How to: restaurant-quality pasta in 2 steps
How is it that your pasta at home never mixes with the sauce as perfectly as it does in a restaurant? Simple: it’s your technique. But don’t worry, practice and these tips make perfect.
Are you from the school of thought that says: cook the pasta, put it on the plate, pour the sauce over it? Then read on, because you can definitely use these tips. What makes restaurant pasta so delicious is that the ratio of pasta to sauce is exactly right, and hardly any sauce is left on your plate after eating it. The trick: cook your pasta together with the sauce.
Step 1: cooking the pasta
Cooking pasta—how difficult can it be? Well, more difficult than you might think. We often cook our pasta for too long and—in a very important detail—in a pan that’s too small. Does the water boil, you add the pasta, and everything stops bubbling? Then you’ve put too much pasta in a pan that’s too small. The water has to heat up again, which prolongs the process and makes the pasta soft. Not delicious. To give you an idea: use approximately 4 liters of water per 500 grams of pasta.
Have you mastered that, and is your water with pasta bubbling nicely? Set a timer for two minutes less than the package indicates for ‘al dente’. Keep stirring every 30 seconds so nothing burns. Because yes, that can happen too.
Step 2: the ultimate trick
As soon as the timer beeps, drain the pasta in a colander, shake off the excess water, and return the pasta to the pan. If you were ever taught that you should rinse your pasta: No. Don’t do it.
Add the sauce to the pasta in the pan, pour in 60 ml of boiling water, and put the pan back on the heat. You probably get it already: you cook the pasta for the final two minutes in the sauce. Add a tablespoon of water now and then if you think it’s necessary, so the pasta can absorb the sauce.
The starch from the pasta acts as a binding agent, binding water and fat together and allowing the sauce to cling perfectly to the pasta. Et voilà: there’s your restaurant-quality pasta.
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