10 Pasta Tips To Take Home

At the Pasta Pantry we make our pasta from scratch daily, but in the unfortunate event that you cannot get our pasta, and you are stuck with dried, store-bought pasta, we thought you could use some tips. So here are 10 tips you can take home with you to improve your daily pasta.

1) Generously salt your pasta water. Do not add salt to the sauce. Your salt water should taste almost like seawater.

2) Do not let your pasta dry off. Drain the water, but don’t let it sit. It will start to stick together if you do.

3) Don’t rinse your pasta after draining unless you are making cold pasta. The starch and salt on the cooked pasta is crucial to the flavour and richness of a good pasta.

4) Save the pasta water. Add a spoonful of it to your sauce after you have mixed the cooked pasta into it. This will help the sauce adhere to the cooked pasta and will improve each bite!

5) Read the water to pasta ratio on the box. It does matter. Having too much water increases the boiling point and can lead to the pasta being cooked too long and being overdone.

6) A perfectly cooked pasta is a little hard to the tooth. If it sticks to your gums, it is overdone.

7) Taste your pasta while it is cooking early and often. It is the only way to be sure.

8) Different sauces go with different pasta shapes. Longer pastas like capellini or spaghetti get thinner sauces and shorter pastas like penne go with thicker sauces.

9) Quality pasta matters. The best store-bought dried pasta is 100% durum wheat semolina.

10) ENJOY!

Alternatively, you can skip the whole process and come to the Pasta Pantry every day 🙂