This Is The Only Reason You Should Rinse Pasta

When you want to make the perfect pasta dish, you have to contend with a ton of challenges. According to Reader's Digest, pasta's simplicity invites a ton of issues, ranging from not adding the proper amount of salt into the boiling water, all the way to exclusively using dried pasta in your recipe. Chief among these common errors occurs at the end meal preparation. Even if you followed all the proper techniques, rinsing your cooked pasta off can spell disaster for your meal. 

You might find recipes that encourage pasta rinsing when cooking Italian meals. According to Delallo, rinsing off pasta results in noodles that lose the ability to absorb any additional flavor. When you want to have your noodles take on the taste of your accompanying sauce, rinsing off your pasta after it finishes cooking can indeed wreck the entire meal. When in doubt, make sure not to rinse, except during one specific situation that truly requires uniform, no-nonsense noodles.

If you need to make a cold pasta salad, soba noodles, or any other cold noodle dish, you absolutely have to rinse your noodles under cool water. According to Bon Appetit, rinsing the pasta removes starch, preventing the noodles from clinging together. Rinsing the pasta also stops the cooking process, finalizing the texture of the noodles (via Delallo). 

When in doubt, make a point to never rinse your pasta; unless the recipe delivers a final product that requires you to eat it cold or at room temperature, make sure to save the crucial starch of each noodle for the optimal mouth feel in every bite. When you have to impress, you wouldn't want a rookie mistake like this to throw off the whole course. With a bit of practice and some conscious effort, we can all avoid this mistake that any noodle novice can easily fall prey to.