How to Cook Perfect Dry Pasta

Fresh Pasta making is quite à la mode at the moment and in our family we tend to make it  at weekends to accompany a Sunday Ragù. The pasta is always made by Enzo and he likes to use ancient traditional wheat flour to create a unique taste. Today 25th October is world pasta day, therefore, I want celebrate it by publishing this post by Enzo singing the praises of the humble dry pasta. This product that in recent years has been maligned for being too fattening and a cheap food only eaten by students and as a quick economical family meal is, in fact, an amazing product and you can create a gourmet dish from it. Dry pasta shouldn't be treated as the poor relation nor as a cheap unnourishing food. For certain dishes dried pasta is essential for example with fish otherwise the dish tends to become gloopy.

Enzo's is our family food writer and cook and in his guest post below adapted from an old publication he reflects on this magical ingredient closest to his heart and tells the tricks for how to buy nourishing durum wheat pasta and cook it to perfection.

How to Cook Perfect dry Pasta

"I still have in my mind my father’s expression in front of a bowl of pasta in a restaurant. ‘Hanno fatto la pasta molla’ (They overcooked the pasta) He said. That sealed the fate of the restaurant. 

Nevertheless sometimes during our meals at home he would appreciate some rather slimy pasta that occasionally arrived at the table. A contradiction? Not really. I worked out that there was a reason for his inconsistency. He enjoyed a good bowl of pasta in a restaurant and expected to have it served “state of the art”. But when it came to sludgy spaghetti at home, his childhood memories resurfaced.

The reason for that is the quality of pasta depends also on its protein content, though he was not aware of this. Before WWII food in Italy was scarce and expensive and people were not really food conscious in the same way  as we are now, so his mother might have unwittingly bought low-grade pasta.

Dry pasta is more traditional in the South of Italy, especially around the Naples region where there are still many very good makers. Until not long ago, and I remember it very well, pasta was sold by the weight and wrapped in beautiful blue paper. Every Salumeria (delicatessen) had its pasta counter where the “pastaio” would serve dozens of different  shapes of pasta.

If you want to serve a state of the art pasta,  the first thing to do is to chose a good dry pasta and to check the protein percentage (pasta is not just carbs !!!) on the label. It must be high and not less then 12,5 %, the higher the better. 14 % is great. It means that the pasta was made with high-quality flour. It also important that it is made with “semola di grano duro”, which means coarsely ground durum wheat. Good quality pasta is tastier and as the Italians say ‘tiene la cottura’, meaning that the pasta doesn’t turn into a gelatinous mass. Top quality pasta has the dough drawn through a traditional bronze machine, that means that the pasta surface is rugged and when eaten has a texture. This information is also stated on the packaging (Trafilati al bronzo).

I have cooked a bowl of spaghetti and I have chosen the  Garofalo Brand.  Voiello and De Cecco are also excellent. The latter is also more widely available in supermarkets outside Italy.

To cook dried pasta perfectly you need a large saucepan  filled with water. Then you have to add salt. To give you an idea of a ratio  the proportion should roughly be:

4 cups (1 Litre) of water

1½  tablespoons (10 grams) of salt

4 ounces of pasta

Celia, my wife, was given by a friend, a shell that holds the correct amount of salt for our saucepan.

The exact  quantity of salt, however, depends on personal taste and how salty the sauce or the topping is. But also bear in mind that when you drain the pasta most of the salt will go down the drain with the water.

You need the following utensils:

A large saucepan

A wooden spoon or a large fork if you are doing spaghetti or similar long shaped pasta.

A kitchen timer

A colander

A good pasta must be ‘al dente’, (literally to the tooth), which means that it has to be slightly undercooked.

Read how many minutes cooking time the manufacturer recommends and subtract one minute because while you are draining the pasta and preparing it to be served it keeps cooking because it is still hot for a while. Later you will adjust the time according to your own taste.

 

Now bring the salted water to a brisk boil, then add the pasta (be careful not to splash hot water) and stir it for a few seconds in order to avoid it conglomerating.

Repeat the operation every 2/3 minutes.

Towards the end of the prescribed cooking time, try the pasta to check that it is cooking properly and the suggested cooking time is right (which is not always the case ). The pasta should be soft with a slight bite to it .

When the timer rings or you think the pasta is cooked take the saucepan off the stove and drain the pasta in the colander in the sink, making sure that you are not scalding yourself!

Pour the drained pasta into a serving bowl and add immediately the sauce or topping that you have prepared separately. Mix gently. The reason you need to do it sooner more than later is that pasta without a lubricant tends to glue into a mass and spaghetti, in particular, tend to became inextricable.

As I said before, pasta, especially spaghetti, must be eaten ‘al dente’.  It means that the outside of the noodle is cooked while the central part remained slightly hard. This makes the texture very pleasant. I’m also told by reliable sources that pasta al dente is easier to digest. Well, being myself born in Naples, I prefer pasta al ‘doppio dente’, which means even harder.

In this specific case, I thought that simple is beautiful so I have topped my spaghetti with a couple of tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and a spray of freshly grated parmesan cheese. You will be surprised how good it is.