Tips for Cooking Perfect Pasta

Our little ones have always enjoyed pasta. It’s available just about everywhere, it cooks quickly and it’s soft – making it ideal for baby food.

Stirring finely chopped, cooked pasta into veggie purees was one of our favourite ways to introduce lumps – you can start off with tiny wee pieces, then cut them larger as your baby develops (you can also buy special ‘baby size’ pasta in some stores, although we never found it worth the extra money!).

Pieces of pasta also make a super finger food – soft, easy to pick up and very ‘gummable’. Ours love the tri-colour variety because they look pretty on the plate – and a real bonus is that pasta is nice warm OR cold, so you can take it as a snack on a day out!

So… you decide to cook pasta for your baby, but you find it has all stuck together in one big lump! What are you doing wrong?

Here are our tips for cooking pasta perfectly, which will stop it sticking and ensure it delights your little baby food connoisseur!

• Don’t overcook it! Pasta is best cooked  ‘al dente’, which means ‘to the tooth’. If you cook it for too long, it will be mushy… and sticky! Different types of pasta have different cooking times depending on their thickness. Check the packaging for specific instructions.
• Make sure your pot is big enough. Cramming too much pasta – with not enough water – into a small pot makes it more likely to stick. A tall pot is better, and you should use 4 quarts (8 pints or about 4.5 litres) of water for every pound of pasta you cook.
• Add a couple of drops of olive oil to the cooking water. This works wonders in keeping the pieces of pasta separate.
• Splash out on a Pasta Insert (Amazon) for your cooking pot. This is useful because you can remove the pasta from the cooking water AS SOON as it’s done. Those extra seconds spent carrying the pot to the sink and draining the pasta can make all the difference to the texture.

Pasta Insert (from Amazon)
• If you’ll be serving the pasta cold, rinse it in lukewarm water once it’s cooked, then toss it with a little olive oil. Again, this will help keep the pieces separate.

And there you have it – five simple steps to cook pasta like a pro!

Buon appetito baby!