How do you tell when pasta is al dente?

Al dente is Italian for "to the tooth". The Treccani dictionary defines it, for pasta and rice, as cooking that stops just short of being completely finished. That is the whole idea in one line: you are aiming for the last moment before soft, not for soft.

The bite test, done properly

Lift out one piece with a fork or slotted spoon. Let it cool for a breath, then bite it in half and look at the cut.

• Still chalky or crunchy, with an obvious white ring or band: keep going. It needs more time.
• Tender, springy, with a tiny pale dot or a thread-thin line in the very middle: this is the window. If the pasta is about to be tossed in a hot sauce, drain it now.
• Uniform colour, soft all the way, slack in the mouth: it has gone past al dente. Still dinner, just a softer one.

Sources differ on exactly where the line falls. Wikipedia's al dente article describes the stage as arriving just before the white centre disappears, while Barilla's advice, as reported by AOL, treats a visible white line as not cooked enough. We split the difference: a faint point is fine if the pasta will keep cooking in the pan; a clear band is not.

The feel matters as much as the look. Al dente pasta has a slight resistance and then gives cleanly. If you have to chew it like a boiled sweet, it is underdone. If it collapses without any argument, it is overdone.

Why the packet time is only a starting point

The time on the packet was set by the producer for their own pasta, cooked their way. Your kitchen is different: the size of your pot, how hard it is boiling, how long it took to come back to the boil after the pasta went in, even the altitude. Barilla itself, again via AOL, suggests starting to taste a few minutes early.

What we do:

• Read the packet time, and start biting a couple of minutes before it.
• Taste again every minute or so. Pasta moves from crunchy to perfect faster than you expect near the end.
• Think about where it is going next. Pasta that will finish in a pan of sauce with a splash of its water wants to come out earlier, on the firm side, because it keeps cooking there (more on that in pasta cooked in the sauce).

Shape and type change the rules

Thick shapes and long tubes hide their centre, so bite rather than squeeze. Small shapes go quickly; stand nearby. Fresh egg pasta is a different animal: it has no dry core to speak of and is done when it is tender and floats, often very fast. The difference between the two is its own subject in fresh versus dried pasta.

Wholewheat, gluten-free and bronze-cut pasta all behave slightly differently, which is one more reason to trust your teeth over the clock.

Was it always like this?

Not always. According to Wikipedia, pasta in Italy was once cooked much softer, shorter cooking became the norm around the middle of the nineteenth century, and the term itself only came into use after the First World War. So if your grandmother's pasta was softer, she was not wrong, just earlier.

The common mistakes

• Throwing it at the wall. It tells you the pasta is sticky, which you knew.
• Draining early and leaving it in the colander. It keeps softening and clumping. Get it into the sauce.
• Rinsing it. That washes off the starch that helps sauce cling, unless you are making a cold pasta salad.
• Forgetting the pasta water. Save a mug before draining; what pasta water is for explains why.