Cooking Pasta Properly

For more flavorful pasta, drain it thoroughly yet quickly (so it doesn't cool) and toss it immediately with a hot sauce.

Stir at the start

Many pasta recipes begin like this: "Bring a large pot of water, 4 to 5 quarts, to a rapid boil." Do you really need this much water? Well, if you're only boiling a small amount of pasta (less than half a pound), you don't need so much, but a generous pot of rapidly boiling water is helpful for several reasons: it comes back to a boil faster when you add the pasta; it makes it easier to submerge long, rigid pastas like spaghetti; and it helps to reduce sticking slightly by quickly washing away the exuding starch from the pasta surface.

To keep pasta from sticking, stir during the first minute or two of cooking. This is the crucial time when the pasta surface is coated with sticky, glue-like starch. If you don't stir, pieces of pasta that are touching one another, they literally cook together.

Add salt, but not oil.

You may have heard that you can avoid sticky pasta by adding oil to the pasta water. This can prevent sticking, but at a great price. Pasta that's cooked in oily water will become oily itself and, as a result, the sauce slides off, doesn't get absorbed, and you have flavorless pasta.

Salted water flavors the pasta. A generous amount of salt in the water seasons the pasta internally as it absorbs liquid and swells. The pasta dish may even require less salt overall. For a more complex, interesting flavor, I add 1 to 2 tablespoons sea salt to a large pot of rapidly boiling water.Rinsing the pasta after cooking is a bad idea. It can cool the pasta and prevent absorption of a sauce, and it can wash away any remaining surface starch. The small amount of starch left on the pasta by the cooking water can thicken your sauce slightly.

For pasta sauces that include egg, like carbonara, it's a good idea to reserve a bit of the pasta cooking water to stir into the sauce. In this case, the starch-enriched water not only thickens the sauce a bit, but it also helps prevent the egg from curdling when it meets the hot pasta.

About Shallots:

Shallots burn easily because of their high sugar content. For this reason, sauté briefly over low to medium heat. When using raw minced shallots in salad dressings, lessen their pungency by reducing the juice; wrap the minced shallots in a clean kitchen towel and squeeze the shallots so the cloth absorbs some of their juices.

Anthony Bourdain said all great chefs have shallots in their kitchen.

Herbs and Spices:

Use a light hand when seasoning with spices and herbs. Your goal is to compliment your dish without crowding out the flavor of the food. Remember, it's usually impossible to "un-spice" a dish!

For long-cooking dishes, add herbs and spices just before serving.

Do not use dried herbs in the same quantity as fresh. In most cases, use 1/3 the amount in dried as is called for fresh.