Salting the water and measuring by hand
Okay, two things in this lesson that people always think are more complicated than they are: how much salt goes in the pasta water, and how much pasta to actually cook. Neither one needs a tool. That's kind of the point.
The salt part
Your pasta water should taste like the ocean. I know that's the phrase everybody uses and it sounds a little dramatic for a Tuesday, but it's actually the right amount, and it's the only chance you get to season the pasta itself instead of just the sauce sitting on top of it.
Here's what that looks like in real numbers. For a big pot of water, maybe 4 to 6 quarts, you want somewhere around 2 tablespoons of salt. That sounds like a lot. It is a lot. Most of it goes down the drain with the water when you're done, it doesn't end up in your body, it ends up flavoring the noodle while it cooks. Don't measure it out with a teaspoon like you're baking something. Just pour a good amount into your palm, look at it, dump it in, and taste the water before the pasta goes in. If it tastes like something, you're there. If it tastes like nothing, add more.
This connects to the salt-in-stages thing I've beat to death already in this module. Same idea. You're not committing to one number, you're tasting and adjusting. The water's just the first stage instead of the sauce.
One real caution here: add the salt after the water's already going, not before, and stand back a little when you do it because a big pour into already-hot water can sputter. Not dangerous exactly, just don't lean over the pot when you do it.
Measuring pasta by hand
This is the part where I lose people a little, because I don't use a scale and I don't use one of those pasta measuring tools with the holes for different portion sizes. Somebody gave Heather one as a gift years ago and it's literally never left the drawer.
For spaghetti or anything long, I grab a bunch with my hand and if it's roughly the width of a quarter when I squeeze it into a circle, that's about one serving. For short shapes, the little tubes or the twisty ones, whatever you want to call them, I just eyeball a heaping cup per person and it's basically always right. Nobody's coming to check your work. If you end up with a little extra, that's leftover lunch. If you end up short, you boil more water and do a second small batch, it takes eight minutes, it's not a crisis.
I'll be honest, this took me a while to trust. I used to actually pull out a measuring cup for pasta, like it was flour for a cake. It's not that precise a food. Cook the stove you have, measure the pasta you have, taste as you go. Those three things cover most of what goes wrong in this module.
The one time I tried to skip all this
I'll tell on myself here. I tried making pasta from scratch exactly once. Flour everywhere, dough like wet cement, and I'm standing there with flour on the dog somehow, and I finally just scraped the whole mess into the trash and opened a box of spaghetti instead. No shame in it at all. That's actually the moment I really settled into my opinion on this, which is: boxed dried pasta is genuinely great, and you don't need to make it yourself to have a real meal. People treat fresh pasta like it's the serious version and boxed is the compromise. I don't buy it. The boxed stuff cooks reliable, it's cheap, and it's sitting in your pantry already instead of requiring a whole flour situation on your counter on a Tuesday night.
So salt your water like you mean it, measure your pasta with your hand and not a gadget, and don't let anybody make you feel like that's cutting corners. It's just how it actually gets done on a weeknight.
Quick elevation note since I've brought this up before in the module: up here around 4,600 feet your water's going to take a little longer to get to a full rolling boil, and the box times run a touch short. Taste a piece a minute or two before the package says to. That's true whether you're measuring by hand or with a scale, so it's not really a "by hand" problem, just a good habit either way.
Before next time
Boil a pot of water at home, salt it until it actually tastes like something, and grab your pasta by hand instead of pulling out a measuring cup. See if your guess matches what you'd normally cook.
~devin