The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

So: energy-in, energy-out. With me so far? Now, what happens when we add some room-temperature pasta to th ...

A LARGE POT NEVER BOILS Want to really blow the mind of one of the large- pot-insisters? Lay this one ...

Drop the pasta into the water and just leave it there, and it will indeed stick to itself. But you know ...

“Impastable!” you cry? Try it out for yourself! That’s goodbye to reason 2. Reason 3 I spent a few years worki ...

The water from pasta cooked in a smaller pot (left) is packed with more starch. This starchy pasta cooki ...

Following that logic, our goal should be to get the water as starchy as possible, the more efficiently to bi ...

I have to admit: even I was a little skeptical about this one. I mean, cook pasta without ...

at most half a degree or so—nowhere near enough to make a difference, particularly because, as we ...

bubbles from forming in the first place. Of course, with our new no-boil pasta-cooking method ...

{^ ITALIAN-AMERICAN PASTA SAUCE (^) } Pasta without sauce is like the Lone Ranger without Tonto. Milli without V ...

The five sauces are: Olive oil and garlic Tomato (classic red sauce) Pesto Cream Meat-based (ragù bolognese) Le ...

Olive oil, garlic, and a splash of pasta cooking water makes one of the simplest pasta sauces around. Mother ...

Pasta aglio e olio comes from the Abruzzo region of Italy, but this simple dish of pasta tossed with ...

and-olive-oil fiend. Feel free to serve it with any shape you’d like. The key to the recipe is to s ...

has a bit of help from the starch in the pasta cooking water. Put it all together—the three different ...

Along with its close cousin the onion, garlic is among the most widely used fresh aromatic ingr ...

away with without sacrificing quality (and you should be too!). Peeled garlic can be stored in a sealed cont ...

Sliced garlic: Garlic should be sliced with a sharp chef’s or santoku knife. To slice it, cut off the root ...

Smashed garlic: This is what I use when I want to slow-cook garlic and flavor an oil as the base ...

Minced garlic: Minced garlic is the most common form you’ll find in this book and most rec ...