You can ruin good pasta in the cooking, but you can’t rescue bad pasta that way. The rules are short — four of them decide almost everything.
The four rules
Plenty of water. One litre per 100 grams of pasta. Less water means the temperature drops further when you add the pasta, and the released starch becomes so concentrated that the pasta sticks together.
Salt generously, but only once the water is boiling. About 10 grams of salt per litre. That sounds like a lot, but it isn’t: pasta absorbs only a fraction of it, and pasta cooked without salt can’t be seasoned afterwards — you’ll taste salt in the sauce and bland pasta underneath.
No oil in the water. It coats the pasta in a film and stops the sauce from clinging later. Water and stirring prevent sticking, not oil.
Taste one minute before the stated time. The cooking time on the packet is a guideline, not a measurement — your hob, pan and amount of water all change it. And the pasta keeps cooking in the sauce, so it’s better to take it out too early than too late.
The step that is usually missing
Pasta isn’t drained and then sauced — it is finished in the sauce. Keep back a cup of the cooking water, add the drained pasta to the sauce in the pan and toss it for a minute with one or two spoonfuls of cooking water.
The cooking water is the key. It contains dissolved starch and binds fat and water into a sauce that clings to the pasta instead of pooling on the plate. Without this step, sauce stays sauce and pasta stays pasta.
And: never rinse pasta under cold water. That washes away exactly this starch. The exception is a cold pasta salad.
Which shape for which sauce
The rule of thumb: the richer the sauce, the more surface the pasta can have.
- Wide ribbons — pappardelle, tagliatelle all’uovo — carry heavy, chunky sauces: ragù, mushrooms, game. Egg pasta has more grip and holds more sauce than plain durum wheat pasta.
- Short, twisted shapes — strozzapreti, strangozzi — catch sauce in their twists and are the right choice for anything coarse and chunky.
- Tubes — penne, paccheri — take sauce inside; good for baked dishes and for sauces with a lot of liquid.
- Long, thin shapes — spaghetti — want smooth, oily sauces: aglio e olio, vongole, a simple tomato sauce. Chunky sauces slide off.
Pasta with truffle: two ways
There are two options, and they aren’t mutually exclusive.
The flavour is in the pasta. Tagliatelle al Tartufo and Strozzapreti al Tartufo carry the aroma in the dough. Keep the sauce as simple as possible — butter, a little cooking water, Parmesan. Any strong sauce masks exactly what you bought them for.
The truffle goes on top. If you are shaving fresh truffle, a plain egg pasta makes the better base — otherwise two truffle notes compete. Shave it over the finished, steaming plate, never into the pan: the aroma compounds are volatile. Five to ten grams per person.
The same applies to truffle sauce and truffle butter — neither is cooked; both are folded in with cooking water in the bowl or in the pan with the heat turned off.
What’s different about gluten-free pasta
Gluten-free pasta made from maize and rice doesn’t behave like durum wheat pasta, and most disappointments come from treating it the same way.
- The window is smaller. There is often only a minute between al dente and falling apart. From one minute before the end, keep tasting.
- Stir more, especially at the start. Without gluten, the pieces stick together more easily in the first few minutes.
- Less cooking water for binding. Maize and rice starch bind more strongly than wheat starch; a spoonful is usually enough.
- Short, thick shapes such as paccheri, calamarata and fusilloni hold their shape much better than long thin ones — which is exactly why these are the gluten-free shapes we stock.
How to recognise good pasta
Two things, both visible. A rough, matt surface instead of a smooth, shiny one: it comes from being extruded through bronze dies and is the reason sauce clings. And slow drying at a low temperature over many hours — pasta dried quickly at high heat tastes flatter and goes soft faster when cooked.
You can see both in the cooking water: good pasta makes it cloudy. That’s not a fault; it’s the starch you then use to bind the sauce.