12 Myths About Pasta You Can Stop Believing

Pasta is a home cook's savior because, in a couple of minutes, you can have a delicious and hearty meal ready and feed a couple of people while you're at it. There are so many pasta shapes to choose from, and even fussy eaters and children can find pasta they love. There are also endless ways to serve it. Sauces can be just as quick to whip up while your pasta boils, or you can opt for a store-bought one for days when you're tired and can't be bothered. Either way, there are so many ways to cook pasta that it's hard not to love it.

I'm a recipe developer and pasta enthusiast, making at least two pasta meals a week. Having traveled to Italy, I've taken classes and dined on some of the most delicious yet simple pasta dishes there are. I've also encountered the strongly held beliefs about pasta in Italy, learned that a whole lot of things I thought to be true were wrong, and kept a thing or two that the people I met there might cringe about. Ultimately, everyone has their own way of perfecting their pasta, and there is more than one way to go about it. However, there are also some long-held beliefs about how to best cook pasta that have been debunked. Here are some myths about pasta you can stop believing.

While this myth has been thoroughly debunked over the years, it was once a strongly held belief for many home cooks. Even when I was learning how to cook, my parents taught me to add oil to the water that you're going to cook your pasta in. The theory was that adding oil would help your pasta not stick together. In truth, oil isn't helping your pasta not stick together at all. It's perhaps causing your pasta sauce not to stick to your pasta.

Other than not having a purpose (and even making things worse with the sauce), it is an expensive waste of oil, as all of it is going to go down the drain anyway. If you've been doing this for years, don't worry; it was a common thing taught to people learning how to make pasta, including myself. Nowadays, I know to save my precious olive oil and use only water and salt to boil pasta. The trick to preventing your pasta from sticking is to make sure to stir it well once you throw it into the water. You don't have to keep stirring at the same frequency throughout cooking, but a couple of stirs here and there do the trick. The most important time to stir pasta is at the beginning. A couple of stirs, in the beginning, will loosen it and keep it from cooking while stuck together.

One of the essential things to do when cooking pasta is to add salt to the water. It's not a step you can skip, thinking that your sauce will be seasoned enough to make your pasta tasty. In my experience, when I've forgotten to salt the pasta water, my pasta turned out to be super bland and no amount of salt added at the end could fix it. Pasta absorbs salt as it cooks, and the salt will seep deep into it. If you only add salt after cooking, the salt only seasons the outside layer of pasta, while the inside stays unseasoned. You may not think pasta is thick enough for this to matter, but it makes a huge difference.

The other thing is you have to generously salt the water. Not just a pinch or two, but add in a couple of shakes of salt and taste the water. You want to clearly taste saltiness in your water. Adding sufficient salt to your water can really affect how tasty your pasta is. In fact, I've found that even if my sauce tastes mediocre, if my pasta is salted enough, the result is still pretty delicious.

While cooking pasta can be considered an easy go-to meal, the only slightly bothersome step is waiting for the water to boil. If you're like me and resort to cooking pasta when you have low energy, it's likely that you'll get a little impatient waiting for the water to boil. We sometimes look for shortcuts, and salt can sometimes play into this. This is because another long-held belief is that adding salt to water will make it take longer to boil, which is why some people are finicky about if and when to add salt to your pasta water. This idea becomes tricky to debunk because, scientifically speaking, this is true. Salt does technically raise the boiling point of water; however, this will likely never apply to your cooking because the amount of salt you need for this to be true is outside the bounds of cooking in general.

So, there's no reason to bother with that theory at all, especially when cooking pasta. Adding salt to your water is absolutely necessary when cooking pasta, and when to add it isn't going to make any significant difference to how long it will take your water to boil. So, go ahead and salt your water freely.

One thing that anybody who makes pasta will know is that you need a large pot of water to boil your pasta in. We're often told to fill up the pot at least halfway, or even better, ¾ of the way, with water so that the pasta has enough room to move around when cooking. We're told if there's not enough water, the pasta won't cook evenly and might even end up sticking. While you can absolutely continue as normal, and there's no negative effect on your pasta by using a lot of water, the truth is that it's not entirely necessary to have so much. It turns out that this is a myth about pasta that you can stop believing. Certain food scientists and chefs have tested cooking pasta in smaller amounts of water and found positive results when doing so.

As long as your pasta is at least submerged in water, there's no reason to fill up your pot like before. While this may upset an Italian grandmother, it's actually a good way to reduce water waste, and, in turn, it actually yields a more concentrated pasta water to cook with. The starchier pasta water makes your pasta sauce a little creamier than normal and gives it great flavor. Even skeptics should give this a try.

Another trick we were likely all taught decades ago is to immediately dunk your pasta into cold water once it's cooked. We've all done this at some point, and I used to think this was the key to keeping my pasta from turning to mush. I always had my colander ready whenever the pasta got boiling, ready to be covered with cold running water once tipped out. Now, I shudder when I think about this. Not only are you needlessly wasting pasta water, and water in general, but you're also taking perfectly warm, starchy pasta and letting all of its goodness wash off. You're also making your pasta cold, only to be reheated again in your sauce.

You can go ahead and never do this again! Transfer your pasta immediately into your sauce while hot. This allows your pasta to absorb the sauce better, and the starchy pasta water on your pasta will help to form a cohesive dish with your sauce. Plus, your meal will be at a good hot temperature and ready to eat.

While this is becoming less common with time, it's not unusual for people to throw out the water that the pasta was cooked in, thinking it's nothing more than a waste product. Nowadays, you'll hear more and more that pasta water is referred to as "liquid gold," and most chefs will tell you never to discard it. In fact, it could be the key ingredient to making your pasta dish even tastier. The reason you should always use pasta water is that it will help loosen your sauce without diluting it. This is especially nifty if your pasta sauce has dried out a little; instead of adding water, add a few spoonfuls of pasta water. Pasta water is well seasoned and starchy, which adds to the taste of the sauce and helps to thicken it slightly, creating a more creamy feel.

You can always reserve some pasta water in a cup to throw in later. Or, you can rely on the residual water from your pasta if you move your pasta directly from the cooking water into the pasta sauce without draining it first. Other than using your pasta water directly in your pasta dish, there are a number of other uses for your leftover pasta water, like making pizza and bread dough with it or even watering your plants with it.

There are different theories about how long you should cook your pasta to achieve the perfect texture, and many pasta lovers will tell you that pasta should be cooked "al dente." This term, which essentially means your pasta still has a little bite to it, means not cooking your pasta until it's completely soft. It can become mushy and lose all its pleasant texture if you cook it that way. While eating pasta "al dente" is my preferred texture, and I certainly see it as the best way, it doesn't mean that everyone needs to. Many of my relatives and friends dislike "al dente" pasta and prefer it cooked soft. Some have told me that "al dente" pasta has a less comforting feel to them, and softer pasta is more pleasant.

After trying to convert them, I realized that people should be free to eat things how they prefer to. Strict rules about the way food "should be" can be exclusionary and if people are cooking food the way they like to eat it in their own homes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. So, eat pasta how you like to eat it, whether that's "al dente" or not.

For the longest time, I thought that buying or making fresh pasta was the superior way to enjoy it. Somehow, it always felt more special if I was eating fresh pasta and many people feel the same way. However, this is actually a common misconception, and in truth, there are pros and cons to both fresh and dried pasta. Fresh pasta tends to go better with some types of sauces, but it's sometimes not possible to get it to cook al dente because it's too soft. It's also a lot more laborious than using dried pasta, and not everyone has the time and skill to make it themselves. Fresh pasta also has to be cooked relatively quickly, as it can spoil much quicker than dried pasta.

There are endless benefits to using dried pasta. It's shelf-stable, so you can always have some in stock. It's so much quicker and easier to use, and often, it's a lot cheaper than buying fresh pasta. Plus, you can cook it al dente with no trouble. It's a lot more forgiving than fresh pasta, which you can get wrong at various stages of the process, and nowadays, you can get excellent quality dried pasta to boot. So, while fresh pasta can sometimes be more delicious, it's not always the superior choice, depending on your circumstances, preferences, and what you're cooking.

We've established that dried pasta can sometimes be the better way to go, but like with most things in life, not all dried pasta is created equally. When shopping for dried pasta, there are better quality products that will yield a better result. You want to use pasta that's made from durum wheat semolina as its main ingredient. It's considered a "harder" type of wheat and will help your pasta keep its structure when cooked.

Often a higher quality pasta will be a little more expensive than the run of the mill pasta brands. If you're able to fork out an extra dollar or two, it's guaranteed to give you a tastier pasta dish once cooked. If you're able to get your hands on pasta that's manufactured in Italy, that's always a sure way to have great pasta, as Italian-made pasta tends to be made with better quality ingredients and fewer additives than American-made ones.

There are certain pasta purists who believe that pasta can't be reheated and retain its quality. While the intention might be good, this can lead to food waste as people are less likely to eat their leftovers if they believe this. You can, in fact, reheat pasta and have it be a decently good meal. While it may not reach the level of perfection as just-cooked pasta, it can come in a close second, especially if you reheat it well. There are plenty of options for reheating pasta, and the most common way is using a microwave. I've found that a microwave works fine for reheating pasta if you add a little bit of water to it to prevent it from drying out.

If you haven't mixed your pasta with sauce yet, a great way to reheat your pasta is to give it a quick boil. Boiling water will instantly warm it up and keep it moist. Alternatively, you can reheat your pasta in the oven, too. Add it to a casserole dish and cover it with foil. I sometimes add a drop or two of water, which will steam through the pasta when covered, or for extra delicious leftovers, I add some grated cheese on top to make a cheesy "baked pasta."

Unless your family is Italian, you probably don't have any hard and fast rules about which sauces need to be cooked with which pasta shape. To an extent, it's not a dramatic, life-altering thing to pair any sauce with any pasta shape, but there is some wisdom in knowing how to pair them to bring out the best in each other. A good rule of thumb is that larger noodles should be paired with heartier, more flavor-heavy sauces, and more delicate noodles will go better with a lighter sauce. For example, when I cook a delicate sauce like brown butter and sage, I always opt for a thin spaghetti or even some ziti. When I make a fragrant saffron and seafood sauce, I like to use linguine because it's a bit more substantial than spaghetti.

For tomato-based sauces, I tend to use any type of pasta shape, and with pesto, I prefer penne or a twisty shape like fusilli so that the pesto can cling to all the little crevices. There are different theories about which shapes are better with which sauces, but it also comes down to the mouthfeel that you enjoy the most. If it's delicious to you, then it works!

Growing up with Middle Eastern heritage, it was totally normal to add pasta to soup, and my mom would often use orzo or even vermicelli in brothy chicken soups. When making these soups for Italian friends, they often gasped at the idea of adding pasta to soup. I frequently reminded them that they wouldn't think twice about eating Japanese ramen or Chinese noodle soups and that this was basically the same concept. In fact, some Italian minestrone recipes involve adding some pasta, and there's even another example of it in a dish called anolini, a classic Italian pasta broth.

In America, chicken noodle soup is super common, but you don't have to be limited to that either. As the weather gets colder and we officially enter soup season, turn to pasta to help bulk up your soup and make it even more of a filling meal. You could even try your hand out at making that viral lasagna soup recipe. There's no need to pre-cook your pasta or cook it separately; just throw in some dried pasta right into the broth and let the starchy pasta water give your soup an added richness.