You’re cooking pasta wrong – chef says don’t boil it in plain water

Most people are familiar with the traditional method of cooking pasta: placing dry pasta in a pot of boiling water with a pinch of salt and letting it simmer for about 10 minutes. However, one chef and mother-of-two insists that we’ve been ‘doing it wrong’ all along and proposes a superior pasta-cooking technique.

Hollie-Evelyn, known as @hollieevelyn on Instagram, regularly shares her “delicious, wholesome recipes” with her 83,500 followers on the platform. In one of her recent reels, she decided to share a pasta hack – unveiling a different approach to the usual way of cooking it.

The video showed Hollie adding dry pasta directly into her pan, with overlay text reading: “POV: you stopped boiling your kids’ pasta in plain water and this happened..”

Next, Hollie was seen adding chopped cherry tomatoes to the pan, along with peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, onion, courgettes and dried mixed herbs before pouring stock over everything.

The chef explains that she cooks the pasta in this manner until it’s al-dente, then mixes in one tablespoon of cornstarch and one tablespoon of the pasta sauce.

Captioning the reel, the mum wrote: “Stop wasting an opportunity to add flavour and goodness into your kids’ meals!

“I cook the pasta straight in chicken stock and veggies. It soaks up all the nutrition and flavour and makes pasta x 10 tastier (with zero extra pans or faffing around!).

“It’s my kids favourite and I never get asked for plain pasta now!”

She said: “Simple and delicious. Save this one for a quick 15-minute meal. We call it rainbow pasta – goodbye plain old pasta.”

To see Hollie’s full recipe, be sure to check out her reel.

The post was a hit, garnering over 9,000 likes. One fan exclaimed: “I can almost smell the flavours.”

Another commented: “Oh what a great idea.”

A third added: “So simple but so effective. Thank you for sharing lovely.”

A fourth also offered their own advice, stating: “Same deal with rice too – so yummy!”