How to Get Better at Cooking Pasta

You follow recipes (or don’t) and the results are ‘meh.’ How do get better cooking pasta? Here are tips that will drastically improve your pasta dishes. These tips and more can be found in our best pasta cookbook for beginners: Pasta Affair!

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Choose Quality Pasta

If you want to get better at cooking pasta, you need to start with good quality pasta. Not all pasta is created equal. The best pasta is made from durum wheat semolina flour and is cut with a bronze die (called trafilata al bronzo or simply bronze die-cut). Why does the type of machine used to cut the pasta matter? A bronze die creates a more porous pasta which gives the pasta a better texture and helps it to cling to sauce better.

Discover our picks for the best pasta brands in Italy in our article!

Don’t Overcook Your Pasta

Soft, soggy pasta is gross. In Italy, pasta is cooked to al dente—which literally means ‘to the teeth’ and refers to the pasta having a bit of chewiness to the texture. Always follow the recommending cooking time for al dente pasta on the package instructions.

Salt the Pasta Cooking Water

The water in which a pasta is cooking must be salted—otherwise the pasta will be bland tasting. Use coarse sea salt or kosher salt. Avoid iodized salt because this can impart a weird, metallic taste to the pasta. Salt after the water is boiling—before adding the pasta. If you add the salt before the water is boiling, the water will take longer to boil. The pasta should be exposed to the salt for most or all of its cook time to properly flavor it.

You can use fine salt as well, but coarse salt is easier to measure. For a large pot of water, a few handfuls of coarse salt is typically enough. For exact recommendations on how much salt to add, check our cookbook:

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Avoid ‘One Pot’ Pasta Dishes

We know—’one pot’ pasta dishes are all the rage. Since most pasta recipes are quick and easy to begin with, the main advantage to the ‘one pot’ recipes is having one less dish to clean. That’s fine, however you need to be quite careful about the order in which you cook ingredients in that pot to avoid the risk of overcooking your pasta into a soggy mess (see “Don’t Overcook Your Pasta”).

Cooking pasta in the sauce (or at least finishing it in the sauce) is actually a real technique that can help you get better at cooking pasta. However, it’s important that the sauce ingredients are cooked enough before you add the pasta. Otherwise you’ll be continuing to cook (or rather overcook) the pasta simply to finish cooking the sauce ingredients. Also, your sauce needs to be liquidy enough to properly cook the pasta.

Personally, we think if your goal is to get better at cooking pasta, you should cook the pasta in a separate pot and finish it in the sauce at the end.

Follow Recipes Until You Understand What Works

There’s an old saying “You must learn the rules before you can break them.” This applies to cooking pasta and cooking in general. If your goal is to get better at cooking pasta dishes using Italian recipes, actually follow authentic Italian pasta recipes such as those on this website!

As Italian pasta recipes have been popularized around the world, many of the ingredients and techniques that made those recipes so delicious have gotten lost. As Italian immigrants have searched for ways to replace hard-to-find ingredients with ingredients available in their new home country, flavor has often been compromised.

If a traditional Italian pasta recipe says to use “Parmigiano Reggiano cheese” or “pecorino cheese,” don’t make a cheese substitution until you’ve actually tried following the original recipe using the recommended ingredients. So-called ‘parmesan’ is NOT the same cheese as ‘Parmigiano Reggiano” in most countries—including the United States. If you use it in place of Parmigiano, you’ll never understand what the dish is supposed to taste like.

Choose Quality Pasta Sauce Ingredients

There are a few ingredients that pop up again and again in Italian pasta recipes. To get better at cooking pasta, you need to learn how to select great tasting ingredients. For instance:

Italian Cheeses

Get to know your Italian cheeses. A little Parmigiano Reggiano goes a long way and it is a completely different product than ‘parmesan’—look for the real thing. Pecorino Romano is a delicious cheese featured in many Italian recipes. Similarly, gorgonzola is another very tasty cheese that will improve your pasta game.

Quality, Sweet Tomato Products

Look for canned and jarred products that say they are made from ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes. These tomatoes are grown in perfect conditions in Italy and are world-renowned for their sweet, robust flavor. Instead of looking for ‘tricks’ like baking soda, carrots, sugar to ‘sweeten’ your tomato sauce, find the best tomato sauce.

Beware: There has been some controversy abroad due to some companies (Cento, we are looking at you) trying to mislead consumers. In Italy, there are many products and ingredients which are labelled DOP. This is a label that is respected in Italy and demonstrates the product has undergone rigorous standards to be considered “produced, processed and developed in a specific geographical area, using the recognized know-how of local producers and ingredients from the region concerned.”

Cento and some other companies have been known to vaguely put a phrase like ‘certified San Marzano’ on their packaging. ‘Certified’ in this sense means nothing, as everyone in Italy understands it is the DOP label that matters. Unfortunately, consumers abroad are not aware of this, and believe they are getting the highest quality Italian products based on this misleading label.

Here’s a look at tomato brands we prefer and why. Note that these are brands we also buy in Italy.

Choose quality, sweet tomato products.