Thank you, SeriousEats, for a long overdue education!
Every now and then I come across someone who tells me to use pasta water in one way or another. For years I simply shrugged and said....."Yeah, okay."
Recently while roaming around my favorite recipe sites and groups it seemed like the "pasta water" phenomenon was surfacing more frequently. Not one to miss out on improving any given food, I decided to give it a try.
Now before any of my fellow diabetics start questioning my defense of the often maligned pasta in our diet, I urge you to remember that pasta actually has a glycemic index in the low range. What makes pasta a possibly bad choice for diabetics is the massive portion generally served in restaurants and homes alike. If you stick to a small portion and fill the rest of your plate with a sensible protein and a salad, pasta is a viable option in a D-friendly diet.
Now that we've established that a small portion of pasta with your favorite sauce is a viable choice, why not make the taste, the mouth feel and indeed the entire culinary experience the best it can be?! :-)
I found a lengthy and entertaining article on the subject written by J. Kenji López-Alt at SeriousEats, but for purposes of education here on my blog I'm just sharing the actual steps for properly saucing pasta.
The Right Way to Sauce Pasta
Pasta heated in a skillet or Dutch oven with sauce has a vastly
different and superior flavor and texture compared with pasta that is simply
sauced on the plate. Fact is, no matter how great a sauce you can
make, if you don't sauce your pasta correctly, you're missing out on one of
life's greatest pleasures. Conversely, even a so-so, store-bought, jarred
marinara sauce can be improved upon by finishing it off right.
Here's how to properly sauce your pasta, step by step.
Step 1: Heat Your Sauce Separately
With few exceptions, pasta should be tossed with sauce that
is already hot and ready. You don't want your cooked pasta to heat up in a cold
pan of sauce, slowly absorbing more water and becoming mushy.
I use either a wide saucier - the sloped sides of a saucier
make it easier to use for tossing pasta than a straight-sided saucepan - or a
large skillet for my sauce.
Step 2: Cook Your Pasta al Dente (Really)
In a separate pot, bring a couple of quarts of salted water
to a boil. Remember: You do not want your pasta water as salty
as the sea. One to two percent salinity is what you should aim for, which
translates to around 1 or 2 tablespoons of kosher salt per quart or liter. You
also don't need a huge amount of water—just enough to be able to keep the pasta
moving. With small shapes, like penne or fusilli, I use a saucepan or a
saucier. With long, skinny shapes, like spaghetti or bucatini, I use a 12-inch
skillet.
There was a time in this country when the default for pasta
was cooked-to-mush. These days, it seems like we have the opposite problem:
Folks are so scared to overcook pasta that most of the time,
it's undercooked. Pasta should* be cooked al dente - "to the tooth”
which means just until it's cooked through. If your pasta has
a chalky or brittle core, it's undercooked. Let it go longer!
*Actually, so long as you don't mind being branded a
heretic by people who probably have more important things to be worried about
than how other people cook their pasta, it should be cooked however the heck
you want it. Mushy, chalky, whatever floats your tortellini.
Your other option is to purposely undercook the pasta by a
few minutes before adding it to the sauce to let it finish. Cooking pasta in
the sauce instead of in boiling water will increase the amount of time it takes
to cook through. It's a good technique to use if you want to delay serving your
pasta for a few minutes. Make sure to keep the sauce thinned out with pasta
water as the pasta finishes cooking if you use this method.
Finally, whatever you do, don't toss cooked pasta with oil -
it makes it much more difficult to get sauce to cling to it down the line.
Step 3: Transfer Cooked Pasta to Sauce
There are a couple of ways to get your pasta from the pan to
the sauce. The easiest is to grab a set of tongs for long, skinny pasta, or a
metal spider to fish out short pasta shapes, and transfer them directly to the
pan with the warm sauce. Alternatively, you can drain your pasta through a
colander or fine-mesh strainer, making sure to save some of the pasta water.
Step 4: Add Pasta Water
Once the pasta is in the sauce, add
pasta water. This is the most vital step in the process. Starchy pasta
water doesn't just help thin the sauce to the right consistency; it also helps
it cling to the pasta better and emulsify with the fat and cheese you're going
to be adding. No matter what sauce you're making—whether it's a chunky marinara,
a rich and hearty ragù
Bolognese, or a simple carbonara - it
should acquire a creamy texture that clings to the noodles.
I start by stirring in a couple of tablespoons of pasta
water per serving of pasta and sauce. We'll add more down the road to adjust
consistency.
Step 5: Add Fat
If you have a very low-fat sauce (like a tomato sauce, for
instance), now is the time to add extra fat. A small amount of fat—extra-virgin
olive oil or butter—is essential to good pasta sauce texture. Without fat, you
have at best watery sauce (nobody has ever said, "Waiter, my pasta is not
quite wet enough"), and at worst sauce that over-thickens with starch
alone and takes on a pasty texture.
With extra fat, you can get an emulsion that leaves the
sauce creamy, but still loose. Fat also brings flavor of its own, as well as
helping fat-soluble flavor compounds in the sauce reach your tongue. I add a
little glug of really good extra-virgin olive oil or a pat of butter (depending
on my mood and the specific sauce).
Step 6: Cook Hard and Fast
Once everything is in the pan together—cooked pasta, hot
sauce, pasta water, and extra fat—it's time to simmer it. Simmering not only
reduces liquid (and thereby thickens the sauce), but also contributes to
mechanical stirring, helping that starchy pasta water do its job of emulsifying
the sauce with the fat and getting it to coat the pasta. The hotter your pan,
the more vigorously the sauce will bubble, and the better the emulsion you'll
form. I crank my burner up to maximum heat and cook, stirring and tossing the
pasta constantly (to ensure that it doesn't stick to the bottom), adding more
pasta water as necessary until it gets that perfectly saucy texture.
Finishing pasta, you'll notice, is a game of constant
adjustments. Pasta water gets added throughout the process in order to adjust
consistency. Don't be afraid of it!
Step 7: Stir in Cheese and Herbs off Heat
Once the pasta and sauce are where you want them, remove the
pan from the heat and stir in any cheese or chopped herbs you may be using.
With thicker, well-emulsified sauces, it's generally safe to add the cheese
directly over the heat, but with a thinner sauce or one that doesn't have much
besides the cheese, adding cheese while it's still on the burner can cause it
to clump.
Step 8: Adjust Consistency
You thought you were done with that pasta water? Not quite
yet! You're just about to serve the pasta, which means that now is your last
chance to adjust texture. (And you'll probably need to: The cheese has
thickened up the sauce a bit, the pasta has continued to absorb water from the
sauce, and some of that water will have evaporated.) Once the cheese has been
emulsified into the pan, it's safe to add more pasta water and reheat the sauce
over a burner until everything is exactly as you want it.
Step 9: Garnish As Necessary
Transfer the cooked, sauced pasta to a warmed serving bowl
or individual plates, then add the final garnishes, if you're using any. These
can be anything from chopped fresh herbs to grated cheese to a big grind of
black pepper. I like to drizzle on some fresh extra-virgin olive oil at this
stage as well. Making sure that all of your serving plates are hot is key to
great pasta texture: What looked perfect in the pan will seize up and turn
overly thick if you dump it into a cold bowl.
Step 10: Serve Immediately
Pasta don't wait around for nobody. Once the pasta is in the
sauce, there's a countdown timer that's automatically started and cannot be
paused. Pasta will continue to cook and soften as it sits. The sauce will start
to cool down and thicken.
The only solution is to serve it immediately and to eat it
with gusto.** If you've done everything right, that shouldn't be a problem.
**That's Italian for "with enough speed to speckle
one's tunic with splatters of sauce."
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Have a great week, everyone, and thank you for your support!
Blessed be… and happy cooking!
Chef Michael R