Macaroni soaked for varying degrees of time.To try it out myself, I placed some macaroni in a bowl of
warm tap water and allowed it to sit, pulling a piece out
every 5 minutes to weigh how much water it had absorbed.
After about 30 minutes, it had taken in just as much water as
a piece of cooked boiled macaroni, all while remaining
completely raw!
While the ability to cook presoaked pasta in just 60
seconds in itself is not all that exciting for a home cook (all
it does is convert an 8-minute cooking process into a 30-
minute soak plus 1 minute cooking process—hardly a time-
saver), it’s a very interesting application for restaurant
cooks, who can have soaked pasta ready to be cooked in no
time.
But what it does mean for a home cook is this: any time
you are planning on baking pasta in a casserole, there is no
need to precook it. All you have to do is soak it while you
make your sauce, then combine the two and bake. Since the
pasta’s already hydrated, it won’t rob your sauce of liquid,
and the heat from the oven is more than enough to cook it
while the casserole bakes. If you taste them side by side,
you can’t tell the difference between precooked pasta and