Previous
Last weekend I got involved in a discussion on Twitter about the power of pasta water. I was whipping together a quick pasta for lunch with what I had on hand — wheat spaghetti, fresh mozzarella, Parmesan, my windowsill herbs — which wasn’t anything too special. Cheese being my obsession, I love a good cheese pasta, but mozzarella being so stringy? Not so much.
Enter the pasta water. Instead of flushing that starchy, salty water down the drain, I added the water bit by bit to my cooked noodles and cheese. Certainly, there was still some clumping, but int he end, most noodles were fully coated with a creamy, yummy cheese sauce that materialized out of thin air and stirring.
Voila!
It was Bill Buford’s excellent book Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany that first introduced me to the concept of pasta water as an ingredient rather than a waste product. And I’m not alone. It’s a gem of wisdom that many who read the book latched on to. Such as. For example. And as an avid recipe reader, I see the technique cropping up more and more, so let’s take a look at one example.
Spicy Spaghetti with Fennel and Herbs.
Whereas we usually think of pasta as being topped by a very specific, viscous sauce — tomato sauce, cream sauce, wine-based sauce, etc. — these pasta water-reserving dishes are instead a collection of flavorful ingredients bound to the noodles with only or mostly that liquid, making the taste less diluted but still cohesive. If that description makes sense to anyone other than me.
The star in this simple dish is the fennel, which is braised in chicken broth along with pancetta, garlic, jalapeno, herbs and spices.
And as you toss those ingredients with the hot pasta and dashes of pasta water, bit by bit, you no longer have noodles tossed with ingredients, but a bound together, moist and delicious pasta dish.
And that, my friends, is the power of pasta water.
One note on this recipe: Yeah, it’s not spicy. At least not for us, maybe because we had to use green instead of red jalapenos. But next time, I’m amping it up.
More importantly, we both like fennel. More than most folks, even. But do you see how big these wedges of fennel they call for are?
Unnecessary. Annoying. Not that tasty. Next time, my fennel is getting diced, which will also decrease cooking time, most likely. I’ll let you know.
As for pasta water, don’t just take my word for it.
- The water “behaves like a sauce thickener, binding the elements and flavoring the pasta with the flavor of itself.” (Source)
- Reserve about 1 cup of the cooking water before you drain the pasta. Use as much of this reserved pasta cooking water as needed to thin out your sauce (this allows you to cut down on olive oil or butter). Also, because the pasta cooking water is so rich in starch, it helps the sauce bind to the pasta—making for pasta with a lovely, velvety quality. And, the residual heat in the reserved pasta cooking water will help your pasta stay hot for longer. (Source)
- When pasta cooks, its natural starches are released in the cooking water. These starches complement the pasta meal because they help “bind” the sauce that is to be used, and allow the sauce to adhere better to the pasta. (Source)
