In two steps, restaurant-quality pasta on your plate

When it comes to putting pasta together, I do pretty well, if I may say so myself. But it’s not like in a restaurant, not yet. I had the secrets of a great pasta whispered to me by FavorFlavs Steffi and now I can do it too. Mamma mia, about the spaghetti tonight.

Are you from the school of: cooking pasta, putting it on the plate, pouring sauce over it? Then definitely read on because you can make good use of these tips. What makes the pasta in restaurants so delicious is that the ratio of pasta to sauce is just right and there’s hardly any sauce left on your plate after eating. The trick: cook your pasta together with the sauce.

Step 1: cooking the pasta

Cooking pasta, how hard can it be? Well, harder than you think. We often cook our pasta too long AND – very important – in a too small pot. When the water is boiling, you put the pasta in and the bubbling stops? Then you’ve put too much pasta in a too small pot. The water has to heat up again, which prolongs the process and makes the pasta soggy. Not tasty. To give you an idea: use about 4 liters of water per 500 grams of pasta.

Once you’ve got that down and your water with pasta is bubbling nicely? Set a timer that is two minutes shorter than what the package indicates for ‘al dente’. Keep stirring every 30 seconds so that it doesn’t stick. Because yes, that can happen too.

Step 2: the ultimate trick

As soon as the timer beeps, drain the pasta in a colander, shake off the excess water and put the pasta back in the pot. If you’ve ever been taught to rinse your pasta: no. Don’t do it.

Throw the sauce into the pot with the pasta, add 60 ml of boiling water and put the pot back on the heat. You probably get it: you cook the pasta for the last two minutes in the sauce. Add a tablespoon of water now and then if you think it’s necessary, so the pasta can absorb the sauce.

The starch from the pasta acts as a binding agent, causing water and fat to bind together and the sauce to stick perfectly to the pasta. Et voilà: there’s your restaurant-quality pasta.