If you drain your pasta water through a Stainless Steel Sink Colander and down the sink, you’re throwing away an invaluable asset that cooks call “liquid gold.”
Because pasta is made of flour, it releases starch into the cooking water as it boils, creating a white, cloudy liquid that we often deem “dirty” and then dump down the Stainless Steel Sink .Big mistake. That’s the liquid gold we’re talking about.
Why would you want to keep that cloudy liquid, you may ask? Because it’ll help emulsify and thicken your sauce. Now you’re probably wondering, “But why would I want to emulsify my sauce? Who even cares?"Emulsification makes a difference, as science and taste buds prove.
All too often, a plate of spaghetti is encircled by a watery, red puddle. You know what we’re talking about. It pools around the edge of your plate and ruins a gorgeous plate of pasta. That puddle results when the water and oil in your pasta and sauce separate from each other.
Here’s where emulsification comes in.
Emulsification is the process of blending two liquids that would otherwise repel each other ― in the case of pasta, it’s oil and water ― into a smooth, inseparable mixture. The starch in your pasta water, as luck would have it, is an emulsifying agent and also a thickener. So if you save some of your pasta water and then slowly mix a ladlefull of it into sauce, you’re binding together the liquids and oils, creating something creamy and thick that won’t ever separate into a puddly mess.
