The method works by putting uncooked pasta directly in a pot of simmering sauce, topping it with just enough water to cover (which is significantly less than a whole pot, obviously) and allowing the pasta to cook in the sauce. According to Harold McGee, there’s a better way. The Spruce Eats uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. Get daily tips and expert advice to help you take your cooking skills to the next level. As a tip, Barilla spaghetti noodles are 25cm in length (approximate 9.8 inches) so a 12 inch frying or sauté pan should work. Plus, pasta cooked using this technique actually makes its own sauce. Considering that on average, a resident of sub-Saharan Africa uses 2 to 5 gallons of water per day, 100 gallons is a lot of water to be dumping through the colander. I’d read somewhere – perhaps this New York Times piece that Harold McGee wrote in 2009 – that pasta could be cooked in significantly less water. Danilo Alfaro has published more than 800 recipes and tutorials focused on making complicated culinary techniques approachable to home cooks. The extra water steams off, the pasta is cooked. When softened, you won’t need to do this as much. They went on to experiment with using no water at all, and voila, they could. There is not a pot of water that gets dumped down the drain. But pasta – how to handle something of which a giant vat of boiling water is part and parcel? By using The Spruce Eats, you accept our, Spicy Spaghetti With Garlic and Olive Oil, Greek Pastitsio: Baked Pasta With Meat and Béchamel, Garlic Spaghetti (Spaghetti Aglio e Olio), How to Cook Pasta for Perfect Results Every Time, How to Make Tomato Sauce From Fresh Tomatoes, A Guide to Making Pasta in Your Home Kitchen. With tongs, move the pasta back & forth so it doesn’t stick together. About 1 tablespoon of olive oil or butter. Copyright © Simplemost, All Rights Reserved. After some adventures with the Epicurious test kitchen, it was confirmed that less water worked, but why stop there? But you can also make a sauce from the pasta liquid—just add a little bit of butter or olive oil to it, ladle it over the pasta and serve. Add 1 pound of uncooked pasta to the salted water. Bring the water to a boil, stirring the noodles frequently so they don't stick together. In a series of tests, they found that a pound of pasta, which is typically cooked in roughly five quarts of water, cooked just as well in half that amount. The traditional way of cooking pasta calls for 6 quarts of water per pound of pasta, but if you're willing to do some stirring, you can make pasta with just a fraction of the water. But I also had a nagging voice in my head that this would be somehow incorrect – that even if it worked, the great Italian cooks of yore would start spinning in their graves.”. Food Network's Alton Brown has some tricks up his sleeves in the kitchen, including a hack for cooking the perfect pasta.. With tongs, move the pasta back & forth so it doesn’t stick together. Or you can use the thickened pasta water as a sauce (see below). By cooking the pasta entirely in the sauce, you end up with a beautifully thick sauce and a noodle with added flavor. If you want to use the pasta water, instead of draining it you can use a pair of tongs to remove the cooked pasta—assuming you're cooking long pasta noodles. In a 2015 blog post, Brown said he prefers the texture of dry pasta when it starts off in cold water, adding that when it comes to the amount of water needed to cook shorter pasta shapes "like farfalle, macaroni and rigatoni, less is definitely more." There is not an extra pot that requires washing. For other pasta shapes, like shells or macaroni, you can lift the cooked pasta out of the water using a ravioli skimmer (compare prices). Sign-up to get a daily batch of tips, tricks, and smiles to, Pringles Is Releasing 3 New Scorching-Hot Chip Flavors, Chocolate Spice Banana Bread Is A New Version To Bake For Fall, Buy Harry Potter Butterbeer-Flavored Peanut Butter, Tune Into A Virtual Dolly Parton Christmas Concert To Get Into The Holiday Spirit, Alex Trebek Recorded Enough New ‘Jeopardy!’ Episodes To Run Through Christmas Day. Continue cooking this way until the pasta is al dente. This technique does require a lot of stirring to keep the pasta from sticking, so you won't want to go wandering off while it cooks. The extra water steams off, the pasta is cooked. Weekly Horoscope: Good Omens, Good Luck, And Good Vibes. There is not a pot of water requiring the energy to boil. Fill a broad-bottomed stock pot with 2 quarts of cold water. By some accounts, a family of four uses 100 gallons of water a year just for cooking pasta. There is not … The pan should be big enough so the pasta can lay flat and “swim” around a bit when it’s softened. If everyone in the U.S. applied this method, we could, astonishingly, save billions of gallons of water. You need to start by selecting the correct sized pan. There are more efficient ways to cook pasta besides dropping it into a big pot of boiling, salted water. How do you cook pasta? I really love this method for the reasons above, but also for a selfish reason: It makes pasta taste better, in my opinion. With Americans consuming approximately 1.9 million tons of pasta each year (the average person yearly consumes 15 1/2 pounds of pasta), this could save a lot of water! Drain the remaining water, toss pasta with olive oil or butter and serve with your desired sauce. The method works by putting uncooked pasta directly in a pot of simmering sauce, topping it with just enough water to cover (which is significantly less than a whole pot, obviously) and allowing the pasta to cook in the sauce. However, Simplemost may receive a small commission from the purchase of any products or services through an affiliate link to the retailer's website. Add some salt. While that might not be for everyone, I find that with tomato sauce, it is lovely. Well, kind of. Dump a few quarts of water, a pinch of salt, wait ten or so minutes for the water to boil. Not only does this method make your pasta taste better than the traditional way, if everyone in the United States tried this, we’d save billions of gallons of water. The starchiness of the leftover pasta water makes it great for adjusting the consistency of whatever sauce you're using. I have this one and use it almost everyday. Make sure your pot is wide enough to accommodate the length of your. It just might be the most frugal recipe of all time! The products and services mentioned below were selected independent of sales and advertising. You'll use less energy this way, too, because the smaller amount of water comes to a boil much more quickly. Add 1 pound of uncooked pasta to the salted water. We use a lot of water in the kitchen. Pasta mavens know that boiling pasta to just al dente and then finishing the cooking in the sauce can do two things: The starch from the clinging (or added) pasta water helps thicken the sauce; meanwhile, hydrating the last of the dry pasta with sauce infuses some of the saucy goodness into the pasta itself. There is not a pot of water requiring the energy to boil. And Tamarkin and I aren’t the only ones who promote the concept: Martha Stewart’s one-pot pasta recipe instructs one to throw all of the sauce ingredients, along with the uncooked pasta, in a pot and cook until the water is absorbed. Add 2 teaspoons of Kosher salt. Writes Tamarkin: “I still found myself heating up big pots of water for pasta. In a quest to decrease his own water footprint in the kitchen, David  Tamarkin at Epicurious started experimenting with less water-intensive cooking methods, like steaming things instead of boiling them.