My beef (heh) is that al dente is like ordering a rare steak. Its great when its done right. The problem is that it rarely (heh) is.
It is a very narrow window. Come up short and its crunchy ( or raw and cold in the case of a steak). Overshot and its just done pasta / a medium rare steak. The later is okay but the former sucks undercooked donkey balls. This is why I almost always order a medium rare steak when eating out unless I know this place can do a rare steak right.
Shoot for “done” pasta / medium rare steak and unless the cook is really bad what you get will be workable. Aim for al dente / rare and IMO more often than not the place will miss the mark.
It’s a matter of preference. I like my steaks medium rare, but if they’re going to err, I’d rather them err on the side of rare, rather than medium. I find most places tend to err on the side of too done, so I order rare when I want medium rare, or “on the rare side of medium rare.” To tell you the truth, it’s the burger places that get this wrong the most. If I want a medium rare hamburger, I have to order it rare.
I guess the point is this. Lets say the “ala dente” window of perfection is boiling for Y seconds plus or minus 30 seconds using method X. The window of cooked, but not ala dente pasta but not overcooked pasta is two minutes using method X.
Chances are, aiming for “cooked” is much more likely to result in cooked but not overcooked or undercooked than aiming for ala dente but ending up “crunchy”.
I thought the whole point of al dente pasta is that the pasta was deliberately undercooked so that it could be placed in the sauce pan amid the finished sauce so it would continue cooking for a couple of minutes until it was done. Then the chef would add a small amount of the pasta cooking water so that the sauce would “loosen” and the finished dish would be properly cooked, all at the same time.
That doesn’t sound quite right to me. That sounds more like parcooking. For me, pasta that is cooked to my liking is “al dente.” It is not completely soft; it still retains a bit of a bite and firmness to it. That said, it is not raw in the middle either. It’s a very short window, maybe 30-60 seconds where it goes from underdone to overdone.
In other words, when I bite down on the pasta, it should have a little bit of “chew” in it. It’s a textural thing. Completely cooked-through pasta offers almost no resistance. With al dente pasta, you can feel the individual strands of pasta (subtlely) collapsing under the pressure of your teeth.
Yes, “al dente” and “undercooked” are as different as “hardboiled with no grey stuff” and “softboiled”. Too many people, including too many restaurants, boil pasta and/or let it stand unwashed and without sauce to the point where it all becomes a big sticky ball. It shouldn’t be a big sticky ball.
That said, yes, there are also a lot of restaurants which go the other way. It shouldn’t be undercooked, either! You can tell whether the pasta is at exactly the right spot by how it moves, it isn’t so difficult. If it’s more rigid than that, it’s undercooked.
I’m with the OP, I prefer mushy pasta. It’s similar with rice - I like my rice mushy, sticky and all clumped together. The ideal rice should be served with a plop out of an ice cream scooper, retaining its dome shape, just like elementary school used to make it! Yum! Screw Uncle Ben!
Though I am honestly puzzled where you people get this idea that it’s ‘mushy’. Pasta takes a long damn time to boil into ‘mushy’. I never time my spaghetti boiling at home other than setting a rough minimum based on other tasks (i.e. when the water starts visibly boiling, I preheat my oven for the garlic toast - when the garlic toast is done about ten minutes later, the spaghetti’s more or less ready) and if I’m not doing the garlic toast that night, I make sure to let it go a minimum of twelve, but I know I’ve done fifteen, and probably twenty.
Yeah, I think that was supposed to be taken as written. I, too, tend to prefer my rice on the mushy, sticky side for most things. (Well, probably more sticky than mushy, but I don’t mind if it’s mushy and the grains are bursting.) Rarely do I want clearly separated grains.
I can see why people characterize well done pasta as “mushy.” My wife prefers it on the “overcooked” side, so that’s how I tend to make it for her. Anything past al dente is a bit mushy to my tastes. I don’t dislike it, but I prefer a bit of firmness.