You’ll Never Cook Pasta the Same Way After Seeing This

You’ve probably been cooking pasta wrong your entire life—and the worst part is, you probably thought you were doing it right. In this episode of The Italian Way with Enzo, Chef Enzo Romano takes on 10 common pasta mistakes and shows you the simple Italian techniques that can completely change what ends up on your plate. Breaking spaghetti in half? Putting olive oil in the pasta water? Rinsing your noodles after cooking? Drowning them in sauce? Enzo explains why these familiar habits can work against great pasta—and what an Italian home cook does instead. You’ll learn why pasta needs properly salted water, why the starch left on the noodles matters, and why your sauce should coat the pasta rather than bury it. And whatever you do, DON’T throw away that pasta water. Enzo shows why that cloudy, starchy water is one of the most valuable ingredients in the entire dish and how finishing your pasta in the sauce with a splash of it can create the glossy, cohesive texture you’ve been trying to get at home. We’re also talking al dente pasta, authentic carbonara, matching the right pasta shape to the right sauce, and why Italian cooking often gets better when you use fewer ingredients—not more. The Italian way isn’t about making cooking more complicated. It’s about understanding a few simple rules, using good ingredients, and letting each one do its job. So before you make your next bowl of pasta, watch this first. Try Enzo’s techniques and see what happens when you stop simply boiling noodles and start finishing pasta the Italian way. And if Enzo changes even ONE thing about the way you cook pasta, tell us in the comments which mistake you’ve been making—and subscribe for more old-school Italian cooking techniques from The Italian Way with Enzo.