The days of draining your pasta by pouring all your cooked noodles and boiling water through a colander and down the sink are over. This could even be described as preparing your pasta "the old-fashioned way." More and more, professional chefs and experts have taught us that saving some pasta water to mix into your sauce produces superior results in most dishes.
Of course, there are some recipes in which the addition of pasta water is crucial, such as the and , but even your standard penne with marinara can benefit from a small drizzle. When you cook your dried pasta in boiling water, the starch from the noodles oozes out, creating cloudy water. This starch helps coat your pasta with whatever kind of sauce you serve, particularly thicker ones.
For example, when you dollop fresh pesto sauce over a mound of just-out-of-the-water farfalle and give it a stir, it's sure to coat the pasta decently. However, when you add some hot pasta water to the mix, any stray clumps of pesto will effortlessly dissolve into the sauce, which gets silky and beautifully coats the surface of your pasta. And, because the water contains starch and (presumably) salt, the sauce shouldn't taste watered down at all.
Pasta water is wonderfully versatile Don't assume that your pasta water is only good for the dish you're prepping in the moment. For starters, you probably know that leftover pasta the next day isn't the same as when it's fresh from the pot. Much of this has to do with the fact that the pasta a.
