We dare to bet you make these mistakes as well when you’re cooking pasta!

Everybody loves pasta. At least, the large majority of us do. It’s one of the most delicious Italian dishes and most people will have their own go-to recipe they’ve been making for years. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Well, it turns out there just might be, because in most cases we make a couple of pretty big mistakes when we’re cooking pasta.

The website Insider spoke with a panel of Italian chefs, who revealed the biggest mistakes most amateur chefs make when they’re cooking pasta.

Cheap version

Don’t try to save money by buying a cheap dried pasta. A couple of the budget pasta brands choose to take a shortcut in their production process. This is why their products are cheaper, but this shortcut also means the pasta is of a lower quality. The lower quality is especially caused by the type of flour used by budget brands and the speeding up of the drying process.

Boiling water

A lot of people don’t have the patience to wait until the water is boiling completely before they add the pasta to the pot. Don’t drop the entire load of penne in the water as soon as the water surface starts bubbling a little. Wait for about half a minute after the water starts boiling properly and then add the pasta.

Too little salt

“Well-seasoned pasta water should taste like a well-seasoned soup,” is what chef Nate Whiting, a famous chef in the US, said about the topic. He suggests you should add 10 grams of salt to every 1000 ml of water. If you add too little salt, the pasta will taste bland.

Enough water

Make sure you’ve got more than enough water in the pot to boil the pasta in. “Pasta needs room to swim!” according to Nate Whiting. He says we should cook our pasta in a lot of salted, boiling water.

Want to read about the other pasta tips? Go to the next page!

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