Salting your pasta water (#10)

When I was in college, I got in an argument with my friend Sam about whether salting your pasta water was needed. He was pro, I was con. To him, salting your pasta water was the same as salting your food - it adds flavor, so you should do it. I was against it because I was looking at the amount of salt he added, which was (to my recollection) merely a few shakes of the salt shaker. There was just no way that amount of salt would flavor the pasta.

Now, of course, I salt my pasta water. But I was right at the time that Sam was way undersalting his pasta water (sorry Sam!). Unfortunately, at the time (2012), scientific cooking hadn’t penetrated the mainstream and we didn’t think of things in a rigorous manner. And salting your pasta water seemed like an article of faith - you just did the thing because everyone else did it, and you don’t want people to make fun of you the way this hedge fund roasted Olive Garden.

My problem was that I didn’t bother to interrogate the article of faith. I assumed that since Sam - and everyone else I had ever seen salt their pasta water - used such little salt, that there was no point in salting your pasta water. But it is so disappointing to me that I didn’t take that belief to its logical conclusion: that they should be salting their pasta water more. A lot more.

I started adding a lot more salt to my pasta water due to reading Missy Robbins’s recommendation in her book pasta to add 2 tablespoons salt for every quart of water. I usually use 6-7 quarts of water to cook my pasta, which means I should be using about 3/4 cup. Typically I go down to about 1/2 cup, but even that tastes a little salty to me. And that’s so much more than the average person uses. Serious Eats, for reference, calls for 1% salinity, which is achieved with half of the amount that Missy Robbins uses (I guess she likes her pasta salty).

Note also that Missy Robbins uses Diamond Crystal kosher salt. I use Morton’s coarse kosher salt. In that Serious Eats article there is a 1.5:1 ratio of salinity by volume for Diamond Crystal to Morton’s kosher salt due to the larger grain size of the Diamond Crystal product. This means that I was actually achieving Robbins’s desired 2% salinity with my 1/2 cup of Morton’s kosher salt per 6 quarts of water! The rabbit hole goes deep!