The recipe always says to reserve some pasta water. I either forget, or I just don’t bother. The one or two times I’ve needed it, I just added regular water and it was fine.
The way I think about it is that the pasta stuff in the pasta water is doing the same thing as the flour in a roux or gravy or whatever.
To get a good sauce, you gotta have the flour/ pasta stuff and fat in the right ratio. And the water is just thinning things out.
I only discovered this pasta water thing last night cooking some shit the wife wanted
The starch in the water will help bring the sauce together and make it stick to the pasta better. Its more noticeable in a loose or wet sauce, esp. if you want to avoid it turning into soup. “Simple” sauces like Carbonara or Cacio e Pepe arent the same otherwise.
If you keep forgetting to do it, try leaving a measuring cup inside your colander, when you go to pour your cooked pasta in, it should remind you that you need to skim some water out first.
The point of keeping some pasta water is that the salty, starchy water helps the sauce emulsify and stick to the pasta. Adding regular water just dilutes the sauce and makes the result worse.
If you’re not going to use pasta water, you shouldn’t add any water at all.
