Cooking Noodles: Salt, Starch, and Whether to Rinse

Salt in the water is your only chance to season the noodle

A cooked noodle will not take seasoning afterwards. Whatever it absorbed while boiling is all it gets, so unsalted water leaves the noodle itself tasteless to the end. The sauce can be well seasoned and the dish still reads as flat, because of that contrast.

The figure is 10g of salt per litre (1%). Reduce it if the noodle is going into a seasoned broth; hold to it for simple sauces like carbonara or aglio e olio.

No oil in the water

Oil added to stop sticking barely helps, and it stops sauce clinging to the noodle — it floats on the surface and coats the strands as you lift them out.

To prevent sticking, use enough water and stir once within the first thirty seconds, which is when the surface starch is at its tackiest.

The cooking water is an ingredient

Water the noodles cooked in carries dissolved starch, and that starch acts as an emulsifier between fat and water (emulsions and pan sauces).

So when a pasta sauce sits greasy and separate, two or three tablespoons of the cooking water, stirred vigorously, pulls it into a cream that coats the strands. Aglio e olio is essentially that one technique, and in carbonara the same water is what keeps the egg from scrambling.

Too much water dilutes the starch and weakens the effect. Pasta wants less water than most people use.

To rinse or not — there is a rule

This is a question of purpose, not preference.

Do not rinse when the sauce has to cling. Surface starch is the glue. Pasta, jjajangmyeon, fried noodles. Rinse it away and the sauce slides off.

Rinse when it is served cold, or when springiness is the point. Cold water strips the surface starch and stops the cooking dead. The bite of naengmyeon and cold mixed noodles comes from exactly that; lukewarm will not do it, and iced water is better.

Rinse when the broth must stay clear. Alkaline noodles — ramen and Chinese wheat noodles — contain kansui, which makes their cooking water yellow and slippery. Let that into the broth and it turns cloudy and faintly bitter. It is why ramen cooks noodles and broth separately, and why khao soi rinses its boiled noodles before they go in the bowl.

Rice noodles are soaked, not boiled

Dried rice noodles dropped into boiling water go to pieces on the outside first. The method is to soak them 20-30 minutes in warm water until pliable, then pass them through boiling water for ten to twenty seconds just before serving (soaking).

Pad thai makes this unavoidable: the noodles finish in the wok in the sauce, so fully cooked noodles turn to paste the moment they land.

Cook to the sauce, not to the packet

Noodles keep cooking on residual heat after draining, and most dishes finish them in a sauce or broth.

• If they will spend a minute in the sauce, drain them one to two minutes short of the packet time.
• Noodles cooked in the broth itself, like kalguksu, are used unrinsed, since their surface starch is what gives the soup its body.
• If cooked noodles must wait, rinse them in cold water rather than oiling them, and reheat in the hot broth or sauce at the last moment.

The commonest failure is finishing the noodles and then making the sauce wait. The order is always sauce ready first, noodles second.