How to Make Your Sauce Always Cling Perfectly to Your Pasta
One of my biggest pet peeves: people putting dry pasta on a plate and then spooning the sauce on top (see photo below). The pasta sticks together, and after mixing, the sauce never clings properly to the pasta. Stop doing this immediately and start doing it this way from now on.
The perfect plate of pasta is a beautiful marriage between the pasta and the sauce. The Spice Girls already sang it: when two become one. That is exactly what should happen to your pasta, and there are two very easy tricks to make it happen. Step one is mixing the pasta into the sauce in the pan, but there are a few other things you need to pay attention to.
Cooking water
Always add a little of the pasta cooking water. It contains starch, which essentially glues the sauce to the pasta. It also makes the sauce slightly thicker, so there are only benefits.
Cook it together
Cooking water is an easy and quick trick, but do you want to take it a step further? Cook the pasta until it is almost done, drain it and add it (with a splash of cooking water, of course) to the pan with the sauce. Let it simmer for a minute or two, stirring occasionally, until the pasta is perfectly al dente. This gives the sauce a chance to soak into the pasta, making the flavor even more intense.
No olive oil in the pasta water
Whatever you do, never add olive oil to the pasta water. Besides not helping one bit to prevent sticking (the oil floats to the top of the water), it is also disastrous for the sauce clinging to the pasta. When you drain the pasta, a thin layer of oil forms over it. Because of that layer, all the sauce simply slides right off again. So don’t do it.
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