Can I cook pasta ahead of time?

The rule that pasta must go straight from pan to plate is a rule for a plate of pasta cooked to order. If you are feeding a lot of people, or want dinner assembled in five minutes, cooking it ahead is a normal professional technique, and the only thing that goes wrong is that people skip the shock or the oil.

Step by step

1. Undercook it deliberately.Two to three minutes less than the packet time, so it still has a distinct hard centre. It will finish cooking in the reheat and it will absorb liquid while it sits. Pasta cooked fully now will be soft later, without exception.
2. Stop the cooking immediately in cold water.Drain and tip into a bowl of cold water, or run cold water over it in the colander until it is genuinely cold to the touch. Residual heat in a drained mass of pasta keeps cooking it for several minutes, which is enough to take it past done.
3. Drain very thoroughly.Shake the colander hard and give it a few minutes. Water left clinging is what makes the shapes stick together into a lump, and it also dilutes the sauce later.
4. Toss with a little oil.A teaspoon or two per portion of olive oil or a neutral oil, tossed through so every piece is lightly coated. This is the one occasion where oil on pasta is right — it is not in the cooking water, it is a coating to stop cold surfaces bonding. Sauce will still cling to it afterwards.
5. Store covered and flat, and keep some cooking water.Up to three days in the fridge in a covered container. If you have room, keep a mug of the salty starchy cooking water too; it is the best thing to loosen the reheated pasta and sauce with.
6. Reheat by dropping it briefly into boiling water.Thirty to sixty seconds in a pan of boiling water — no salt needed, it is already seasoned — then drain and straight into the sauce. Alternatively, put the cold pasta directly into a pan of simmering sauce with a splash of water and stir until hot.
7. Finish in the sauce, always.A minute in the pan with the sauce over heat is what makes reheated pasta taste like it was just made. Add a spoonful of the reserved water; the starch in it helps the sauce grip.

Tips

• Sturdy shapes — penne, rigatoni, fusilli, orecchiette — hold up to this far better than fine long strands. Angel hair does not survive it at all.
• For a pasta bake, cook the pasta even shorter, because it will absorb sauce for another 30 minutes in the oven.
• Fresh pasta is the exception: it cooks in two minutes anyway and does not benefit. Freeze fresh pasta raw instead and cook it from frozen.
• Cooked pasta freezes reasonably well in portions, especially if it is already sauced. Reheat from frozen, covered.

Common mistakes

• Cooking it to the packet time and then chilling it — It carries on cooking as it drains, absorbs more water as it sits, and cooks again when you reheat. Three chances to overshoot.
• Skipping the oil to be healthier — Two teaspoons of oil across four portions is nothing, and without it you get a single solid block you have to break apart.
• Storing it in water — It keeps absorbing and goes bloated and slippery. Drained, oiled and covered is right.

Questions people ask