Pre-Soaking Pasta
If you leave uncooked pasta in lukewarm water for long enough, it’ll absorb just as much water as boiled pasta.
After about 30 minutes, it had taken in just as much water as a piece of cooked boiled macaroni, all while remaining completely raw!
While the ability to cook presoaked pasta in just 60 seconds in itself is not all that exciting for a home cook (all it does is convert an eight-minute cooking process into a 30-minute soak plus one-minute cooking process—hardly a time-saver), it’s a very interesting application for restaurant cooks, who can have soaked pasta ready to be cooked in no time.
But what it does mean for a home cook is this: Any time you are planning on baking pasta in a casserole, there is no need to precook it. All you have to do is soak it while you make your sauce, then combine the two and bake. Since the pasta’s already hydrated, it won’t rob your sauce of liquid, and the heat from the oven is more than enough to cook it while the casserole bakes. If you taste them side by side, you can’t tell the difference between precooked pasta and simply soaked pasta. Think of what this means for lasagna! I know of at least six different common dental procedures that I’d rather have performed than to have to par-cook lasagna noodles.
