[alexjplant]

True facts. Make a pan sauce while your pasta is cooking then throw it straight inwith some of the starchy water to thicken things up.

I die inside every time somebody dumps a jar of Ragu into a drained pot of overcooked spaghetti. Hell, there are ways to dress up jar sauce in a one-pot fashion that only take a few minutes more but a lot of people simply aren't interested. Conversely I'm sure there's stuff that I do that others cringe at - my guitar-playing buddy probably feels the same way every time I drag my digital rig onto stage instead of real amp and pedalboard.

[the_sleaze_]

It's like white people tacos vs food-truck tacos. It used to be gauche but has now become its own standard. You can like white people tacos and food truck tacos.

Try dumping the pasta into the strainer, then putting a layer of olive oil across the bottom of the dry pan like youre about to shallow fry something. Then shallow fry the canned sauce in teh olive oil. It should splatter and hiss. Then dump the pasta in.

Is it legit? No. Is it good and easy? Yup.

[walthamstow]

> I die inside every time somebody dumps a jar of Ragu into a drained pot of overcooked spaghetti.

I can give you even worse than that. It was common in the 00s in Britain, maybe still is, to serve pasta as a bowl of plain, dry boiled spaghetti with sauce poured on top.

[kimixa]

As a brit growing up at a similar time I assumed that was an American thing - you saw it all the time on TV and adverts, but seems crazy to actually serve it like that. It was always served by my parents already coated in sauce.

Looking back, I suspect it was more that the contrast of the sauce and spaghetti colours made it "pop" more onscreen. Though it's possibly unsurprising that could feed /back/ into how people thought it "should" be served.

[imiric]

I actually don't mind that. It allows me to choose the pasta-sauce ratio in every bite. The taste difference from when pasta is soaked in sauce is negligible IME.

Plus, I freeze my sauce separately from the pasta. Freezing pasta and then reheating it makes it mushy. Whereas I can always reheat the sauce and cook fresh pasta in minutes. Which also allows me to use a different type of pasta every time.

[laurencerowe]

This was my experience growing up in Britain in the 90s. Fortunately one of my housemates at university worked in kitchens made a point of showing me how much tastier it was when the pasta was properly coated with the sauce.

[stephenr]

> It was common in the 00s in Britain, maybe still is, to serve pasta as a bowl of plain, dry boiled spaghetti with sauce poured on top.

Friends (the US show) had a scene where a supposed CHEF did this when cooking for her parents, in the mid-late 90s.