I promised myself I would stop using my parents' cooking habits as fodder for articles when I reached a certain age. Fortunately, that age is 102.
While I didn't know it at the time, my parents—bless them, truly—committed many “crimes” against pasta when I was growing up, including adding oil to the cooking water and rinsing it with water from the tap as it sat in the colander. Drizzling oil into the water—supposedly to ensure the noodles wouldn't stick together—made the pasta extra slippery, while rinsing them under a running faucet was even more of a guarantee that no sauce could stick.
See, rinsing noodles removes starch from their surface, thereby making it more difficult to get any kind of sauce to cling. In our household it didn't matter—we ate the pasta plain (which is a story for another time, or never). But if our goal had been to marry the noodles with sauce—say red pesto or brown butter or cream and peas or oil sizzled with garlic and anchovies—that rinse would have been highly counterproductive.
None of this is to say you should never rinse your noodles. Pray tell, what rules in life are so hard and fast? If you’re making a dish that will be served chilled or at room temp—think cold soba, rice noodles, pasta salad—you do want to rinse so that you get toothsome (sorry) individual strands rather than one big gummy clump.
Certain types of noodles benefit from a rinse in almost all applications. In her book Japanese Home Cooking, Sonoko Sakai recommends rinsing soba and udon. “Even if I serve it hot,” she told me, “I like to rinse it in cold running water to remove the surface starch and give you a good palate feel that's not slimy.” She will even go so far as to soak her soba in ice water, which firms them up for a chewier texture.
So rinse sometimes, rinse wisely, but don't rinse like my parents.
Cook, rinse, don't repeat:
This pasta salad holds up well at room temperature and has a flavorful, punchy romesco sauce.
