- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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Add a dash of olive oil to the boiling water. It won’t fucking help, but at least you can fuck up pasta in new and interesting ways.
ITT: I learn that a disturbing amount of people can’t even boil pasta correctly.
What the fuck is wrong with people? It’s the most basic shit, I don’t understand how anyone could fail to do it wrong.All the brain space went to open source software and political theory.
Lemmy loves beans, but a chili cook off from this group would be a god damn disaster.
I’ll be honest. I did exactly this very recently. In my defense, I’m an okay home cook. I was constrained to a smaller pot than usual and way too desperate to still fit a full box of pasta in it.
Let it boil 30 sec
Then stir for a few seconds
Thats all you need
I would also advise to add just a bit of olive oil
No, you’ll fuck up how the sauce adheres to the pasta.
I was making the joke, but if you want to be picky — fight this guy, not me
I don’t have to fight him. Most of the people in the comments are already doing it.
I guess to clarify, if you want your pasta not to stick, coating it in oil will stop it from sticking, covering it in telfon would do the same thing. The problem is what are you doing with the pasta after you cook it. You might get away with olive oil if you’re combining it with pesto, but you do that to a red sauce or an alfredo and you’ll end up with a bowl of sauce and oily noodles that did not combine well.
Maybe you just put too much oil on, I make 6 lbs of pasta at a time once or twice a week at work and I’ve never had an issue with sauce not adhering. And I cook in a senior living center, if there’s an issue with the food, we hear about it. You just need enough oil to coat them, they shouldn’t be swimming in it.
It depends. If you’re putting the sauce on immediately then you don’t need the oil, but if you’re gonna wait and do it at serving time then I find a light coat of oil is worth it to keep from sticking.
Granted, I tend not to do red sauces. Pesto and cream-based sauces tend to do fine though.
Yeah, when doing non-oily sauces, just add the sauce immediately instead of ever adding oil.
What if you want to serve it buffet style with more than one choice of sauce? Like at a catering event or something
What’s the point of having oil on top of the water?
No clue, but oiling the pasta after it comes out
- Makes sauce adherence worse, so don’t do it
- Makes them able to lie around longer without clumping together
So instead, just plate and coat with sauce immediately instead of waiting.
You can just take the clumpy pasta and add a bit of olive oil afterwards, works too
Add salt to the water first
No, it’s supposed to be sugar!
Hydrate your pasta for an hour before cooking. Not only will it not stick, burn, or have undercooked bits, but it will fully cook within a minute. So you can just put it in your sauce directly and skip the boiling step.
Your pasta stick because of starch. Luckily, they release the large majority of their starch in the first minute of cooking, so stir well during the first minute and make sure there’s enough water in your pot.
Stir well once. I never need to interact more than 4 times / 20 seconds with the pot:
- Put water in and turn on heat
- Wait until water boils, then put pasta and salt into water (lower heat now so it doesn’t boil over later)
- Wait 30 seconds, then stir once (i.e. make all the pasta stop touching for a moment)
- Wait until done, then take pot off and pour out
In addition to that, if you don’t have a feeling for how long the pasta needs to boil / how done pasta looks, you need to sample a noodle now and again.
Just use whole wheat pasta.
Stir literally once. No salt, no oil, no additional stirring.
What psychopath doesnt salt their pasta.
Afraid of a little NaCl?I can just salt it in my plate. Feels wasteful to put a ton of salt in the water and dump 99% of the salt in the sink anyway.
Plus, sometimes, I just feel like keeping it unsalted entirely. Depends on the sauce etc. You taste the subtle sweetness of the noodles more that way.
You’re mostly salting the surface when you salt at the table. If you salt the pot, the salt will dissolve in the water meaning it has an even distribution when it penetrate the pasta. Salting at the table means it will have saltier spots than others unless well tossed and tasted until even. But this only solves the distriution issue and not the penetration issue.
If you’re worried about wasting the salted water, you might get some milage with adding the pasta water to your sauce. In this case, using a smaller amount of water increases the starch to water ratio and reduces the total amount of water used. Carbonara used this approach while keeping it all in one pan.
Lightly salted pasta water, I feel, preserves the sweetness of the durum while still hiding the bitterness of the flour. Just my two cents.
Honestly I’ve tried salting a few times and for the little difference it makes… I don’t feel it’s worth the trouble.
But thanks for the info, I honestly hadn’t thought about the details.
I’ve forgotten to salt the water and added salt at the table and it’s nit even close to the same. It just tastes bad, which has been agreed on by family and friends who did the same. I think your tastebuds might be broken.
High quality pasta tastes good without salt.
Because it might be pre-seasoned lol.
Yeah no, that’s not how salt works. If you need to add salt at the table, you should have tasted and salted the dish better.
The exception is multiple people with very different salt tolerances, there’s just no good solution for that.
That’s a giant asterisk. My mom regularly oversalts her soup and I wish she didn’t. Some restaurants (especially fancy restaurants) salt their food so much it’s borderline inedible. There’s no good reason for them to do that. Arrogance perhaps.
Even my own tastes in salt vary greatly from day to day. So I wouldn’t even trust myself with getting the salt amount right for myself if I cooked for myself alone. As soon as any other human is implied, it just gets riskier.
No salt?
That’s true for any pasta
You stir your pasta?
Never, those fat clumps taste the best.
Mhmmm…Splätzle clumps :p
Ngl, they are the best feature of doing them yourself.
Serious comment on a shitpost community, but the easiest fix I found to pasta that sticks too much was to just buy better quality noodles. The cheapest stuff would stick like nothing else, while Barilla or any pasta cut on bronze dies never did.
Barilla isn’t a better quality pasta. Change my mind
It’s fair IMO. There are worse, there are better.
Oh no, absolutely. I realize in hindsight my wording implies that. As someone else commented here, I also consider them the bare minimum. Anything less than that and it’s awful noodles with no sauce adhesion or starch released.
Italian here. Barilla is considered the bare minimum. Its not a high quality pasta, although they have a bronze cut kind which I never tried.
How about De Cecco?
Yes de cecco, molisana, garofalo or voiello are quite available everywhere in Italy, its still factory made but with more care and with bronze cut
If you want to go on expensive stuff you need to look into “monograno”, basically means “single grain” a 1kg pack could go up for 6-10 €
Worth it? For everyday use only if you make it an hobby, otherwise a normal bronze cut is enough.
I would still eat barilla, but only if its the only alternative to not having pasta
In france they eat a lot of “panzani” which I believe its still Italian, but quite shit in quality, very unexpensive
The Al Bronzo brand of Barilla does taste better, imo, but not worth the extra cost. I’ve never had a problem with the regular stuff sticking as long as I salt the pot and stir occasionally.
I’m pasta-ignorant. How does the material of the cutting tool affect the final product?
Bronze cutting is slower (so less efficient) but being slower make the pasta more “rough” and not smooth. This makes sauce stick more to it
I see… But wouldn’t that only effect the ends? Or does it start as a sheet and get cut into strips like fettuccine? But that would still only be the edges, right? What about something like linguine with a rounder cross-section?
I’m just not picturing it
Im answering with a video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8wZbNmdIKw
But no, usually pasta is pressed into shapes and then cut at the end
While being pressed against the bronze thing it gets rough on the edges and in the inside
I see. I didn’t realize the extruder die was the part that’s bronze
Pasta is made by squeezing the dough through what’s called a die:
Normally this die is PTFE-coated on the inside to minimize friction, so they can run the machine faster and therefore make more money. This results in smooth surface pasta.
In recent years they figured out they can charge extra for pasta that that was made on a die without PTFE coating, because there is a myth that rough pasta holds more sauce (it doesn’t). This is marketed as “bronze cut” because traditionally the dies are made of bronze I guess
Ohhh, so that’s the part that’s made of bronze. That makes more sense. It threw me off that it’s called “bronze cut” and not “bronze extruded” but I get it now
because there is a myth that rough pasta holds more sauce
I don’t know, the Italian in this thread seems to approve of bronze-cut pasta. Not sure if the opinion of a German overrides that… (I jest, I have German grandparents)
they figured out they can charge extra for pasta that that was made on a die without PTFE coating
Honestly, PTFE has other issues though. It’s a forever chemical and can cause birth defects and cancer. For several years it was popular on cooking stuff for its non-stick and anti-scratching properties. I had a couple pans with it myself, and I loved them at the time. But that was before we as a society learned more about PTFE. Like asbestos and cigarettes, it became widely adopted before we knew enough to avoid it.
Aside from PTFE, phenols (like BPA, BPS, and PFAS) are another thing that are really important to avoid, but commonly used in modern manufacturing.
Their quantities are also too little tbh
I believe they have 1kg options
I can’t find them in stores, maybe they are in fancier stores like Rosetto or sum
Barilla are shitty homophobes.
Words or donations?
Words, sure its been a while but the CEO back then is still the CEO today
Barilla Pasta Homophobic Rant: ‘If The Gays Don’t Like It They Can Go And Eat Another Brand,’ Says CEO Guido Barilla
‘I would never use homosexual couples in my adverts’: Barilla pasta boss’s anti-gay comments spark boycott call [Italy]
Yikes. Time to use up my berilla pasta sauce and look for a decent replacement
But of course, always make up your own Mind and your research.
Rummo is the best mass produced pasta I know.
It’s absolutely not, they just have a high marketing budget. They didn’t even use bronze dies until they introduced a new product line not that long ago.
easiest fix i found was to add half a cup/ladle of starchy pasta water to the sauce (halfway through the pasta boiling)
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Didn’t catch that. Could you repeat?
PASTA. 30 SECONDS. Jesus Christ.
- get water boiling
- add salt+oil or stock
- then add pasta
- boil until it’s not yet mush
= no sticky
The oil does nothing other than float on top of the water
It breaks surface tension and stops the water from boiling over. Oil means a lot less watching the pot while I do other things.
Is your pot really tiny or you put too much water? I don’t see how it’s possible that it boills over, only if you negkect it for a lot but at that point, the pasta is ruined too probably
And oil will not do anything else other than making your sauce not stick properly to the pasta
Mine boils over in a large pot because I’m impatient and have the heat too high. The bubbles come up and through the pasta so violently that they use the noodles to ramp out of the pot. It’s somewhat amusing until you get a fat sizzler that won’t stop and you know it’ll be a bitch to clean.
Alas, it is a consequence of my own actions.
You should tune down the flame/power after it boils, the water will just continue to boil for long (or you can even put a lid and it should boil for a lot more without turning the heat, never did it because i forget to try every time tho, lol)
Yeah, high until it boils then lower it to a simmer. It’s boiling water, it’s gonna be about 100C regardless of how high the stove is set to. More power in a boil (when cooking) is only useful when you’re trying to reduce the water content of something
Just lower your temps so it doesnt bubble as much?
or put a spoon on top. if it’s wooden you can have it catch fire for more kitchen fun!
And it ruins the pasta, so the sauce doesn’t stick to it. Use less heat.
Use a decent quality pasta, stir once. No oil needed.
I use cheap pasta, never stir and it almost never sticks. I’d hazard a guess that people who are having this happen are not using salt, and probably not using enough water or a big enough pot.
Yeah, big pot and salt are mandatory.
TIL the cheapest pasta in Aldi is decent quality.
Aldi regularly wins product comparisons: best OJ, best olive oil, best bike helmet, …
It is! If you want to get real fancy get pasta that’s bronze cut, it’ll usually have it on the box somewhere up top as a selling point. It makes the pasta edges slightly rougher and makes sauce cling to it more. I forget if Aldi has any like that, but you can usually find it for maybe 50 cents to a dollar more (USD) in other stores. Very low cost, high reward.
UK Aldi, not sure I have ever seen bronze cut used as a selling point on pasta, probably out of my price range.
Never tried it
Adding oil is a great way to lubricate your pasta so the sauce won’t stick to it…
…
I just boil barilla penne in my little rice cooker.
Put in the water, bit of salt, bit of pepper, bit of italian seasoning.
Bring to rolling boil. (this takes ~10min w/ my rice cooker)
Add pasta.
Do nothing, the pasta stirs itself because rolling boil, wait 5 minutes.
Get mitts, keep the lid on the cooker bowl thing, pour out 90%-95% of the water through the vent hole on the lid. Should take another minute or two to empty the water this way.
Slap what remains into a bowl.
Now presumably you also have some pre grated or shredded cheese, as well as some kind of italian sausage or something grilling up on a skillet… flash it if you have to, sear it a bit maybe, the pour marinara over the skillet.
Stir occasionally for maybe 2 minutes, at high heat, now dump all that onto the penne, and then sprinkle on the cheese.
Kablamo, italian pasta from a rice cooker.
Now… the real ‘chef’s kiss’… also have some italian bread that you’ve lightly braised with olive oil, dusted with a cheese crumble, and then toasted. Then, have olive oil and/or balsamic vinaggrette as a dipping sauce.
Bellissimo.
You can also dip the toasted bread into the pasta, no one is stopping you.
But yeah basically the trick with pasta is… don’t involve the pasta untill the water is well good and angrily boiling.
i mean i’ll try premixing some italian seasoning and putting it in with my pasta, but your recipe scares me. why do i have to be naked in front of my pasta bacon? i’ve tried that. i have a scar (on my eyeball, so it’s not like the clothes would have helped, but like maybe the grease wouldn’t have popped so excitedly had my junk not been exposed) from baconing nakey.
Flashing your meats by way of cooking naked; it causes their muscle fibers to relax, as they now know you’re not a threat (like showing your “underbelly”). Now you can get a really good sear and lock-in the juices, as you and your meats reach an understanding of mutual vulnerability. You just can’t show any fear though, so no aprons allowed. Trust is essential for tenderness, and vice versa
I’m gonna get such a burn, aren’t i
… it is extremely funny that you extrapolated from that, that I cook naked.
… Because I actually do, quite often, now that you bring it up.
Teaches you to be precise and delicate, very quickly.
But uh yeah, I would at least wear an apron for bacon, anything with popping grease… sorry about your scar.
sorry about your scar.
i’m not. it looks cool.
… it does make for a funny drunk story too.
… its 100 fucking degrees, has been for over 48hrs straight now, never below 90…
…, ive ran out of witty puns, brain hitting thermal limits, going to melt now
Dude go drink some hot toddies. It is the only way through. Boiling
No really go find yourself some ice. Take care dude
Yeah it is probably cold/cool shower time… bllllaururrrrgfjhhhhh
bread that you’ve lightly braised
You “lightly” sear and slow-simmer your bread? That must make it hard to toast afterwards…
300g of pasta in bowl, cover with water, microwave, 15 minutes at 800 W (probably shorter for smaller amounts of pasta).
No salt or stirring or anything necessary, always
operfect.Edit: ironically I had a typo in “perfect”.
Dissolve about a tablespoon of salt into the water when it starts boiling. This helps the pasta starch causing the stick to break up so pasta doesn’t stick to itself or the pot as much when it’s in.
Then just make sure the pasta has plenty of room to roll in, not crammed in a small pot. Obviously never put pasta into non-boiling water. Just like noodles.
If it’s happening on your plate, it’s just too starchy still. Get better pasta.
Salt does nothing to “break up” starch, it adds flavour to the pasta. Starch is definitely the reason your pasta is sticking but the fix is to cook it in more water. That said, if you want to use some pasta water in your sauce then stirring more frequently and using less water can be beneficial.
Is pasta not noodles?
not anymore!
Or don’t put any salt in the water for utterly disgusting pasta.
Salt is for flavor and you can put pasta in non boiling water. There are several recipes which do that to reduce cooking duration.
Better pasta, soft water or just boiling till al dente are better solutions.
