Cooking Pasta: Absorption Method

Filed in archive Tricks & Techniques on May 28, 2006

Pasta, pasta, who doesn't love pasta? Do you know that even to this day, in many italian homes when the menfolk come home from work, instead of saying "I'm home!" they say "Mamma, butta la pasta!"? That literally means drop the pasta in the boiling water - because I'm home and hungry. Boiling is the most well-known way of cooking pasta. That's the method written on the backs of packages. However, there's another method.

I've read about this technique a long time ago, long before I've read about Iska's Singing Spaghetti. Now Clotilde mentions it:

The idea of this technique is to coat the pasta with a little olive oil, add just enough liquids to cover, and cook until desired tenderness. According to Virka -- who read it in the Italian paper La Reppublica so it simply must be true -- this cooking technique dates back from the early 13th century, and was in fact the only one that was used before it was displaced by the now-classic boiling method.

Cooking the pasta in the sauce, I have been using a very similar way after reading about it BUT only if I'm cooking for myself, the pasta is meant to be immediately eaten or for a small number of people and I know that they'll finish what I cooked at the end of the meal. Why? The main reason is because the leftover pasta will be soggy after a few hours. Unlike boiled pasta which is plunged in cold water after draining to keep it from further cooking, this cannot be done with the absorption method. Having it soaking in the sauce does not help either.

But would I recommend this method? Yes, definitely. I find the pasta more flavourful and toothsome (Clotilde says so too). Try it, you might just love it.