How To Cook Pasta Like A Nonna

Pasta comes in two basic forms: dried and fresh. Both are good, but suitable for different sauces.

Fresh pasta usually contains egg and is typical of more affluent northern Italy where it’s sauced with rich meat ragùs and creamy or buttery sauces. The poorer south makes dried pasta from just flour and water, and typically dresses it with olive oil, tomato and bolder Mediterranean flavours.

First, which pasta to buy.
If you’re buying dried pasta, Italian is best! Dried pasta should be made from a particularly hard variety of wheat called durum wheat, any other variety creates a pasta that’s too soft when cooked. Under Italian law dried pasta can only be made with durum wheat.

The best dried pasta is extruded through bronze dies rather than the more commercial Teflon-coated ones, leaving a rougher, more porous surface for the sauce to cling to. It’s also called bronze-extruded or bronze-drawn pasta. Most major brands have bronze-extruded ranges.

Now the cooking.
There are only a few simple rules to follow to cook pasta like an Italian Nonna:

• Use plenty of water, ideally 1 litre water per 100g pasta.
• Salt the water well, 10g salt per litre of water.
• Get the water to a rolling boil before adding the pasta then return it to the boil as quickly as possible.
• Use the packet timing as a guide but check regularly during cooking by biting a piece.
• Be brave and take it out of the water just before you think it’s ready, so it can finish cooking in the heat of the sauce.
• Act quickly, either draining the pasta and reserving some of the cooking water or lifting the pasta straight from the water into the sauce.
• Add pasta to the pan of sauce immediately and toss together over the heat (this doesn’t apply to sauces like pesto, that are served ‘a crudo’ and only heated by the warmth of the pasta).
• As you toss the pasta and sauce together add a little of the cooking water, it contains starch from the pasta which makes the sauce creamy and helps bind it and the pasta together.
• The sauce should dress and flavour the pasta, not drown it. By tossing the hot pasta and sauce together, the pasta absorbs the sauce so every bite has flavour and you need less sauce.
• Serve pasta immediately into warm shallow bowls. The Italians say: “La pasta non aspetta nessuno” (pasta waits for no one).
• Eat pasta with a fork, or fork and spoon, never a knife as you shouldn’t cut the strands.

Scroll down for a step-by-step video of how to cook pasta like a Nonna!