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  water and salt

  As long as you are willing to stir, you can use very little water to boil pasta.  If it's in hot water, it's being cooked.

  Obviously, keeping the cover on heats the water faster, so do that.

  Salt has almost no effect on the TASTE of pasta (try doubling or even tripling the amount of salt you put in and tasting the pasta raw some time..it takes a lot more salt in the water to make pasta taste salty than we are talking about here.) However, salt does make the water boil hotter, and thus cooks the pasta faster.  Remember back to high school chemistry - a mixture always boils at higher temperature than pure water.  Thus more salt is usually better since it shortens cooking time (the extra time to reach slightly higher boiling point is negligible by comparison).  This means also that you should put the salt in before the water boils, and wait for it to boil at the new higher temp (or, put it in at boiling, but hold off adding the pasta for a bit until the new temperature is achieved).  Whether you add the salt when the water is cold or hot makes no difference.On A new low-carbon (if not low-carb) way to cook the Italian staple posted 9 months ago 7 Responses