How to Cook Pasta and the Tools You Need to Do It

After working in an Italian restaurant, I learned a thing or two about making pasta. For one thing, you should start tasting your spaghetti or fettuccine early because there’s nothing worse than serving mushy, overcooked noodles. This means you should never blindly trust the timing instructions on the box. For another, salt the water more than you think you need to. The depth of flavor comes from the boiling process, so if your pasta water is bland and tasteless, odds are good that your final dish will be, too. Lastly, get a large pot when cooking a box of pasta. If the noodles are on top of one another when boiling, you’ll be left with clumpy, unevenly cooked rigatoni that no one wants to eat.    

Of course, the tools you use are just as important as the quality of the pasta or the amount of salt in the water. Below, I rounded up some of the gear that’s been most helpful in my kitchen. There’s a Cuisinart pasta pot with an accompanying straining lid, KitchenAid tongs, Hiware spider strainers, and more. Everything is available at Amazon, and prices start at just $10.    

Pasta-Cooking Tools Every Kitchen Needs 

Every time I’m cooking ravioli or tortellini, I pull out my handy spider strainer. It enables me to fish al dente pasta out of the water without dumping the whole pot. I find this to be especially useful when I’m cooking multiple ingredients in the same water, like boiling peas or blanching spinach. This way, I don’t have to keep bringing water to a boil over and over again. It’s also handy for cooking dumplings, poaching eggs, and shallow-frying potato latkes.    

While a spider strainer is best for scooping, kitchen tongs are best for grabbing. I use mine to secure single spaghetti strands when testing for doneness, remove cooked spaghetti from boiling water, toss spaghetti with sauce, and portion it onto plates. It pays to have multiple tongs in your drawers, as they’re useful for so much more than just cooking pasta.  

I own Made In’s 8-quart stockpot and pasta insert, and couldn’t recommend it enough. It’s roomy, functional, and built to last — but it also costs $299. Given its hefty price tag, I found a Cuisinart model recommended by hundreds of Amazon shoppers that costs substantially less. At 6 quarts, it’s large enough to cook a whole box of spaghetti. Plus, the lid has holes for straining, and the interior offers convenient measurement markings, so it’s easy to track how much water you’ve added. With this pot, there’s no need to dirty a separate colander.     

Of course, if you already own a stockpot and would rather not buy another, you’ll need to procure a colander for when you boil large amounts of pasta that can’t be scooped or grabbed quickly with a spider strainer or tongs. This $14 strainer can either sit inside your sink or hang across it, depending on its width. It’s also dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning.     

I’ve owned this casserole dish for years. While I have a prettier Le Creuset stoneware dish that I pull out when guests come over, OXO’s glass version is my go-to when I know I’ll have leftovers or when I’ll be getting in a car. I love that it comes with a lid, which makes stacking, saving, and transporting infinitely easier. It’s also a cinch to clean. I’ve made my fair share of cheesy baked zitis and layered plenty of lasagnas inside this dish, and it always comes out of the dishwasher sparkling clean, unstained, and odor-free. 

When I cook pasta, I’ll almost always make some sort of sauce. This is where my saucier pan comes in. More rounded than a frying pan and wider than a saucepan, there are no hard-to-reach corners in which ingredients can get caught. Naturally, this makes a saucier the perfect tool when simmering tomatoes and garlic and whisking flour with butter for a béchamel sauce. It’s also a great style when I’m simply browning butter and tossing in cooked spaghetti or freshly boiled gnocchi. Made In’s pan is the top-tested model at Food & Wine, as it has a sturdy handle that stays cool and a large surface area.   

For those ambitious nights when I decide to make pasta from scratch, I use my KitchenAid stand mixer and its clever pasta attachments. Between the roller that flattens my dough and the cutters for fettuccine and spaghetti, it takes minutes to complete the process — and with very little effort on my part. But there’s no need to buy a KitchenAid if you don’t already own one; there are plenty of pasta makers at Amazon, including the popular Marcato Atlas.