Most home cooks make the same three small mistakes when cooking pasta. Correcting the mistakes produces meaningfully better results without requiring any additional equipment or significant expense. The corrections are simple and worth making.

The first mistake

Not enough salt in the pasta water. The water should be salted to the point that it tastes like seawater — substantially more than most home cooks use. The salt seasons the pasta from the inside in ways that finishing salt cannot replicate.

The second mistake

Cooking pasta too long. The package times are calibrated for the pasta being eaten directly out of the pot. Pasta that will be finished in a sauce should be removed about two minutes earlier; the residual heat and the sauce-finishing complete the cooking.

The third mistake

Not finishing the pasta in the sauce. Most home pasta is plated and topped with sauce. Real pasta cooking finishes the partly-cooked pasta in the sauce with a small amount of pasta water; the starch creates the emulsion that turns separate ingredients into a finished dish.

The cumulative effect

The cumulative effect of correcting these three mistakes is meaningful. The pasta that the corrections produce is closer to the pasta produced in good Italian restaurants than to the pasta most home kitchens have been producing.