How Salty Should Pasta Water Be?

There are many things that annoy Italian chefs when they see others appropriating their cuisine. Eating tinned carbonara, putting pineapple on pizza, drinking cappuccino after midday, and snapping spaghetti in half before cooking will all be greeted with contempt. But the one thing that annoys Italians more than anything else is under-salting your pasta water.

The reason to season pasta water with salt

Like Maggie Thatcher's pearls, adding salt to the water in which you're about to cook your pasta is non-negotiable. It's crucial to have your pasta nicely seasoned, or your dish will taste bland regardless of how flavourful your sauce is.

Pasta water should not be as salty as the sea

Traditional wisdom says to cook pasta in water as salty as the sea, but if you've ever swallowed a mouthful of seawater or cooked your pasta in water with a 3.5% salinity, you'll know that that's just gross.

To find out the perfect saltiness level, we dusted off our trusty digital kitchen scales and cooked pasta in water with no salt up to 3.5% salt in 0.1% increments. Some of our tasters settled on a 1% salt-to-water ratio, but even this much was too salty for us.

A 0.5% salt-to-water ratio is the perfect amount for us, but everyone has different salt tolerances, so you'll need to make up your own mind. We vary the amount depending on what we serve our pasta with. If we're pairing it with something already very salty, like pancetta or anchovies, we go easy on the salt. Conversely, we may be more generous if we pair our pasta with something naturally quite bland, like tofu or turkey.

Choose your perfect level of saltiness

Teaspoons of salt to water

Bonus tip
Before you tip your leftover pasta water down the sink, consider whether you could use it in and around your home and garden.