How to dry cooked pasta.

I often use pasta as my starch when I have pre-cooked "saucy" foods like curry or Chili con carne, and of course pasta sauce. The problem with pouring saucy foods over just cooked pasta is that if the pasta is not drained thoroughly then the water from the pasta eventually pools at the bottom of the dish and just dilutes the saucy goodness on top. Water is good but it's for drinking, not eating, you know? So, what do I do to make this problem go away? I have two methods, one hot and one cold. :)

For hot foods, like say if I'm going to pour some cold curry or spaghetti sauce on the pasta and heat it up in the microwave, I first pour out the pasta on the dish I'll be serving it on then microwave just the pasta by itself for about five minutes. Basically what this does is it makes the water clinging to the surface of the pasta "boil". I then take the pasta out and mix it around with a fork or a spoon. You should see a lot of steam leaving the pasta at this point and that's the point since steam leaving equals water leaving. You'll notice that the surface of the pasta will quickly start to "dry out". With the excess water now evaporated away, pour on what ever cold sauce you want to heat the pasta with and take it for a spin in the microwave again. Voila! No soggy pasta! Woohoo~! Oh, just remember, microwaving the pasta will "cook" it further so you may want to adjust how al dente it is before you stick it in the microwave so the texture ends up closer to what you prefer. I'm not a big al dente guy so I'm all good usually. :)

So, if I have this awesome hot method, why do I need a cold one? That's because I'm big fan of Hawaiian food, da bes kine ya~, and that means I love macaroni salad made with mayonnaise! I'll post my recipe for my mayonnaise macaroni salad in the near future but what's important here is that if you make mayonnaise macaroni salad with hot macaroni you end up with... macaroni floating in oil. Although tasty in its own way, trust me I've had it and it's good ;) , it's not exactly what I'm looking for. So, when I boil macaroni to make salad with I run it under cold water until it's all chilled then take it for a spin in the, you guessed it, salad spinner! I have one of those OXO pump type salad spinners and about six to seven pumps usually does the trick for me. By the time I stop the salad spinner by pressing down on the little black button, the pasta is nice and dry and ready to meet some mayonnaise. Yum yum yum!

So why not just salad spin all pasta whether hot or cold? I suppose you could but then I'm not sure if pouring boiling hot water on the inner basket of a salad spinner, which is most likely made of plastic, is such a good idea.

And there you go. Two ways to dry cooked pasta. Never have soggy pasta again! :D