1,541 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

Cooking time for pasta

What is as good and simple as pasta? Not much, I think, and it's so easy to prepare: boiling water, salted (or not, depending on your taste), a few minutes of boiling and it's ready.

The only "difficulty", so to speak, is the respect of the cooking time and the risk of, unfortunately, overcooking your pasta.

24 K 4.6/5 (19 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Pasta Time Cooking Al dente Italy

Last modified on: July 18^th 2019

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Cooking time for pasta

As always with pasta, we must take inspiration from the masters that are the Italians, they are very attached, and rightly so, to a rigorous and fair cooking, the famous "al dente".

Cooking is very precise: the pasta is plunged into boiling salted water and left for the precise number of minutes indicated on the packet, a number which depends on the nature of the pasta: 5, 6, 7 minutes or more, then drained and eaten or served.

Impossible to miss? In principle not, but there is a very easy mistake to make, it is to overcook, and thus to have overcooked pasta which becomes sticky, and much less good.

An Italian friend of mine pointed out to me that "At home" (in France) pasta is always overcooked, no matter where you go to eat it. It's not that it's inedible, just that it's a little overcooked, usually by a minute or so.

It's not always the cook's fault, the mistake is often already on the package, so she pointed me to this great tip.

If you have a package of pasta where it is written in Italian

pâte italiennes

Respect the time indicated precisely (here 6 minutes)

If you have a packet of pasta where it is written in a language other than Italian

pates françaises

Subtract 1 minute from the indicated cooking time, so here 12 - 1 = 11 minutes.

With this simple rule, you should have pasta that is always al dente.

To sum up: The cooking time is indicated not in Italian on the package => subtract one minute from the indicated time, the cooking time is indicated in Italian, do not change anything.

Lasts posts

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20251,0765

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20251,1635

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,058

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,8595

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,5983

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Baking cakes

Where we see that to put a cake in the oven, once the dough is finished and in its mould, there is no hurry and that the cold is your friend.
June 28^th 201945 K4.1

The right weight of pastry for a pie

Let's try to solve a thorny problem: How much dough will I need when I make my next pie? You're planning to make a pie, you're going to use your favourite mould or circle, but how much pastry will you need to fill it completely with a well spread pastry, without being too thin, or on the contrary...
March 20^th 202067 K4.3

The so-called "nervous" meats

You've probably heard this before, we're talking about "nervous" meat, or meat with nerves, to describe what is indicated by the blue arrow on the left. This is a piece of beef, and what we call a nerve is not a nerve, it is in fact collagen (chemists sometimes call it a "collagen sink"), a...
April 16^th 202137 K4.5

How easy is it to chop herbs?

Whenever you have fresh herbs - parsley, chervil, coriander, mint, etc. - to incorporate into a recipe, we tell you to chop them up. In this case, "chopping" means separating the leaves from the stems, keeping only the leaves, and chopping them more or less finely. It's not very complicated,...
September 12^th 202313 K5

How to zest a fruit?

You will have no doubt noticed that many recipes call for the zest of citrus fruit. The zest is that outer layer of the skin which adds so much flavour to a dish. There are many different ways to peel off the zest and various tools are available. Here is a summary of the “dos and don'ts” of...
November 5^th 201347 K3.8