Salt water makes a lot of things better — we all know it gives us beautiful hair after a day at the beach and nothing says summertime like the smell of salty air. Celebrity chef and TV personality Giada De Laurentiis is clearly a believer in the power of vitamin sea ladling out a pot full of real seawater to cook her pasta in a recent video she shared on TikTok.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Food Network | 2019-08-08 14:00:05 |  543,395 Views |
Giada De Laurentiis Makes Farmer's Pasta with Cheese | Everyday Italian | Food Network
There are all sorts of tips you need to know to cook pasta perfectly but here’s one you might not have tried yet. In the video the chef is on a boat off the coast of Italy with her family (“the dream” as she calls it) and unsurprisingly is responsible for making dinner. She leans over the back of the boat to ladle a pot of water to cook pasta. Before she dumps some of the water she notes that she’s only taking half of the water out of the pot. Conventional cooking wisdom advises against salting your water to the level of sodium in the ocean so De Laurentiis throws out half the pot.
Of course we all know by now that we need to salt our pasta water. It’s one of those steps that makes such an immediate difference from cooking it in a pot of plain water — once you try it there’s no other way. The necessary jolt of sodium adds so much flavor to your spaghetti penne or lasagna noodles right from the start making your Italian dishes a success.
As important as it is to add salt to your water before cooking noodles you’ll end up with a frown if you cook your pasta—or anything else—entirely in seawater. The ocean’s salinity is about 3.5% hence the advice to never salt your pasta water to the salinity of a mouthful of ocean. You need to dilute it with fresh water as Giada De Laurentiis does to get the right amount of salt in your pasta water. For every gallon of water you need to add 2 tablespoons of salt.
