Breaking is also a for ot of people cooking a small amount, who don’t see a reason to heat up a big-ass pot that fits a whole noodle.
I just want to say that I’m astounded that a number of posters speak glowingly of breaking spaghetti. I’m incredibly careful to make sure that not a single lovely strand of noodle gets broken as they are gently and lovingly slid into the boiling water. To me, texture and the style of eating is a big part of the enjoyment of spaghetti, and short broken strands would so completely spoil the experience that if I had a package with more than a couple of broken or chipped noodles I’d throw the whole thing in the garbage.
In fact what I normally make is technically spaghettini, cooked al dente, because I find ordinary spaghetti noodles far too thick. The right kind of spaghettini cooked this way creates a wonderful base for the classic spaghetti dinner IMHO, the long thin strands creating exactly the right texture experience. To me, short fat noodles would look like something you just dumped out of a Chef Boyardee can.
But I WANT IT NOW!!!
Because of this thread, I’m going to start breaking my spaghetti noodles in half before I put them in the pot.
Actually, I pretty much only eat fresh pasta now, so I can’t break it in half cuz it’s not, you know, dried from a box. sniff. But if you like it that way, far be it for me to cast judgement.
My kids would’ve ran away from home if I broke the spaghetti. They loved the long noodle. I also had to search out 2 twist macaroni and giant bowties. They ate a bunch of pasta.
Yes! Exactly!
Notice that the article that started this up above never ever gets around to giving a reason except that it’s traditional. So is making your own spaghetti sauce, which I also don’t do, because no recipe exists that will make one tomato’s worth of sauce. Anyone in this thread who buys commercial spaghetti sauce has no right to comment on breaking pasta.
Unless you can give me a real cooking reason, which none of you have. What difference in texture is there in 5" vs 10" cooked strands? If the ends droop into the water as quickly as non-breakers say, then how could there even physically be a difference after several more minutes of cooking? Wrapping around a fork? What kind of forks do you have that don’t require wrapping a 5" strand?
This might be the dumbest argument for anything I’ve seen here. And that includes the political threads!
wut
chop, whizz or blend one tomato to desired chunkiness
dump in pot
heat
spice
pour on pasta
Why would you do that anyway? The whole noodle doesn’t need to be submerged at the same time. I put enough water in the pot to cover the noodles about halfway up. Drop the pasta in, wait about 30 seconds, then use tongs to bend them over and submerge them.
Or use a large frying pan, lay the noodles flat, cover with cold water, heat to a boil and cook for required time, then drain. Guaranteed the noodles will not stick to each other. This works for any type of pasta.
Hell, if you are making that small an amount of pasta:
butter
Parmesan
pepper
Screw the tomatoes.
No, they only offer it in Angel Hair and Thin Spaghetti. Or at least that is all I notice when I grab a box in a split second as I zoom past in the electric shopper. I have this down pat.
Dennis
Speaking for myself, but perhaps also on behalf of all intact unbroken noodle lovers everywhere, I don’t give a damn about tradition. I care only about enjoying spaghetti (spaghettini). There isn’t a “cooking reason”, and in fact it’s harder to cook long strands uniformly than a mess of short ones. The reason has to do with the pleasure of eating them. I meant “texture” in the broad sense, not of the texture of the individual molecules of pasta material, but in the macro sense of the texture of long strands of thin noodles, as opposed to some amorphous mass of noodles’n’sauce that you could eat with a spoon.
To my mind, the alternative of short noodles is analogous to the deplorable practice of premixing the spaghetti and the sauce. How about you put the whole thing in a blender and just produce a uniform glob of what can generically and ironically be referred to as “food”? Enjoying a meal is all about an intangible mix of appearance, taste, texture, ambience, and undoubtedly many other things.
I wouldn’t consider myself to be someone “who buys commercial spaghetti sauce” since I’ve several times been through the exercise of trying out many different kinds, in some cases after carefully reading reviews, and disliking all of them. My practical solution for the last fifteen years or so has been to buy pasta sauce from a wonderful upscale Italian boutique grocery – one which has been favorably compared to Fauchon in Paris – that makes their own, and which comes in either liter or half-liter mason jars. I cannot claim that I’m able to make great pasta sauce myself, but I can truthfully claim that I know the good stuff when I taste it. And in a broader sense this is the standard I apply to whole vs. broken spaghetti.
I’m a trained cook and I know that this the proper way to cook pasta.
However, family habits die hard. I imagine my mother broke them to make it easier for me to twirl it. I do the same because it’s automatic unless I actually think about it before breaking it.
BTW, my husband the Irishman thinks it’s a riot :eyeroll:
I promise I’m not being facetious here, but…what does that mean? At first glance I took it to mean “putting the sauce and the pasta together” but that’s surely not deplorable, that’s just…well, that’s just serving a meal. Isn’t it?
I’ve already given a reason. For me, it’s mouthfeel. It’s fine if you don’t like it, but to say there’s no difference is silly. You can get a lot bigger clump of spaghetti on your fork with longer strands than you can with short strands. I love the feel of biting into a big forkful of spaghetti and the way the strands break under your teeth. And, no 5" pasta does not wrap as easily or well as 10" pasta in my experience. I have no idea if that’s why it’s traditionally not broken, but that’s why I prefer it. Same with Asian noodles, as I said before. I simply do not like short strands of thin noodles when it comes to eating them with a fork or chopsticks. For soup, which is eaten with a spoon, short strands are better, of course.
The spaghetti is placed on the plate. The sauce is ladled over the pasta.
ETA: for clarity: as opposed to dumping the sauce and spaghetti together, then serving that.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I rather get the impression that mixing it is the better way to do it though: there’s less opportunity for the uncovered pasta to cool/dry out/coagulate. Whenever I’ve eaten pasta in Italy, it’s come mixed in the sauce. Hence I wondered if there was something I was missing: I didn’t think that coating pasta in the sauce that’s been made expressly and exclusively to coat it could really be thought so terrible.
I was taught, by a gen-u-wine I-talian, to stop cooking the noodles a minute early, dump out the water, put the pasta back in the pot, add a couple ladlefuls of sauce, mix it around over heat for that last minute or so, then put the noodles on a plate and ladle sauce over it.
I’m not really into subtlety and frankly I can’t really taste any difference between doing that and just cooking the noodles and saucing them on the plate, but that’s the way I was taught, so that’s the way I do it.
That puzzled me too. Any pasta dish I’ve had in Italy had the pasta coated with its sauce before being served. Sure, serve it however you want, but “deplorable”?
Maybe it’s an Italian-Italian vs Italian-American thing?
Daddy D_Odds would always ladle in a couple of spoonfuls of sauce on the pasta before serving, mostly to keep it from sticking. Leftover pasta doesn’t clump, good when one is cooking for two days worth of meals. Cooking pasta for the last minute in sauce simply allows some of the flavors of the sauce to penetrate into the pasta. Very good with olive oil-based sauces, not so easy with a meaty “Sunday” gravy.
That’s similar to what I usually do, but I also reserve a little bit of the starchy pasta water and put about a half-to-full ladleful of it into the sauce (depending on how much sauce I have.) It helps smooth out and thicken the sauce a bit – it’s not always necessary, and I sometimes forget to do it, but I like the little bit of body and smoothness it adds to the sauce.