rice pasta

It's been almost a month since my last post. Wow!

Today's post will not be some long critique of a product or even a recipe. It's just a simple tip.

When preparing rice pasta, rinsing it with cool water at the end of the cooking process is crucial:

I've been eating rice pasta for several years. Prior to the food sensitivity testing, I knew that eating wheat in excess gave me problems, so I tried the different rice pastas over the years. Thank goodness they've improved!

One of the things I never liked about rice pasta is that it gets mushy if you cook it according to the cooking time on the package. I was raised around people who knew what good Italian food was, and 'al dente' is imperative for decent pasta.

But I digress. It never occurred to me to read the package on the rice pasta beyond the cooking time. After all, it's pasta- just dump it into the boiling, salted water, cook it till it's done, drain it and sauce it. Right?

WRONG!

I was waiting for the noodles to cook the other night and reading the package to pass the time, when I noticed that it instructs you to rinse the noodles after cooking. Since I was only cooking for myself, and I don't mind my noodles being cold, I decided to do it.

I was absolutely delighted to find that my pasta, which was quite mushy prior to rinsing, firmed up after the cool water rinse!

I don't know the 'why's or the 'how's, but I do know that I will not be skipping that last step again anytime soon!