Pasta and Sauce: How hard can it be to get the two together just right? It turns out there’s actually a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Let’s start with the right way: Basically you want to mix your pasta and sauce together in one pot to create an evenly balanced dish where every bite of pasta gets the right amount of sauce.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Publish Date not found |  0 Views |
You're Doing It All Wrong – How to Make Pasta Sauce
But the really good way to do this requires a bit more effort than just throwing the sauce and noodles together. Ideally you cook the pasta in salted water reserving some of the pasta water when you drain it (put a cup under the strainer to catch some). Then you mix the pasta sauce and some of that reserved pasta water. It’s a good idea to undercook the pasta by a minute or so because it will cook more while it’s in the pot with the sauce and water.
There’s no exact measurement for how much pasta water to add to the sauce and sources vary on what the best amount is. But it doesn’t hurt to be frugal: Start with about 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup) for each serving of pasta you have in the pan and add more as needed—you can always boil it off but the more you do this the more likely you are to overcook your pasta.
The reason this is the “correct” way to mix pasta and sauce is because the pasta water helps bind the noodles and the sauce together thickening the sauce. This may seem counterintuitive since you’d think that water would actually thin out a sauce. But pasta water is a different beast: it’s cloudy in color and the reason for that is all the starch from the pasta has leached into it. That starch is what helps bind the sauce and noodles together. (For this reason you wouldn’t want to try this sauce-mixing method with regular tap water as it will only thin out the sauce and prevent it from sticking to the noodles.) The salt in the pasta water can also add some extra flavor but you want to be careful not to oversalt your sauce if you plan on adding this extra salt at the end. It works especially well for creamier sauces like cacio e pepe or carbonara.
