When heating jarred pasta sauce, is it ever worth adding a bit of the starchy pasta water to the jarred sauce?
one would think that jarred sauce doesn’t need the water, and it ultimately makes jarred sauce less thick vs the normal effect when making fresh sauce and adding starchy water.
I have some pasta cookbooks that suggest the starchy water is how the pasta sauce becomes glossy and comes to life. It also helps it stick to the noodles. But there would be no point in doing it unless you are heating the sauce in a pan and add the al dente noodles to the sauce to simmer briefly while you stir and meld to become a pasta dish.
You're not adding pasta water to the sauce, you're adding pasta water to the sauced pasta to get the sauce to coat the pasta, adjust the thickness and texture, get the sauce to emulsify and coat the pasta, and provide enough liquid to finish cooking your slightly undercooked pasta.
Unless you're doing the "dump a jar of sauce on a bunch of pasta" thing. In that case the pasta water ain't gonna do much for you.
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