— Douglas Butler

You know, pasta is usually, uh, cooked in the sauce a little bit as well too. So if you're doing something like a traditional pasta sauce, like an Italian pasta sauce, you might make the, uh, sauce in a pan, and I usually like to do it in kind of a wider pan to be able to toss the pasta into, but then you actually will boil your pasta separate and then take your pasta and put it into your saw tape pan, and then mix it into the sauce a little bit as well. Um, after you do that, it's always good to add just a little bit of the pasta water to kind of help, um, you know, coat that noodle as well. And the, what happens here is you're actually getting that flavor to really kind of meld into the pasta. Now, this is actually a great rule that's usually regularly followed. You'll see it in some of the, um, let's say the Italian restaurants, uh, you know, they'll serve the pasta, uh, on the bottom and they'll coat it with oil or something and then put the pasta sauce on top of that. Um, that's little different, and it's not as traditional to the Italian cuisine, um, from Italy. Uh, not to say it's not wrong or anything, but to be able to get more flavor and more pasta, uh, coated with that sauce, it's definitely best just to be able to have that pasta sauce in a wider, um, sauce pan or a wider, uh, uh, saute pan. Um, and then take the pasta, put it right in there with some tongs, then toss it around, add a little bit of, um, water to it, just a, you know, table spoon or two of pasta water just to be able to get the consistency of the pasta sauce that you want on that noodle. Um, and then if you want to, you can add a little bit of fat to it, like an olive oil or something. If you don't, not doing olive oil, you don't have to do that at all too, you can completely avoid that. But that would also be the time you'd add that fat would be after you add the pasta water to that. Now, that's the same thing with many different cuisines to be able to kind of toss the, uh, the, um, the ingredients into the sauce as well. And you'll see that in, you know, um, different Asian cooking as well to be able to kind of toss that to be able to get the most flavor so it absorbs into that noodle as it's still cooking as well. Now, for your example with the pasta salad, yes, it will absorb into that and you might need to add a little bit more, but that just means that as you know, that pasta is cooking, it's absorbing that flavor into it, and if you want a little more sauce to it, that's where that water kind of comes into it to be able to, you know, thicken it up a little bit to be able to make a little bit more sauce to it. But it also will absorb into the pasta to make a little bit more flavor. And that's totally okay if you do want it to be, you know, um, you, you typically wanna serve it directly right after doing that as well.