Cooking the Pasta for Gourmet Pasta with Sausage & Peppers

Video Transcript

"PAMELA BOWMAN: We have this great [SOUNDS LIKE] spinone pasta. It's the coolest pasta. I'll grab my knife and open it up, and I want to show you how it looks. It's got all these--it's kind of like a spoke wheel. As you see, its got all these great little nooks and crannies in it. And those really pick up the sauce and the oil and all the little bits and pieces. I just love this pasta. But there's a trick to cooking pasta. One of the things you want to do first is get the water really boiling. We want it at a full rolling boil. The next thing you want to do is add a lot of salt. The idea in Italy is that the water should be like sea water that you put your pasta in. The pasta is also going to absorb some of the saltiness, and that's where you're going to get the flavor in your pasta. So we're going to pour in a little bit of our pasta. There you go. We'll add just a little bit more. We're going to use half the bag. Now, I want to give this a good stir. Now, this is going to cook for just eight minutes. And we want this to just be al dente, which means to the tooth, actually, so that it has a little bit of bite to it. You can actually pick the pasta up and bite it and you'll see a tiny, little white line in it, then you'll know your pasta is perfect. It's to the tooth. Because once we add it to our pan, which is what we're going to do after the pasta's cooked, it's going to absorb the oil and the flavors of the sauce that we've made in the pan or the ragu as it is."