1,551 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

XO Cognac Explained: Meaning, Aging, and Flavor Profile

XO Cognac always goes beyond the labels on the bottle: it is often associated with tradition and quality. You get to appreciate the artistry, character and ageing process when you understand what defines this smooth Cognac. The section below tackles everything about XO Cognac, from complex flavour...
January 28^th 202676 Sponsored article

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 20252,2755

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 20251,4995

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 20251,365

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 20254,2665

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

85 grams of eggs?

Some time ago, I already spoke to you about the difference between baking and pastry-making, I emphasized, among other things, the precision of pastry-making which requires grams, cm, degrees and minutes. That's why, on the one hand, you have baking and cooking, where a certain tolerance is...
November 26^th 201857 K4.6

Preserving egg yolks

If you're using only the egg whites in a recipe (such as meringues ), you'll need to store the yolks until you're ready to use them again. There's nothing very complicated about this in principle - all you have to do is chill them, but there are a few pitfalls to be avoided in practice.
June 18^th 20248,4445

Steam for baking bread

What does steam have to do with bread-making? This is not only a bakers' secret, it is something you might not think of at all: if you make bread and bake it like a cake, you will end up with bread, but pale and with a thick, hard crust – a long way from the golden-brown crusty loaf you had in...
June 16^th 2021148 K4.5

Perpetual stock

It's something you have probably have done yourself: cooked or pre-cooked vegetables before adding them to a recipe. This is almost always done the same way: peel the chosen vegetables (carrots, for example), cut them up, boil them in salted water (using a tablespoon or so of coarse salt per litre),...
November 22^th 201631 K5

The golden-brown finish on puff pastry

Let's take a look at the tricky matter of producing puff pastry with an attractive, golden-brown finish. French pastry chefs call this "dorure" (literally, "gilding"). Behind this quirky term there lurks a real problem (and the solution): when using puff pastry (pâte feuilletée) for a pie, or...
February 8^th 201848 K 24.6