I’m embarrassed to ask such a question, but for years I’ve been under the impression that the purpose was to raise the boiling-point of the water. I don’t even remember where I picked this little factoid up.
After occasionally forgetting to add the salt until the water is almost ready to boil, I can’t help noticing that, far from delaying the boil, it seems to accelerate it.
Does boiling pasta (or even vegetable matter,) in salted water serve any purpose other than, well, to make it salty?
I don’t salt it. But I do add a little oil (like olive oil) to prevent it all from sticking together. C’est moi.
I seem to recall from previous threads that any reasonable amount of salt added to a pot of water will not significantly affect the boiling point.
I thought the salt was primarily for flavor.
Thanks Achernar, you’re right this has been [url=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?sthreadid=72113”]covered before.
“Use the Search, young Jedi.” :smack:
Well, now I know. I’ve been robotically salting the water all these years for no good reason. What a waste of natural resources. I’m off to flagellate myself for a bit now, and perhaps I’ll salt the wounds afterwards. Gotta do something with the stuff, and I never use it for anything besides cooking pasta.
Use the Preview, young Padawan. 
I’ve been wanting to share this for eco-fans (or just those in the middle of a heat wave), but not only is salt unnecessary, so is most of the cooking heat!
Probably this could be done with cold water, but assuming you want warm pasta: Heat the water to boiling. Put in the pasta. Turn off the heat. Stir pasta about 2 minutes later, then again at 5 minutes. Depending on how you like it, pasta is ready in 10-15 minutes.
On sweltering days I’ve found this a lifesaver.
the salt helps both to raise the boiling point which can be important with some pastas and high elevations and also improves the absorbtion of water by the noodles
From epicurious.com, here’s a handy recipe.
Read all the reviews, some people don’t like it for some reason 
AmbushBug
Fixed link: Salt in boiling water
1g salt per quart raises the boiling point of water by ~ 0.016 degrees Fahrenheit. Adding ions to the water increases the rate of hydration of the pasta.
partly_warmer takes his/her pasta off the heat to cook it. Why am I not surprised?
Oh, yeah, and …
Mudd, you lout.
See if I invite you over for din-din after the electricity’s been out for two days.
If I don’t salt it, any noodles not covered by sauce taste noticeably “flat” to me, quite possibly because I don’t drain the stuff any more than just dumping the water out while holding the pasta back with a spatula, so my pasta is normally still quite wet with the water it was cooked in, which I might notice not being salted.
Cooking it in non-boiling water - doesn’t it wind up mushy by the time you’ve let it sit long enough to become flexible? What was that about “al dente”?
It’s used solely for flavoring. Like yabob says, pasta cooked in non-salted water tastes flat.
Also, if you’re having trouble with pasta sticking together, you’re not using enough water in your pan. To properly cook pasta, you need a LOT of water, briskly boiling. Too little water results in pasta sticking together. Not boiling results in mushy textured pasta.
On Iron Chef they once had an native Italian chef whose speciality was pasta and who insisted that pasta had to be boiled in water that had the same salinity as the Mediterranean Sea.
If memory serves me right, it was Marco Molinari who faced Iron Chef Morimoto in Battle Porcini Mushroom.
Nonsense. I haven’t put salt in pasta for years and it doesn’t taste any different than pasta I eat in places where the salt is added.