I started reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Head written by Samin Nosrat, a book about mastering the elements of good cooking.
The first chapter is on salt, including the types of salt and properly salting. Including how time, heat and water affect the activity of salt (osmosis and diffusion). The book further talks about how salt not only changes flavour, but also can change the texture of protein. Besides directly salting the food, it is also possible to create a salted environment for the food to cook in.
After reading, I decided to set up some experiements to see if what the book says is true.
The Hypothesis:
Cooking the as the book says will yield a properly salted pasta that is tastier than what I do normally.
The Salt:
First thing was buying the salt. The book recommends a particular sea salt brand that is not sold in Australia and is probably going into liquidation. In Australia, the salt I picked up is SAX cooking salt.
The Experiment – First Run:
The book suggested a starting point of 2% salinity for blanching and cooking pasta, and I decided to put that into practise.
| Normally I cook pasta this way: | Using the book technique: | |
| Ingredients: | Big pot 3cm deep water and about 180g of pasta + a tiny tiny pinch of salt or no salt at all | Small pot A litre of water (or 4 cups) 100g of pasta + 13g of sea salt (unfortunately, I think I put in 15g) |
| Cooking: | After water is boiling, cook for 12 minutes with lid on. Take pasta out, and use cold water to stop cooking process. | After water is boiling, cook for 10 minutes lid off. Take pasta out then cold water to stop the cooking process. |
| Result & observation: | Very soft pasta, no salt taste. Lots of big bubbles and overflowing over the pot, had to take the lid off for half the cooking process. By the end, water was only 1 cm left. | Extremely salty pasta, not completely cooked through. Water boiled much slower than big pot (probably due to heat escaping through the side of the pot). Small light foaming so I cannot keep the lid on. |
| Remedy: | N/A | Threw the pasta into boiling, unsalted water and cooked for 1 minute. |
| Result: | N/A | Great texture and not too salty |
Results:
Cooking with 16g of salt yielded a pasta with better texture but much saltier than mine, and is inedible as a result.
Discussion:
There was definitely some inaccuracies with how the experiment was handled, so I tried again in the second run.
Improvements to make in second run:
- Salt makes sure the pasta is properly cooked at the temperature (curtesy of friend’s research)
- Need enough water. I researched and found that the reason for the big bubbles in the first pot was due to too much starch the pasta was releasing into the water – i.e. I need to have more water vs pasta ratio to prevent that.
- Checking pot and stove size
The Experiment – Second Run:
After my first run, I was curious if I was just cooking for too long with 12 minutes. Maybe if I shortened it I would get a similar texture? I also saw on the Barilla package that they suggested 7g of salt with 1 L water and 100g pasta.
I reran the experiment:
| No Salt | Using the packaging technique: | |
| Ingredients: | Big pot No salt 130g of pasta | Small pot A litre of water (or 4 cups) 100g of pasta + 7g of sea salt |
| Cooking: | After water is boiling, cook for 10 minutes with lid off. Take pasta out, and use cold water to stop cooking process. | After water is boiling, cook for 10 minutes lid off. Take pasta out then cold water to stop the cooking process. |
| Result & observation: | Still soft pasta, no salt taste. Texture is better but not as good as book technique pasta. | Still quite salty pasta, good texture. |
| Remedy: | N/A | Added olive oil (per suggestion of friend) |
| Result: | N/A | Less salty but still somewhat salty, great texture. |
Results:
Cooking as the packaging said yielded a pasta with better texture but still saltier than mine, and is too salty to eat.
Discussion:
Both my friend and I agree that 7g pasta is still too salty. She then suggested olive oil, which did temper the salt, so the tricky thing is the pasta may depend on the sauce. For example, I am making carbonara, which is quite a salty sauce, so the salty pasta + salty sauce is not great. The pasta may be considered properly seasoned if I made bolognese.
However, considering in the past I never needed salted pasta, I suspect I don’t prefer too salty noodles. (Consistent with how Chinese noodles are cooked, we add the sauce later.)
Thus, the experiment confirms I should put in less than 7g of salt. It is also possible that the 10min fully immerses a lot of salt into the pasta, unlike blanching, so I should put probably 5g or less.
Conclusion:
A. It is found that salt improves the texture of pasta over non-salted water.
B. 1L water + 100g pasta should not have more than 7g of sea salt when cooked for 10 minutes.
C. To further confirm results for a perfect pasta, the experiment can be rerun as follows:
- Try 5g salted pasta with bolognese to see if it is not salty enough
- Test the 5g salted pasta texture
D. What is read from the books needs to interact with actual experiments. Books frequently provide a starting point for exploring what works for ourselves. It is not wise to only blindly trust the books. I shall leave you with a Chinese saying: “人要有格物致知精神!” or “People should have the spirit of investigating things to attain knowledge!”
2024.09.02