KITCHEN PRACTICE 1 — Tasting the Salted Water vs. the Cooked Pasta
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Chapter: Italian Cookery 3 — Cooking Pasta Properly

TASK
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Cook a batch of dried pasta, salting the water until it genuinely
tastes like the sea. Taste the water before adding pasta, then taste
the pasta itself once cooked, and note how the two compare.

WHAT TO DO
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1. Bring a large pot of water to a full boil.
2. Add coarse salt — start with roughly 1.5 tablespoons per 4 litres
   of water, then adjust.
3. Taste a small spoonful of the water (carefully, it's hot). It
   should taste distinctly, unmistakably salty — closer to seawater
   than to a well-seasoned soup.
4. If it tastes only mildly salty, add more salt and taste again
   before adding the pasta.
5. Add the pasta and cook according to the package time, tasting for
   doneness 1–2 minutes before the package time is up.
6. Once drained (don't rinse), taste a piece of the plain pasta on
   its own, with nothing added.

WHAT TO EXPECT
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- The raw salted water should taste noticeably, almost surprisingly
  salty on its own — if it tastes just "a bit seasoned," it likely
  isn't salty enough yet.
- The cooked pasta itself should taste pleasantly seasoned all the
  way through, not overwhelmingly salty — the pasta only absorbs a
  fraction of the salt from the water, so a very salty pot produces
  a moderately, evenly seasoned pasta rather than an oversalted one.
- If the plain pasta tastes bland or flat, the water almost
  certainly wasn't salty enough, and you should salt more generously
  next time.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This exercise exists to build a genuine taste memory of "how salty
is salty enough" — a number in tablespoons is only ever an
approximation, since pot size, water volume, and personal taste all
vary. Tasting the water directly, before you've committed the pasta
to it, is the only reliable way to catch under-salting before it's
too late to fix — once pasta is cooked in under-salted water, adding
salt to the finished dish afterward never tastes quite the same as
seasoning from within.