Good Lifestyle

To prepare dinnercan be pain. It can be even more of a pain when you have to do it after getting the work home and you are hungry.

Unsurprisingly, it is in these terrible conditions that I chose to transgress one of the cardinal rules of cooking so that even the amateur cooks know: I threw itPasta... in water ...which has not been boiling.

I know. I KNOW! Terrible, right? My Italian ancestors certainly trembled the head of shame to me. But I feel obliged to leave you all on a small secret-You too can put the pasta in cold water and do not feel guilty. In fact, this is the first step of a method to know how to cook pasta faster. (And faster, we hear in half the time!)

Have you ever raised an eyebrow when Martha Stewart taught you about pasta in a single dish? (For the uninitiated: .. the pasta in a single dish are when you throw in all your ingredients in a larger, flat shallow and cover the ingredients with cold water See photo below for reference)

No, you probably do not! So, if I said you that you can use the same technique to cook all your pasta from now on?

Before we delay like a person at random on the internet, know that I do my research and found that the actual professional leaders also did.

In fact, the legendary author of food scienceHarold McGee addressed this same question in aNew York Times article in 2009.

McGee has made a small experience at home. It has put a spaghetti book in a pot, added 1 1/2 liters of cold water (for reference, the directions of the box instruct you to bring 4 to 6 liters of water to boil first), and 2 teaspoons of salt andso lit the heat.

Despite having to stir often to prevent the noodles from paste and because a smaller volume of water is not enough to keep the pasta plunged all the time, "spaghetti came out well. "

If you ask me, a little more stirring to get pasta in my faster plate is worth it.

In addition to preparing dinner faster with this method, Kenji Lopez-Alt, author of the cookbook award-winning James BeardFood Lab: Home Cooking Better by Science and Culinary Director General for the blogSeriously eats, Found that cooking pasta in this way in fact resultsBetter, starch pasta water.

"In addition to thickening just a sauce, the starch also acts like an emulsifier," Lopez-Alt explains in a messageThe food laboratory: a new way of cooking pasta? "This means that [add] a little pasta water [to your sauce] will be emulsified for a light, a creamy sauce that is much more efficient with pasta coating. »

And you will have guessed it by experimentation, he found that the batch of pasta cooked in 1 1/2 quarts against the one cooked in 3 liters was a lot of Starchier, and would therefore be a much better binding the sauce than what you usually be left with.

With all of this being said, you have to go along his brake to try this method at home. So without further delay, we present to you how to cook pasta faster:

All you need to do isthrow your pasta in a pot. (Depending on the quantity of pasta that you plan to cook, set your pot or size of the mold accordingly so that pastaprincipally is in a single layer of amylaced quality.)

Pour enough water to cover the top of the pasta layer. Sprinklesalt, Define yourburner up, And give him astir.

You will have to stir along time through the cooking process to prevent the noodles from paste, butabout 12 minutes, Your pasta is ready! (We recommend that you perform a taste test to check the degree of cooking rather than simply its timing.)

Depending on the amount of water that remains in the pot, you can add your sauce in the pasta directly (which allows starchy water to thicken the sauce), or you can drain the pasta, add it To your sauce, then add as much pasta water as you wish.

Time saving?

In, McGee found this method takes about 12 minutes to cook pasta through. Compare this for the 15 minutes it takes to boil the water plus 11 minutes to cook the pasta, and You have registered for at least 14 minutes of cooking time !

Fan of fast dinners? Do not miss our favorite 15 minutes dinners to lose weight .