Some habits have a hard tooth. Take, for example, cooking pasta: our mothers and grandmothers always taught us to add a little salt to boiling water. And, from generation to generation, this tradition has been perpetuated without really understanding the reason. However, it turns out that this step, which we thought was essential, is useless in a certain sense. If you add salt at the end of cooking, it is pure waste, because it will have no impact on the taste of your spaghetti. On the other hand, at the beginning of cooking, if you salt the pasta water, the taste will be better. And if you thought until now that salt speeds up the boiling process, you were wrong. Turn of the question.
As with the most popular culinary dishes, we often follow certain pre-established rules with our eyes closed. What if we sometimes make mistakes without even realizing it? For years, we’ve been told that adding a few pinches of salt, a clove of garlic or a few dried peppers to the pasta cooking water will make all the difference in the preparation of our spaghetti, tagliatelle, fettuccine and other macaroni. But is it really as useful as we are led to believe?
Is it useful or optional to salt the pasta cooking water?
Add salt when cooking pasta
No doubt, when it comes to preparing good Italian spaghetti, we all tend to season the cooking water. Systematically, spices, especially salt, are added without really knowing why. Popular beliefs abound: some are convinced that it would have a great influence on the temperature of the water and that it promotes much faster boiling.
Read also: How many days can cooked pasta be stored in the refrigerator? Do not eat them again after this time
There is truth and falsehood. Salt water will indeed be hotter than soft water, but the impact on cooking time is minimal (just a few seconds for a reference cooking time of 8 minutes) and on the other hand, salt water will take longer to boil than fresh water. So it doesn’t really matter when you get dirty.
And if that weren’t enough, the pasta doesn’t adhere properly to the salt we’ve added to the pan. The reason is very simple: they probably don’t absorb enough water to make the seasoning worthwhile. As you can see, regardless of the added spice or even olive oil, the pasta doesn’t adhere to anything and retains less water than we imagine. Not to mention that the starch granules don’t completely dissolve, so the center of the noodles remains more intact than the surface.
ENJOY AND PLEASE SHARE THIS RECIPE WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS FOR MORE EASY RECIPESTHANK YOU SO MUCH
