Should You Add Olive Oil to Your Pasta Water?
No one is happy when pasta comes out of the pan completely clumped together. To prevent this, people use all kinds of tricks, but what’s the right way?
Olive oil?
A commonly heard solution is to add a splash of olive oil to the cooking water. You can forget that tip altogether. Oil and water don’t mix, so the oil stays floating on the surface and doesn’t mix with the pasta. When you drain the pasta, the oil does leave a thin layer of oil on it, but this is exactly what you don’t want. That layer of oil prevents the sauce from clinging to the pasta. Long story short: don’t do it.
The solution
So what should you do? It’s very simple: all you need to do is stir. As soon as you add the pasta to the boiling water (to which you’ve added this amount of salt), stir the pasta well. Stir it another couple of times throughout the cooking time, and mix the pasta with the sauce immediately after draining. Never rinse your pasta with water, as this washes away the outer layer of starch, which is precisely what helps the sauce cling nicely to the pasta.
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