Home cook calculates exact time to cook pasta for it to be al dente

A home cook has gone to the effort of calculating how long you need to cook every single type of pasta for, in order for it to be al dente, which literally translates to ‘to the tooth,’ meaning it’s slightly harder than the soft pasta you may be used to.

If you like your pasta cooked this way, then read on. If you’re sick of following the box instructions and getting “mush” for your evening meal, heed this advice instead.

The methodology for the home cook, who posted their advice on Reddit’s cooking forum, was they used the “same brand (Barilla) for consistency where possible”. They used “4 quarts water per pound, 1 tbsp salt per quart, rolling boil before adding pasta, tested every 30 seconds starting 2 minutes before box minimum, and each shape tested 3 times, [then] averaged”.

They also wanted a “slight resistance when bitten” and shared a table of all the different pasta shapes they tested, 31 in total, and compared how long the box tells you to cook it for to how long you actually need to cook the pasta for.

The keen pasta maker explained: “Every single box time is wrong, like they were systematically inflated by 1-3 minutes on average. The median overestimate is 1:15, and the worst offender in normal pasta is ziti at 3 full minutes of lies.”

They continued: “I have a theory: pasta companies assume you’re going to walk away from the stove. They’re building in a buffer for idiots, which, fair. But some of us are standing here with a stopwatch.”

The home cook wrote: “Now let me talk about farfalle: farfalle is not pasta. Farfalle is a design flaw someone decided to mass-produce.

“The fundamental problem is geometric. You have thin frilly edges (maybe 1mm thick) attached to a dense pinched centre (3-4mm thick where it’s folded). These two regions require completely different cooking times.

“At 8 minutes: centre is crunchy, edges are perfect. At 10 minutes: centre is barely al dente, edges are mush. At 11 minutes, the edges have disintegrated, centre is finally acceptable.

“There is no time at which farfalle is uniformly cooked. I tested this 7 times because I thought I was doing something wrong. Farfalle is wrong.”

So, overall, the advice is, if you want pasta cooked to al dente perfection, it’s best to do it one to two minutes less than whatever the box says, and start testing the pasta two to three minutes earlier than that, so you can see what texture it is.

They added: “Some of you may ask about fresh pasta. Fresh pasta cooks in like 2-3 minutes, and you can actually tell when it’s done because it floats. Dried pasta is where the lies live.”

In the comments, someone wrote: “Maybe this is crazy, but I don’t set a timer for my pasta. Once I can tell the pasta is close, I eat a noodle every minute until I’m satisfied.”

Another penned: “I start tasting once it looks right. The shininess changes, I dunno, it’s just fairly obvious to me.”

A woman fumed: “Who follows those recommended cook times? Are you all insane? Once it’s close to your liking, spoon a noodle out, toss it quickly back and forth between your hands to cool it (~3-5 seconds) and test it. Repeat every minute until it’s good. This is how my Italian friend taught me to cook pasta. There is no timer involved.”