Al dente is specifically undercooking it a bit because you prefer that texture over the fully cooked texture. If you pull it a little early then let it fully finish in the sauce it's not what I would consider al dente.
The meaning of cooked and overcooked depends a lot on personal taste, but generally al dente it's when it's still elastic but not mushy, like if you apply pressure with the border of a fork, it goes back to the original shape when you relieve the pressure and doesn't fall apart.
But that's simply the help visualize it and it's not even applicable to all kinds of pasta, practically we taste the pasta while it's still cooking and decide if it's all dente or not based on our experience.
Usually when pasta cooked the exact amount of time specified on the package it should be "al dente", but you shouldn't trust it and start tasting it a couple of minutes before that point.
Anyway not all pasta makes sense al dente, fresh pasta or stuffed pasta like ravioli or tortellini for example cannot (and shouldn't) be cooked al dente.
As a lazy person, I continue to be disappointed pasta scientists and designers have done little to make that part easier and less work.
There's an art of knowing when
Never try to guess
Cook until it's soft and then
Ninety seconds lessIt’s different, from, say, a rice cooker, where all rice more or less gets cooked the same way with varying times, you can definitely screw up cooking rice in a pot, and you don’t, say, need to reserve rice water for anything. Also rice cookers keep rice warm for hours on end in a manner that doesn’t detract from the taste or dry it out, but I don’t know that that would work for pasta.
You say this but we're deep in a thread with terms like 'saucibility'. Surely if pasta science can address a problem that's also neatly solved by simply adding more sauce, it can spare a few mighty braincells on 'standing by a pot for two minutes frantically fishing out and tasting hot undercooked noodles'. Maybe every packet of pasta can come with a couple of noodles on teabag strings.
Of course is not a science, sometimes it's not gonna be perfect, but on average it is
consumer models also exist, but are quite expensive.
My girlfriend bought a Cookeo[2] (it's an electric multi-cooker for different kinds of food, including pasta) and after a few failed attempts we have been happy of the results. It's quite cheap.
p.s. tasting pasta while cooking it at home is kind of a ritual here in Italy
[1] http://ifea.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Italgi-pasta-c...
Where did this idea come from?
I used to believe this too and did exactly as you suggest. But I always left it in longer.
So I started following the timing on the pack. It always works for me for normal dried pasta.
Beyond that, reusing spoons to taste test is more often done on fictional shows. Cooking shows usually either use different spoons or pour a bit on a saucer and drink from that.
Finally, ignoring all the other ways Afro-Italians exist, some Italian islands are technically part of Africa.
Not aware of this. Maybe you’re thinking of the Pelagie islands, which are very close to North Africa?
You cook the pasta al dente on purpose, to avoid mushiness with the sauce later. But the finished product isn't al dente--it was a temporary state.
I didn't realize anyone preferred the texture and would preserve it, but that makes sense.
The entire appeal of cooking it that way is having the variance in texture in the same piece. It absolutely makes sense to design a pasta shape that optimizes for that. In fact a lot of pasta shapes already do, whether or not it was intentional.