it does not matter when you salt your water for dried pasta there's a pervasive belief that you have to salt the water at the beginning before you bring it to a boil there's also a pervasive belief that you have to salt it after the water is already boiling i'm gonna prove it to you those are both myths as long as you don't put in way too much salt how much is too much well that's a trickier question and we'll get back to that but put your salt in whenever as long as the salt goes in before your pasta goes in you're golden the dissolved salt will season the noodle from the inside as it cooks and swells up with the water now both these salt early and salt late myths are predicated on real facts the salt early camp points out that if you wait until right before the pasta goes in the water might not be as hot as it could be when you dump the noodles in the newly introduced salt will temporarily lower the temperature in the pot because the salt is cooler i mean unless you keep your salt in the oven or something the salt's going to be at room temperature it's cooler than the hot water plus when the salt dissolves in the water that is an endothermic reaction it takes heat energy to break apart the sodium and chloride ions the net temperature in the pot goes down and it takes the stove a little time to bring it back up again the salt early folks say you want to throw your salt in at the very beginning give everything plenty of time to come up to the highest possible temperature before you drop the pasta and indeed hotter water does cook pasta faster and better to my taste at least here's a batch i cooked the whole way at sub boiling temperatures about 95 degrees celsius this pasta shape is usually done in 10 minutes at a full boil 100 c but in the sub boiling water it took 15 minutes not 10 and the surface of the noodles was a little gummy and slimy by the time the inside was al dente so yeah i think it's probably true that you want your water boiling well when you drop your pasta in but is the salt really going to cool it down that much a few big pinches into this little boiling pot did not register at all on my consumer grade thermometer here if i start dumping in the whole salt cellar i lose a few tenths of a degree but that's way more salt than you'd ever use plus the temperature bounces right back again after a few seconds for me to get any noticeable degradation in quality of the finished cooked pasta i had to turn my heat all the way down and i had to hold my pasta at five whole degrees under the boiling point for the entire duration of cooking that resulted in a slight difference in texture over here we're talking about a dip of a tiny fraction of a degree that only lasts a few seconds there's no way that's going to have a noticeable effect on the food one other argument the salt early camp makes is that salt water comes to a boil faster than fresh water salting at the beginning will save you time this is technically true salt lowers the heat capacity of water meaning it takes less energy to raise the temperature of the water but again this only makes a noticeable difference at completely insane levels of salinity that you'd never cook with a big pinch into just a little cup of water here made no difference that i could observe with a stopwatch so that's why i'm saying the salt early rule is a myth then there's the salt late rule some people warn that if you throw your salt in right at the beginning in still cool water it won't dissolve as well and that's true at least at first as heat rises water becomes a better solvent and the physical agitation of all those bubbles does a good job of stirring the salt around getting it evenly distributed and even if the salt isn't evenly dispersed you're gonna agitate it some more with the pasta so it's all gonna get mixed up no matter what back when i first started cooking on the internet there was a self-identified professional chef who used to really love coming at me in the comments and this is back when i still had a bad habit of indulging that kind of stuff and anyway this chef just insisted that salt has this really really profound effect on the boiling temperature of water for pasta and i'll never forget what he said i cited some science indicating that salt doesn't do that much in terms of boil temperature and all of that and he said i don't care what a scientist tells me i can see with my own two eyes that when i put the salt in the water boils harder i put the salt in and the water goes whoosh from this chef deduced that the salt is making the water a lot hotter and hotter is better and i kind of felt the guy's frustration because here's the problem your eyes are really good at telling you whether something is happening they're not as good at telling you why it's happening this furious whoosh that happens when you throw in the salt this is not evidence of dissolved salt making the water boil hotter how do i know well instead of a handful of salt let's do the same exact thing with a handful of sand same deal and note that the sand is not dissolving like the salt does we still get that appearance of the water boiling harder i'm pretty sure this is because both the salt and the sand are facilitating what the scientists call bubble nucleation you ever noticed that when you first put a pot of water on the heat where the bubbles start forming is around the edge for a hot water molecule to convert into steam and form a bubble it has to overcome the atmospheric pressure pushing down on the water's surface and it has to overcome the intermolecular bonds that hold water molecules together in groups like raindrops that's called surface tension it takes much less energy for this molecule to overcome these forces and expand into a gas if there's something on the inside of the pot for bubbles to grow on what they call nucleation sites some impurity in the water or some irregularity in the pot surface look at how craggy that steel is under the microscope and as i turn the heat on check out the bubbles forming on those crevices there's some scientific articles about this in the description one explanation i've read says that those little caves form protective barriers they shield the baby bubbles from the compressive forces all around them the crevices may also harbor air pockets that were trapped when we poured in the water regardless it takes way less energy to grow a bubble than it takes to get it going so they get bigger and bigger rise to the surface because they're less dense than the water and pop in a super smooth container like glass there aren't many crevices and cracks that can serve as nucleation sites so the bubbles have trouble forming and this can result in a phenomenon known as superheating this is something that happens to me all the time when i'm boiling water in here for coffee nice pure water nice smooth glass nice even heating from the microwave no physical disturbances breaking the surface tension there's nowhere for bubbles to grow so the water actually gets hotter than its normal boiling point it super heats and eventually you might hear this sound coming from the microwave as finally the bubbles explode or they could even explode on your hand when you reach in you got to be careful or maybe you know get a kettle but definitely get your coffee from trade coffee the sponsor of this video as i have converted to a coffee drinker quite late in life trade has grown with me at first i would take their quiz online and say i'm a noob just send me something good and pre-ground now i can tell them that i like very light roasts and some unconventional processing methods and to this day they find me new and interesting coffees from top roasters that meet my tastes the coffee comes right to my door and these compostable bags super fresh and holy moly this rwandan coffee roasted by sterling is exactly what i've been looking for it's acidic it's fruity some dark chocolate notes you give feedback and trade gets better and better at keeping you in a constant supply of your perfect coffees you get your first bag for free when you sign up with my link in the description free shipping too hit my link below take the quiz sign up and get your first bag free thank you trade anyway that violent reaction in the microwave i'm pretty sure is just a more dramatic version of what we see happening when we throw salt into already boiling water we suddenly introduce a ton of craggy surface area into the pot providing a ton of bubble nucleation sites and whoosh teeny little pockets of superheated water in there are given a means of escape this is not an indication of the water getting hotter it's just the opposite this is heat energy leaving the pot though still not nearly enough to make a meaningful difference in how the pasta cooks now that salty chef in the comments pointed out that when salt is dissolved in water it actually raises the boiling point of the water which is true once the salt is dissolved it will take a little more energy for water in here to vaporize and escape thus the temperature inside your boiling salt water is greater than it would be in boiling fresh water and your pasta gets boiled at a slightly higher temperature yes i put my gopro in a boiling pot just for a few seconds it was fine salt water does boil hotter than fresh water but you'd have to put in a lot of salt to raise the temperature even a single degree here's a little pot of boiling fresh water hovering right around 100 c where we'd expect it now i'm going to dump in my entire salt cellar this whole thing of salt i'm going to dump this into this which is way more salt than anyone would use for pasta and it goes and as we'd expect the temperature dips at first by like half a degree a minuscule difference for pasta cooking give it a minute to rebound and that gagging amount of salt has raised the boiling point about a degree a minuscule difference for pasta cooking hey let's put in another full seller there we go and hey now we're getting somewhere 104.
it's salty enough that crystals are starting to form on the rim let's do another cellar at this point we've saturated the water at normal atmospheric pressure at least we simply could not dissolve any more salt into this there's salt at the bottom that's just sitting there crystals are hopping out of solution on the side it's the dead sea in here probably about 30 percent salt in the actual dissolved liquid and the temperature 107. based on my experiments that's enough to make a slight noticeable difference in the texture of the pasta but you would never use anywhere close to this much salt how much salt would you use well there's an old adage that pasta water should be as salty as the sea i even repeated that once in one of my earliest videos here and i guess i never really thought much about it is it true sea water varies a lot but on average it's about 3.5 percent dissolved salt by weight so 965 grams of water 35 grams of salt oh i can already tell this is way more salt than i normally put in get that dissolved and bring it to a boil by the way this is really salty water and the temperature is still right around 100 c salt is irrelevant to temperature in pasta cookery boil that pasta for exactly 10 minutes per the package instructions drain and taste yeah that is way too salty i wouldn't call it inedible because it's only like half the salinity of seawater the brine is diluted by all of the dry mass of the pasta i did the math and it's about as salty as a dill pickle and i really like dill pickles but yeah that is way too salty for pasta at least to my taste maybe if you dressed it in a sauce heavily that was completely unseasoned let's see how much salt i usually use this is about how much i usually eyeball into this pot it's a couple of big pinches and wow 5 grams so if seawater is 3.5 percent salt my normal pasta water is like .5 salt boil that for 10 minutes drain and that actually tastes a little under seasoned but i suppose my sauces are usually pretty salty so dress that simply and yeah that tastes perfect to me i like the heterogeneity the sauce and the noodle complete each other and you can taste their different salinities interacting with each other as you chew through them so does this mean we shouldn't season pasta water at all that's the east asian way of doing rice right plain unseasoned steamed rice complemented by heavily seasoned accompaniments i love it everybody loves it so let's try pasta that way 10 minutes in pure fresh water drain give it a salty sauce to balance it out and ah that's not working for me it's too heterogeneous the contrast too extreme the pasta itself just tastes like gummy nothing now do i feel that way simply because i have lived my whole life eating pasta that was boiled in salty water and that's just what i'm used to i have no idea and i don't really care you like what you like right but i don't like being wrong and i was wrong when i said years ago that pasta water should be as salty as the sea however i understand why that advice has persisted for generations i think it does work in practice let me show you i tried tasting both of those salted pasta waters if you just dip your finger in really fast that little film of water cools off very rapidly in the air and you don't scald yourself you can just lick and have a taste honestly i couldn't tell much of a difference between the 3.5 seawater solution and my normal 0.5 pasta water solution maybe if i tasted them side by side but in the moment they both just tasted unpleasantly excessively salty i think the sea water adage persists simply because that's the closest analog that most of us have in our lived experience we simply don't get salt solutions anywhere near that strong in our mouths that often and we simply haven't developed a really fine perceptual instrument for telling the difference between salt solutions in this extreme high range at least i haven't i think what salty as the sea means in practice is add salt until the water tastes bad to you we are evolved to be repulsed by sea water because if we drink a lot of it we die just get the water a little saltier than taste good to you because remember the pasta will only end up being about half as salty as the water that you boiled it in from there you can adjust seasoning to taste in the pan with the sauce it's a system that's worked for generations just as coffee plus boiling water has worked don't forget to get your first bag from trade free with my link in the description and hey a tiny pinch of salt and coffee is good too
