First, temperature dynamics and being able to reliably determine doneness by time. Boiling water is nature's thermal measuring stick, and if your water is dropping to 150 it's a Problem. This is especially the case if you like to let the water 'coast' heat-off so that your pasta doesn't burn to the bottom of the pan during an unattended rolling boil.
Second, clumping. You want the ability to freely stir and get water between pieces of pasta, or if the heat is on for the boiling bubbles to stir, in order to avoid the pasta sticking together.
Third, use 80% less water and you only get a 5x higher concentration of starch. I don't have measurements in front of me but I suspect this simply isn't starchy enough to take a tiny portion of that water and use it as an effective emulsifier. The article pins 1% starch as a threshold of effect, and I doubt I'm losing 0.2% of pasta weight when cooking to al dente.
Note: This is all for dried durum wheat-flour pasta, the generic industrial 'macaroni' of American agribusiness. Egg pasta is a very different product, with different cooking characteristics, that happens to share the name. Durum semolina pasta, whole-wheat pasta, gluten-free "pasta", rice pasta... no guarantees that this is applicable.
Correction: To attain 1% of 5kg of water, I need 50g of starch. In 500g of pasta, there's no way in hell I'm losing fully 10% of the weight of the pasta. If I cut the water to pasta ratio by 80%, I would still need to lose 2% of the weight of the pasta, and I don't think that's happening.
- You can't rely on box cooking times even as a starting point. Your pasta will take significantly longer to cook, since it will bring down the temperature of the water when you put it in, since there's so little water
1. The starch comes from the pasta, not the water. Decreasing the water increases the concentration of the starch in said water. That’s why every good recipe for cacio e Pepe I’ve seen recommends using as little water as possible
2. This has been thoroughly debunked. Kenji did a full write up of this but suffice to say that starches absorb water starting at 180 degrees. As long as you have the water above that temp it will cook in the same amount of time.
In my experience box cooking times are never quite right, and irrelevant if you're going to be finishing your pasta in the sauce anyway.
Unless you're extremely familiar with the exact brand of pasta, temperature of your stovetop, etc., you should be tasting your pasta toward the end of cooking to decide when to stop cooking it.
> - It's still not going to be enough starch
I'm inclined to disagree, but only have anecdata on this, so I can't really get into an extended debate over it. So I guess now I get to look forward to experimenting with starch additions the next few times I cook pasta.
I don't get clumping. I use an adequate quality pasta (De Cecco mostly), stir it when I put it in the water, and a few times after that, cooking to al dente. If I'm making a Caccio e Pepe or Carbonara I cook the spaghetti or (my preference) Buccatini I'm aiming for the minimum amount of liquid left, ideally just enough to put in the sauce. I use a frying pan so I can lay the noods out flat to minimise the water.
As I said I don't get clumping, it is absolutely possible to cook noods in minimal water without clumping because I do it so try switching some thing up if it's happening to you.
How do you stir long pasta in minimal water before it has softened?
While small pasta shapes are relatively easy to stir such that they break contact with anything nearby right from the beginning, long pasta tends to move together when stirring until they’ve softened - at which point they’ve already started sticking together.
You can try to stir it so that the pasta isn’t all running parallel before it softens, but then you get ends start sticking out of the water until it softens more, leading to uneven cooking.
For long pastas, I’ve found using more water and just adding a little flour while cooking to be a lot easier.
I use kitchen tongs to pick up and jostle the noods as another commentator mentions. It starts out parallel as you say. Flour would add a flavour I didn't want and I don't have an issue with uneven cooking or clumping so I don't need to.
shrug then go with De Cecco, it's still better than Barilla. But if you find a Molisana or especially a Garofalo, do grab a pack and taste the difference.
I'll pick up a pack if I see it. The top quality the supermarket we go to has is Rummo, it's the next step up from De Cecco (in the supermarket at least) and I buy it sometimes, but to me there's not a hell of a lot of difference between the two for the price difference.
Sometimes I forget to stir and have to reboil the pasta. Long noodles like spaghetti will stick like crazy and have inconsistent cooking. If I need to cook quickly I use less water. Otherwise more water is hands off.
