Italy.
Italian cooks salt pasta water "like the sea" — not quite: about 1 %, a third of the sea. That is enough to season the pasta all the way through.
There is no "Italian food" so much as the food of Italy's regions, united only in 1861 and still cooking very differently: the butter, rice and polenta of the north (risotto, XXI.3; polenta, XXI.9), the egg pasta of Emilia (XXVI.6), the olive oil, tomatoes, dried pasta and seafood of the south and the islands. What links them is respect for the ingredient — a few excellent things, in season, treated simply: a Margherita pizza, a plate of spaghetti with tomato and basil, a bistecca with olive oil and lemon. Many protected products (DOP) — Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto di Parma, San Marzano tomatoes — are defined by place and method.
Pasta is cooked in plenty of boiling water salted to about 1 %, 10 g per litre (XXI.6). Pasta absorbs over its own weight of water as it cooks, and with it the salt, so it is seasoned through; unsalted pasta tastes flat however well sauced. It is drained a minute short of al dente and finished in the pan with the sauce and a ladle of the cooking water, tossed hard (mantecatura): the water's gelatinised starch binds fat and water into a creamy emulsion that clings — the whole secret of cacio e pepe and carbonara (XVII.4). The workshop salts the water.
Below: the salt in cooked pasta boiled in water salted as you choose, absorbing water as it cooks (dried pasta takes up about 1.4 times its weight; exact mass balance assuming the water's salt concentration is absorbed with it), against the 0.6–1 % of a well-seasoned dish.
- Describe Italy's regional cooking.
- Salt and cook pasta.
- Finish pasta in its sauce with pasta water.
- Choose ingredients first.
Salt the water, save the water
By the mass balance, 10 g of salt per litre puts about 0.58 % salt into the cooked pasta — seasoned through, before any sauce; water "as salty as the sea", 35 g per litre, would give 2.0 %, far too salty. A good rule is 1 litre of water and 10 g of salt per 100 g of pasta, the water at a rolling boil when the pasta goes in, stirred in the first minute so it does not stick.
Cacio e pepe for 2: toast 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper in a dry pan; add a ladle of pasta water. Cook 200 g spaghetti or tonnarelli in less water than usual (so it is starchier), draining it a minute early and keeping the water. Mix 80 g finely grated Pecorino Romano with a little warm (not boiling) pasta water into a paste. Toss the pasta in the pepper pan off the heat, add the cheese paste and splashes of water, tossing hard until a creamy sauce coats every strand — too hot and the cheese clumps (XVII.8). Serve at once. Carbonara uses the same mantecatura with egg yolks, kept below about 70 °C so they thicken without scrambling.
Cook two small batches of pasta, one in unsalted water and one at 10 g per litre, and dress them the same way. Taste them side by side.
Terms
- Al dente
- Cooked but still firm to the bite.
- Mantecatura
- Tossing pasta or risotto hard with fat and starchy liquid to make it creamy.
- Pasta water
- Starchy cooking water that binds sauces.
- DOP
- Protected designation of origin for regional products.
Sources
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.
- H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.