‘The pasta waits for no one.’ 12 simple rules for perfect pasta

What we call “sauce” for pasta in this country is “condimento” in Italy. The word comes from the verb “condire,” which means “to season.” And it’s an important distinction. Because pasta is not a vehicle for the condimento. The condimento is seasoning for pasta. In Italy, pasta is the star.

I learned this up close years ago when I found myself outside Palermo in the Madonie Mountains, most famous for their rugged nooks and crannies used as hide-outs for the Sicilian Mafia. I was writing a book about pasta for the famed mother-and-daughter cooks Wanda and Giovanna Tornabene, who ran a now-closed, weekends-only restaurant, Tenuta Gangivecchio, in the former 14th century abbey that was their home. The book was called “100 Ways to Be Pasta.”

“Pasta is a live thing,” Giovanna, the daughter, told me on my first evening in Italy as she boiled fusilli to make a quick pasta out of what she’d found in the cupboard, a delicious if weird combination of canned tuna, curry powder, dried currants and fresh parsley.

“Pasta is not actually a live thing, but OK,” I thought but didn’t say. What I said was, “Oh! Wow,” inviting Giovanna to go on. I was willing to suspend disbelief — to enter into their world, to explore pasta’s 100 lives for the sake of the book. What I didn’t know was that their world would unlock my pasta-making skills forever.

So here they are: 12 simple game changers for perfect pasta.

1. Pasta water — the water the pasta was boiled in — is the key to all great pasta dishes. Martha Stewart refers to it as “liquid gold.” In Italy, liquid gold is olive oil and pasta water is “pasta water.” Either way, you have fair warning: Don’t dump your pasta water down the drain.

2. Add more salt to the pasta water than you want to. One day I showed Giovanna how Americans salt their pasta water, by shaking a salt shaker over the pot a few times. She laughed and grabbed “un pugno,” a fistful, of Sicilian rock salt and threw it into the pot of water. “It should taste like sea water,” Giovanna explained. I find the perfect ratio is 1 tablespoon of salt per quart of water. You might balk at the amount, but the water penetrating the pasta is what softens it as it cooks — so if the water is salted, you get salted pasta. If the water is not salted, you end up with noodles that need salt. No amount of salty stuff that you put on the pasta will compensate for the lack of salt in the pasta.

3. The pot of boiling water does not need to be enormous. Large pots of water take years to come to a boil. Giovanna used a medium saucepan for a pound of dried pasta. It boiled in minutes. If you have a weak stove (like I do) and the water stops boiling when you add the pasta, put a lid on the pot until the water returns to a boil, leaving the lid slightly askew so you can see the water.

4. Add oil to the water when you are cooking long strands of pasta. Such as spaghetti.

5. Stir the pasta while it’s cooking. This prevents it from sticking together.

6. If you have teeth, cook your pasta until it’s al dente. Don’t overcook the pasta. What we call al dente is just properly cooked. It is not a daring or “cheffy” thing. It’s the thing. Pasta is supposed to be something you bite into. If you really want to be Italian, cook it only until you can just bite into it but don’t necessarily want to. Chef Ori Menashe of Bestia, when he worked at Osteria Angelini, once handed me a plate of pasta, the rigatoni he’d made for staff meal, so underdone that when I cut into it, I could see a white chalky layer of uncooked pasta at its core. “That’s how we eat it in the kitchen. It’s Roman style.”

Don’t overcook the pasta. Pasta is supposed to be something you bite into. (If you don’t want to bite into pasta, maybe ask yourself why?)

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

7. Do everything you need to do — and have whoever you’re serving do whatever it is they need to do, including sitting down at the table — before you put the pasta in the water. As Wanda told (more like scolded!) me: “You wait for the pasta. The pasta waits for no one.” The pasta is not just the star, it’s evidently also the guest of honor at any meal where it is served. Do not let pasta sit in the sink waiting for the condimento to be ready or for your family and friends to sit down at the table or open a bottle of wine or feed the dog while your pasta sits, dying, in a colander. Be ready and waiting. The time between taking the pasta out of the water and getting into your mouth determines the quality of the dish.

8. Drain the pasta quickly and not thoroughly. Lift the pasta out of the water with tongs or a slotted spoon (depending on the shape), or drain it in a colander — but not before saving some of that precious pasta water — and transfer it directly into the pot with the condimento. Either way, some of the water should make its way into the pan with the condimento. (See 1, above.) Do not rinse pasta. (When I mentioned to Giovanna that many do this in America, she was so shocked I thought for a minute I’d have to figure out how to get an ambulance to these remote mountains.)

9. “Stain” the pasta with the sauce. After taking it out of the water, cook the pasta with the condiment for a minute or two or even three, to “stain” the pasta. Even if the condiment doesn’t have a lot of color, think of staining as also “staining” it with flavor. The flavors of the condimento need to penetrate the pasta.

After taking it out of the water, cook the pasta with the condiment for a minute or two or even three, to “stain” the pasta with flavor.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

10. Just don’t oversauce your pasta. Remember, the sauce, or condimento, isn’t the star. Like the ketchup on a hamburger, a condimento is meant to complement the pasta. (One can’t escape its relation to the English “condiment.”)

11. Add some of the hot, salted starchy pasta water to the pan. As you’re staining the pasta, add some of that hot starchy salted water from the pasta pot. Especially when making a simple almost sauce-less pasta like cacio e pepe or spaghetti with oil and garlic, the water is essential to the sauce. The water is what helps the condimento coat the pasta. You want the finished pasta dish to be slippery and glistening.

12. You can do what you want … to a point. Even though you’re not supposed to put cheese on seafood pasta, this is America, land of the free. We put cheese wherever we want it. Breaking rules is practically in the Constitution. That said: Don’t overcook your pasta.