During a recent trip to Italy, a local surprised us by saying that everyone (including Italians) cooks pasta wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that we boil the water, then add the pasta. But our Italian source insisted that pasta cooks best at 176°F—a temperature well below the 212°F required to bring water to a full boil. Could it be true?
To test this theory, we needed to consider the science of pasta cooking. A high-quality dried pasta consists of starch granules surrounded by a network of proteins. When the pasta is cooked, the starch absorbs water, swelling and gelatinizing, while the heat causes the surrounding proteins to firm up and hold the starches in place. This process occurs between 158°F and 176°F, and it’s in this range that pasta becomes al dente (flexible, yet firm to the bite).
For our test, we cooked two varieties of dried pasta— rigatoni and fettuccine—at both a low simmer and a hard boil. We were surprised that during the first 10 minutes of cooking, the simmered pasta softened more quickly than the boiled pasta. But after 10 minutes, the differences balanced out, with the boiled pasta reaching the al dente stage first.
We believe this happened because the greater heat energy of the boiling water activates the insolubility of the pasta surface proteins more rapidly, transforming it into a protective outer layer that shields the pasta’s starches from water.
By contrast, the lower heat energy of the simmering water appears to affect pasta proteins more slowly, allowing the water to penetrate the pasta and gelatinize the starches more rapidly. Thus, we found no benefit to simmering pasta. In fact, boiling is not only quicker, it’s also better for pasta that is only parcooked in water, then finished in a sauce. The higher heat causes the pasta to absorb less water, so it can absorb more sauce during the next stage of cooking.
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