These Imperial Turdsicles not only saythat Olive Garden, the Italian restaurant chain, is being reckless with its unlimited breadsticks but complains that Olive Garden fails to salt the water used to boil its pasta.
WTF. If I’m going to smother my pasta with a meaty Bolognese sauce, why on earth would I need to salt the water I cook my pasta in?
You don’t NEED to salt the water you cook pasta in. I never do. The advantage of salting is that the salt elevates the boiling point of water. So the water gets hotter, and the pasta cooks faster. That’s about it.
How much salt would I have to add to 1 (one) gallon of water to increase the boiling point of the water and how much would the temperature be elevated (over say, 5 (five) minutes?
Extra Credit - And how much quicker would the pasta be cooked assuming I toss in 1 (one) pound of Linguine using the salted water as opposed to unsalted water? (C’mon, earn that Phd.)
Nope. Despite what the Internet would have us believe, you’d need astounding amounts of salt (like a cup of it per gallon of water) to raise the boiling point of water enough to make a difference in cooking time. Four tablespoons per gallon will raise the boiling point less than half a degree – your altitude will make far more difference than any amount of salt you could get to dissolve.
The real reason is for taste, and if you’re going to be putting something on the pasta (or salting it later, or just don’t like the taste of salt), it’s perfectly optional. Most people don’t put enough in to even affect taste much – the recommendation I’ve heard from chefs is that the water needs to taste like seawater before it’ll be seasoned enough to affect the pasta’s taste noticeably.
ETA Math for folks who care: Examples Of Colligative Property | Sciencing
Surely the point of salting is to make it taste better, the same reason people salt vegetables when they boil them. If you don’t think it tastes better with a bit of salt, or if you do, but you are deathly afraid of a little extra sodium, you don’t have to do it.
Taste better? As I said, I’m going to smother my pasta with a meaty Bolognese sauce, so why would I need to salt the water to boil the pasta?
Seems obvious to me that putting salty sauce on top of pasta doesn’t get the saltiness inside of the pasta itself, which is what happens when it boils in salty water. The salt gets absorbed into the pasta, and though you might not think it, the effect is different when you eat it.
It all gets mixed up in your stomach anyway.
You probably don’t, but if you’ve got two pots to your name, this is an excellent time for Kitchen Experimentation ™! Do half your pasta each way, and see if you can (blind) tell the difference between the two at the end.
Salt is weird stuff. It changes the way your tongue perceives other tastes, even in quantities too small to taste “salty.” Adding the same amount of salt before, during, or after cooking will often produce more variation in taste than you’d expect – particularly for foods containing or cooked in a lot of liquid (soups mainly, but also pastas). In certain foods, it has chemical properties beyond it’s flavor at all: acting as a limiter to yeast, for example, or decreasing the freezing point of water for ice cream. I can’t detect it, but I’ve been told that it will affect the texture of flour-based foods, as well; it’s possible that pasta would be included.
Thanks, TimeWinder. Will try the two pot solution.
Pasta is bland without salt that’s why. The bolognese sauce doesn’t make the pasta any less bland. However I’m a salty person I like things well salted. My girlfriend doesn’t salt pasta.
You should dump her.
I have high blood pressure, and I talk with my doctor and dietician in gruesome detail about salt intake. As far as I can tell the salt added to ALL my food in home cooking isn’t a significant contributor to my sodium intake. I’ve added less than one kilogram of salt in the last eight years. The last time I bought a 1kg package of salt was 2006, when we moved and I tossed the entire pantry before moving. It’s still half full at least. And for all that time, there have been three people in our household. So I doubt if even 100mg per person per day is coming from there.
What’s driving up the intake is the salt in the processed ingredients. Soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, various Chinese processed tofu products, meat substitutes, bouillon and stock, pasta and pizza sauces. All loaded up with sodium. I might put a teaspoon of salt
per liter of pasta water, but. 90% of that is getting poured out when I drain.
I can definitely taste the difference between salted and unsalted pasta water. Or rather my daughter can, if I forget to salt it. On the other hand we make our own pasta sauce with fresh or canned tomatoes. So that is not adding an amount of saltiness that may drown out taste sensitivity to salt in the pasta itself.
Yes, it’s to flavor the pasta itself, not raise the boiling point the miniscule amount a little salt would raise it. I agree that not salting it makes the pasta taste bland, and it’s not quite the same as salting the outside of it, but it may not be a big deal to everyone. (I tend to use a fairly restrained amount of sauce on my pasta, so the pasta itself is more noticeable.) The best, as always, is not to take anyone’s word for it and try it both ways, as suggested above. For the same reason, I like a bit of salt in my water when cooking rice, as well.
Right: it’s about the flavor and possibly texture. It doesn’t matter to me; I guess my palate isn’t delicate enough, but I add salt when cooking for others.
TimeWinder is definitely right that salt can have nonintuitive results. I’m trying to remember the details and can’t, but just recently I tasted an insight into this and it was remarkable. Adding salt to one ingredient changed the whole experience of a mixture (a hash of sorts, if my vague impressionistic recollection is of any value).
1.How much salt are you adding to how much water?
2. How much of that salt do you think is poured down the drain along with the water?
3. At the end of the process, how much of a difference do you think the little salt that actually got into the pasta itself effected the taste?
Pasta absorbs flavours as it cooks. As other said, salting the water is to give it some flavour. Here’s something else you can do: Drain the pasta before it’s done, and finish cooking it in the sauce. That way it will absorb sauce. (I haven’t tried this with a white sauce.)
You are supposed to use a lot of salt. If you watch cooking shows they throw in handfuls of the stuff. I’m sure most of that salt goes back to the sea.
I can definitely tell the difference between well seasoned pasta and the non-salted bland stuff.
I have seen cooking shows where they have thrown in pinches of salt and maybe a spoon or two of salt(if into a big pot), but I have never seen them throw in handfuls.
This seems to be the preferred method by chefs, and I believe, most actual Italians.