I know that it increases the boiling point of the water, but by how much?
Does the salt (other than making the food taste salty) cause any changes to texture? Like for spaghetti does it make it gooey, or “more” el dente? Or does the salt do other things that I am not aware of currently?
It increase the boiling point by a small amount. This claims 1/2 degree C for every 58 grams per gallon of water. 58 grams is about 2 table spoons of salt.
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen01/gen01021.htm
Pasta texture is primarily due to cooking time. I can’t find any cites, but my own original research suggests that salt has a negligible affect on texture, but is useful for the purposes of flavour. However salt variously affects the ‘acceptability of texture’ with meat, and plant products. Other effects are outlined here.
ETA: reference I found suggested +0.5°C for every 58 grams of salt per kilogram of water.
The salt is primarily (I’d say “only”, but I want to hedge a little) for the flavor. It’s the same reason you salt the water for potatoes. It’s to get a little saltiness into the pasta. To do this right, though, you should salt the water pretty generously–enough so that it is somewhat salty to the taste. Traditionally, it is said one should salt the water so it tastes like the sea, or something like that. American styles of Italian cooking tend to be much more heavily sauced than Continental/Northern Italian styles, so you might not notice the difference as much. I tend to make my pastas very light on the sauce (something like in this picture), so undersalted pasta is more noticable. You can add salt afterwards, of course, but it seems to distribute and penetrate the pasta better when you salt the water.
For some foods it will prevent them from turning into mush when boiling.
Al dente. Italian, not Spanish.
The formula for boiling point elevation is molality * i * Kb, where molality is moles of solute over kg of solvent, i is the number of particles each solute molecule dissolves into (Van’t Hoff factor), and Kb is a constant unique to the solvent. For water, Kb = .512, so to raise the temp by 1 degree, you have:
1 = 2 * .512 * x mol/1kg
so you need .98 moles NaCl (57 g) per kg of water to raise the boiling point by 1°C.
Edit: I think the cites didn’t take the Van’t Hoff factor into account.
I’d thought it was to add nucleation points… No?
if the salt is dissolved then it isn’t a nucleation point.
most metal pans have enough scratches to provide lots of points.
And you never get superheated water in a cooking pot, AFAIK.
For food science questions I always trust Harold McGee.
If the cooking water is supposed to taste “like the sea”, would it work to just use actual seawater? Assuming one has a ready clean supply of it, of course.
Pasta tastes just fine when cooked in unsalted water. People are just so used to salt that they think something’s wrong if they don’t taste it.
People just like the taste of salt. I prefer the taste of pasta, though.
Nah, it tastes bland. And it’s not just modern over-salted tastes, this is how the Italians have been doing it forever. I think we’ve been over this before, but I suspect you are particularly sensitive to salt. For a lot of us, salt amplifies the flavors of foods, making them taste more like themselves. Undersalted pasta isn’t near the abomination undersalted potatoes are, though.
I second this. Bread without a small bit of salt in it tastes bad. Bread with salt in it doesn’t taste salty, but it tastes much much more like… bread.
Same thing goes for a lot of things you would think shouldn’t have salt, like cinnamon rolls or caramels.
I’ve never tried it with pasta but we always cook lobster in seawater and it tastes great.
Well, we’ve established that ‘normal’ salting of water for cooking pasta doesn’t change the boiling point significantly.
I concur on the ‘more flavorful’ aspect, but I was under the impression that the salt aided in dissolving the gluten cooked out of the pasta, making it cook better and helping prevent ‘clumping’ – the annoying phenomenon of having a dozen or so strands of spaghetti stuck together in a quarter-inch-diameter glob. (Of course stirring during cooking and rinsing aftewards help here too, but the salt in the water aids in dissolution.)
OK, what about the “add a bit of oil to the water” folklore? There seems to beat least two theories for that one - first, that it keeps the pasta from sticking together, and secondly, that it keeps the water from frothing up and spilling over. So just boil it at a rolling boil in a sufficiently large pot.
Nevertheless, I will admit to performing both rituals. I salt the water and put a dollop of oil in it.
And you DON’T rinse it. Just pour the water off.
Oil does help the frothing a little bit. It does nothing to prevent the pasta from sticking together when added to the water. Pasta sticks together in the pot because the pieces were not separated (you needed to stir it better or have the water at a higher boil).
If you want to keep things from sticking after cooking and draining, you either put the pasta straight into a sauce, or add oil.
As for rinsing, you should rinse when you want to stop the cooking process and hold the pasta. For example, if you are making a pasta salad, or are cooking pasta the night before you plan to add sauce to it. (These are the same occasions when adding oil after cooking also makes sense)
I eat it that way all the time; it tastes just fine. And, no, I’m not sensitive to salt, but I generally prefer the flavor of the food to the flavor of salt (with some exceptions – I do prefer french fries, potato chips, or butter salted).
If the Italians have been doing it forever, then they haven’t tasted pasta without salt. They don’t know.
People like the taste of salt, and probably think something is missing without it. But all that’s missing is the salt, not the flavor of the dish. Sugar makes food taste sweet; pepper makes food taste like pepper; oregano makes food taste like oregano; garlic makes food taste like garlic; etc. But salt, magically, does not make food taste like salt. :dubious:
If you like the taste of salt, that’s fine, but don’t confuse the taste of salt with flavor.
