Allrecipes shared an easy-to-follow process for creating an emulsion that will make you feel like a gourmet cook with just a little time and patience. After you cook your pasta (al dente — we’ll get to that below) and reserving some of the cooking water, use the same pan to bring just a half cup of your sauce to a simmer, then add a dab of very cold butter. Keep an eye out for beads of fat forming in your sauce, and add another half a tablespoon of butter if it isn’t thickening. Ultimately, you want to be able to scrape your spoon along the bottom of the pot and see the bottom for a moment before it fills back in with sauce. Then you mix the pasta into your emulsified sauce, adding some of the starchy reserved water back in as needed.
The packaging of many pastas includes instructions for cooking it al dente, but if yours doesn’t, you can still reduce the cooking time by up to three minutes to achieve the required texture. When you taste the pasta straight from the pot, it should have a slight bite to it. This is crucial because when you stir the pasta into the sauce pot, it will continue to cook in the sauce.
Additionally, for your sauce to have that wonderful clinging quality, the pasta must be slightly undercooked, or al dente.
If you cook at home, you probably find that the pasta and sauce never quite stay together. Even with homemade tomato sauce, I find it difficult to achieve a thick enough consistency for my pasta dishes.
Since butter improves everything, really, what doesn’t it? However, texture is more important than taste when it comes to pasta sauce.
In his Serious Eats article, J. Kenji López-Alt says if you are going to allow your pasta to finish cooking in your pasta sauce, youll want to thin the sauce with some pasta water. Pasta water is the real key to getting your sauce to stick to your pasta. And Serious Eats isnt alone; McCormick also supports this trick as the secret behind well-coated pasta. Once you put your noodles into your pasta sauce, you are going to want to add a little pasta water to get your pasta sauce to your desired consistency. López-Alt further explains that this starchy water is going to help the surface of your pasta noodles become the right texture and will encourage your sauce to cling to the pasta.
Sounds like perfection. But what about using a jar of pasta sauce from the grocery store? Giada De Laurentiis told Bon Appétit its okay to use store-bought sauce in a jar. She said, “If it makes your life easier and it means youre actually going to make a dish, then go for it. Just make sure the first ingredient is tomatoes and not sugar.”
The next step for saucing is equally as important. Per a Serious Eats post, food writer J. Kenji López-Alt. recommends cooking your pasta until it is al dente, but he concedes you should cook it to your preferred softness. And while your pasta is cooking, López-Alt suggests warming your sauce because you should toss your noodles with hot pasta sauce. If you choose to add undercooked pasta to your pasta sauce and allow it to finish cooking in the sauce, López-Alt notes this will take more time, so plan accordingly. Then he offers an important trick for getting your sauce to stick to your pasta.
It may surprise you to learn that there are proper and incorrect ways to sauce pasta if you want the sauce to stick to the noodles. Giada De Laurentiis asserts that it all begins with the water you’re boiling. In her video, “Dos and Donts of Cooking Pasta,” De Laurentiis explains that the first step in giving your pasta dish flavor is to add salt to the water. But the celebrity chef advises against adding any kind of oil to the water because it will keep your pasta from becoming extremely starchy, which is necessary for your sauce to stick. But thats just the beginning of your pasta saucing journey.
