So how much water does pasta really need? My grandmother, my mother, mother-in-law, aunts, cousins, neighbors all filled an enormous stockpot with gallons of water, making the filled pot heavy, dangerous to lift, and difficult to work with at the end of the process.
I was delight to learn that experiments have developed products to lesson the amount of water, and in some cases, start the pasta in cold water. But would it work, and would THEY like it?
The THEY of course belong to the older generation who believe they know how pasta is supposed to be, and how it should taste with sauce.
And then there's the ultimate critic of all things: my husband. No other's opinion stands up to ultimate arbitrator of culinary matters. Freshness, taste, texture, aroma, appearance, seasoning of food are important matters, and judgment can make or break a following interval if a dish doesn't live up to his sometimes arbitrary standards that take years to master.
Dare I experiment with suggestion in The New York Times, or possibly ruin my life by using a innovation to short cut the process and use less water with the "Pasta Express as Seen on TV."
I could play around with it, but would I dare serve my husband pasta made in this new fangled tube to be filled with pasta and boiling water? Or should I make try the tips given by Harold McGEE on February 24, 2009 in the the Times story?
The Pasta Express seems fun, but I'm to chicken to "go all the way" at this time. No, I stick to the stove, and decease the water, both of which will save my back as well as 250,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil, or $10 million to $20 million at current prices.---------------------To see which of these factors are really significant, I put a pound of spaghetti into a pot, added just 2 quarts of cold water and 2 teaspoons salt and turned on the heat. The water took about 8 minutes to reach the boil, during which I had to push the noodles around occasionally to keep them from sticking. They took another 10 minutes to cook through.
When I drained the pasta, it had the texture and saltiness I expected, seemed about as sticky as usual, and when tossed with a little oil, seemed perfectly normal.So I tried reducing the water even further, to 1 1/2 quarts. I had to stir often because that’s not quite enough to keep all the pasta immersed all the time, but again the spaghetti came out fine.
Why can pasta cook normally in a small volume of water that starts out cold? Because the noodles absorb water only very slowly at temperatures much below the boil, so little happens to them in the few minutes it takes for the water to heat up. And no matter how starchy the cooking water is, the solid noodle surfaces themselves are starchier, and will be sticky until they’re lubricated by sauce or oil.
I described my method in e-mail messages to two of this country’s best-known advocates of Italian cuisine. Lidia Bastianich told me: “My grandmother would have thought of the idea surely as blasphemous. I think it is curious.” And Marcella Hazan said, “I am a very curious person, and I’m glad people are exploring new ways.” Both of them gave it a try.
Ms. Bastianich responded with a controlled experiment. She started spaghettini in pots of cold water and boiling water (4 quarts each instead of her usual 6) side by side and found the cold-water version lacking in the gradation of texture she looks for. As for the flavor, she said “I felt that the cold-water pasta had lost some of the nutty flavor of a good semolina pasta cooked properly.”
Ms. Bastianich agreed that using less water is O.K. “Yes, I think it’s doable to reduce the cooking water by one third,” from 6 quarts per pound to 4. “But please ‘butta la pasta’ in boiling water.”
Ms. Hazan tried starting a batch of shell pasta in a somewhat reduced amount of cold water, and found that it needed constant stirring to avoid sticking. “Maybe you save heat energy, but you also have to work a lot harder,” she told me in a follow-up call. “It’s not so convenient. I don’t know if I would cook pasta this way.”
Heartened by the experts’ willingness to experiment, I went back to work, this time starting with hot water. I found that it’s possible to butta la pasta in 1 1/2 or 2 quarts of boiling water without having the noodles stick. Short shapes just require occasional stirring. Long strands and ribbons need a quick wetting with cold water just before they go into the pot, then frequent stirring for a minute or two.
Except for capellini, which cooks too quickly, I find that both the cold and hot versions of the minimal-water method work well with the common shapes I’ve tried, with whole wheat pasta, and even fresh pasta, as long as any surface flour is rinsed off first.
I prefer starting with cold water, because the noodles don’t stick together at all as they go into the pot, and because I don’t notice a difference in flavor once they’re drained and sauced. It’s true, though, that no matter what temperature you start with, this method requires more attention. That’s a disadvantage when you’re cooking several things at once.
If you cook pasta often, try experimenting with different starting temperatures and amounts of water. You can even cook pasta in the manner of a risotto, adding the liquid in small doses and stirring constantly. Be sure to use a pot broad enough for the noodles to lie flat on the bottom, and to reduce the salt for smaller volumes of water.
There’s one other dividend to cooking pasta in minimal water that I hadn’t anticipated: the leftover pasta water. It’s thick, but you can still easily ladle it out by tilting the pan. And it’s very pleasant tasting: not too salty, lots of body, and lots of semolina flavor. Whole-wheat pasta water is surprisingly delicious.
Italian recipes often suggest adding pasta water to adjust the consistency of a sauce, but this thick water is almost a sauce in itself. When I anointed a batch of spaghetti with olive oil and then tossed it with a couple of ladles-full, the oil dispersed into tiny droplets in the liquid, and the oily coating became an especially creamy one.
Restaurant cooks prize thick pasta water. In “Heat,” his best-selling account of working in Mario Batali’s restaurant Babbo, Bill Buford describes how in the course of an evening, water in the pasta cooker goes from clear to cloudy to muddy, a stage that is “yucky-sounding but wonderful,” because the water “behaves like a sauce thickener, binding the elements and flavoring the pasta with the flavor of itself.”
Mr. Buford suggests that the muddy pasta water should be bottled and sold, because home cooking never produces anything like it. Cooking one batch of pasta in minimal water can’t smooth out the starch as completely or generate those long-cooked flavors. But it does make pasta water good enough to sip.
"Good enough to sip? That's sound familiar. But in this case the water sipped is thick barley water sipped for "health purposes" by the present Queen of England.
Same principle, but comes from a different grain...that's all.
wow..thanks for that tips..My hubby when he is cooking pasta, he wants more water so that pasta will cook very well..
Posted by: carisoprodol | October 21, 2009 at 08:51 PM
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Posted by: Retro Jordans | June 21, 2010 at 02:32 AM