More Recent and Contemporary ‘Blunders’

In this post in a series on ‘Pasta Blunders’, I open a discussion of two more recent practices that might be better described as misguided pasta-cooking short-cuts and/or perfectionistic efforts to ‘improve’ perfectly good traditional dishes and methods. I include them as blunders because they share one or both of the underlying motivations that lay at the root of the first- and second-wave blunders I have described in prior posts.

Both of these recent practices are over-reaching, exaggerated applications of the relatively recent American ‘discovery’ of the common-sense practice of using residual pasta water in finishing pasta dishes. Interestingly, they exaggerate from completely opposed motives.

Customary Usage Is Incremental

In customary home usage, Pasta water is used most commonly in small, incremental amounts to thin out an overly thick sauce. It is also used to create an emulsified pan-‘sauce’ in dishes that would otherwise lack what is commonly understood to be a sauce [such as white clam sauce, cacio e pepe, agli e olio, vegetable pastas, or similar dishes].

In emulsified dishes of this type, pasta water is used in somewhat greater amounts as the main liquid component. It is added to hot, in-the-pan non-liquid aromatics, herbs, pork bits, vegetables, seafood or other ‘dry’ pan ingredients —- and the desired amount of sautéing oil or rendered fat —- to transform them into a sauce. It is also often used as a moistener in pastas with sautéed vegetables, beans or legumes.

Italian home cooks have been using pasta water in this manner since at least the time when stoves replaced hearths. They have done so for one obvious, decidedly non-arcane, and plain-as-day reason that towers over all other more recent concocted technical claims and ‘creative’ repurposing experiments of chefs and ‘experts’.

A Better Alternative to Plain Water

Put bluntly, in most cases, pasta water is merely a preferable alternative to plain water. It offers a free, immediately at hand, warmer, somewhat saltier, slightly starchy, slightly pasta-flavored, and eminently rational alternative to using cooler, unsalted, utterly starch-free plain water for those purposes. [And it is often preferable to stocks, which tend to impose upon and blur the results the flavor impact of simple dishes that use a small number of complementary, but sharply or intensely flavored, ingredients.]

The techniques cited in this segment of the series exaggerate the customary uses for pasta water in one of of two ways; others combine both. Most of them heavily reduce the amount of initial water in order to create a much more starch-dense residue. This can be carried excess in ways that will seem excessive or extreme to those who use pasta water in customary ways.

Others simply abandon water entirely and just cook the dry pasta in the [usually tomato or meat] sauce itself. And still others try to use only enough water to cook the pasta but leave only minimal, if any, residue. This is done most commonly in American, cheese-intensive, firmly or nearly-firmly bound dishes that eschew runny sauces such as mac and cheese, many ‘white’ vegetable/cheese ’lasagne’ dishes, and pasta-based casseroles.

[In the next post —- Part 5-The Third Wave-3 —- of this series, I examine each of the types of exaggerated use of pasta water in some detail. I will focus on the motivations that drive their their practitioners and advocates as well as on the health implications of the exaggerations themselves]