesan or Pecorino Romano, or chopped fresh herbs such as basil or parsley.

Pasta is traditionally eaten by itself, not as a side for meat or fish. This is to enjoy the delicate harmony of flavours in full. In Italy, meat or fish are served afterwards.

10) Make a new dish out of your leftovers

Don’t reheat your leftover pasta: microwave or pan, it will still taste awful. Instead, make another dish out of it.

In Italy, leftover pasta is usually baked with other ingredients, such as cured meat, mozzarella, boiled eggs, and vegetables, to make what’s called a pasticcio (literally meaning ‘a mess’!), or mixed with eggs and transformed into a sort of tortilla pasta, called frittata di maccheroni.

If you follow these guidelines, you will have the best pasta of your life and will make Italians proud.

See more in The Local’s Italian food and drink section.

Member comments

  1. Si, si, except for rule number 5, which was invented by someone who never eats alone. Making pasta for myself became a delight when I finally broke down and broke my linguine in half. Maybe you can tell the difference, but I’ve been eating linguine for 70 years, and I can’t.

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For members

OPINION

Doggy bags and sharing plates: Why Italy’s last food-related taboos are dying out

Italy is famous for its strong culinary traditions and unwritten rules around eating, but as Italians embrace doggy bags and informal dining, Silvia Marchetti argues that the last food-related taboos have been broken.

Published: 25 April 2024 09:40 CEST
Doggy bags and sharing plates: Why Italy's last food-related taboos are dying out

Italians are deadly serious when it comes to eating or, as they say, “mettere le gambe sotto il tavolo”, meaning ‘putting your feet under the table’.

Three meals per day remain sacrosanct at home, but at restaurants the eating etiquette is changing, particularly in big cities where globalisation has an effect.

I recently discovered, much to my surprise, that Italians are embracing doggy bags. When I was a kid, many many years ago, to us Italians it always seemed like something only foreigners could do, especially Americans.

We would never have asked a waiter to give us a paper bag to bring away the food for the next day, it just would never have popped up in our minds: you eat what you are served and if you no longer wanted what you’d paid for, well too bad, you’ll leave it on the plate. It would’ve been embarrassing to walk away with a doggy bag.

So I was shocked when recently at a restaurant in Rome I saw Italians taking away bags of leftover lunch food, including cold pizza slices and meatballs. It almost knocked me off my chair.

READ ALSO: Are doggy bags still taboo in Italy’s restaurants?

When the waitress came to our table to bring the cheque, and saw that we hadn’t finished our fried  fish and spaghetti alle vongole, she asked if we wanted a doggy bag. My jaw dropped. It was a first for me.

Yet what really shocked me was that the restaurant was not in the city centre, but in the countryside where traditions tend to survive, or at the very least, take longer to die.

It struck me how it’s no longer foreigners asking for doggy bags, but even Italians have overcome the stigma of this former faux pas.

The sad truth is that it’s not just because of globalisation and the economic crisis following the pandemic. There’s been a fall in the cultural level of many Italians, so asking for a doggy bag is also a way to avoid having to cook for the evening or for the day after, rather than to save money.

Sadly, this trend is not an exception, nor a one-off, and in Italy it’s not driven by concerns over food waste (we’re really not that ‘green’) or the cost of living.

Italian restaurants are simply becoming more generically European and international, adapting to global habits and the requests of foreign clientele.

In Rome’s touristy spots, restaurants showcase photos of dishes outside the restaurant to lure customers, or display real plates of gluey carbonara. This is something I had never seen in my childhood.

I have noticed that other restaurant eating taboos and etiquette rules have fallen away, too.

A few (well-off) friends of mine bring their own bottles of wine along when they eat out so that they don’t have to pay for these at the restaurant. I find this very inappropriate, but it usually happens when the restaurant owner and customers are friends or know each other.

READ ALSO: Want to eat well in Italy? Here’s why you should ditch the cities

Trends in restaurant etiquette are changing. There are eateries that serve pizza at lunch, which used to be something you could only order for dinner unless you’re in Naples.

The standard three courses which we normally have are also being messed up: appetisers, first, second and side dishes are eaten in a disorderly way – something which would make my granny turn in her grave.

I have seen Italian families first order a T-bone steak and then pasta or a slice of pizza, while many couples share plates. The man orders one type of spaghetti dish, the woman orders another kind of spaghetti and half-way through the meal they switch dishes. This was something very unusual in the past. Before in restaurant there were boundaries in eating habits and in the eating culture, which are now blurring.

My parents taught me it is rude to poke your fork into someone else’s plate to curl up some spaghetti for yourself. My dad always looked sideways at anyone who did that: not only is it extremely improper, he thinks, but it is also very unhygienic.

There are no more rules left in Italian restaurants nowadays, and all taboos have been broken.

To adapt to foreign clients many restaurants tend to stay open the whole day, especially in very touristy areas, and the untouchable hours of lunch and dinner now overlap. Some taverns even serve breakfast.

READ ALSO: Why do Italians get so angry if you mess with classic recipes?

In the north, I’ve noticed that bread and extra-virgin olive oil are often missing from the table and you have to ask for them, which is something very atypical of Italian standards.

To find the traditional Italian eating code in restaurants where there are rules that will never die, one must go deep into unknown spots, and travel to remote villages no one has ever heard of. It’s always harder to find such authentic, untouched places.

I really hate to say this, but wherever there is mass tourism local traditions tend to die, particularly food-related ones.

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