How to Stop Pasta Sticking Together When Cold (And 2 More Tricks)

We’ve all been there: you’ve cooked up a batch of pasta and you weren’t able to eat it all. You put the leftovers in the fridge but when you come back to eat it the next day, your pasta is a sticky, clumpy mess.

This is a common problem. But the solution how to stop pasta sticking together when cold is simple: oil.

How to stop pasta sticking together when cold: coat your pasta in oil

When I worked in an Italian restaurant, we had one chef who was solely responsible for the pasta dishes. And just like any Italian eatery, we went through a lot of pasta.

To make the chef’s life easier during service, they prepared large batches of pasta at the beginning of the day. And I mean large — on a busy day, it could be as much as 12kg of pasta.

It’s a great trick to precious save time during service, but how did the pasta chef stop the pasta sticking together when cold? After all, you couldn’t serve one of those clumpy messes of pasta in an Italian restaurant.

Simple: they thoroughly coated the pasta in oil before storing it.

How to coat your pasta in oil

Coating your pasta in oil is a straightforward process:

1. Cook your pasta as per the packet instructions.
2. Drain the pasta. In a bowl or container, set aside any pasta that will be stored in the fridge.
3. Add oil to the pasta to the container and toss until it is all coated in the oil — the amount of oil you should use will depend on the amount of pasta you have cook, but around 1 tbsp of oil per 250g of pasta should be sufficient.

How to stop pasta sticking together while cooking

If you’re worried about eating the oil afterwards (after all, that could be a lot of extra calories if you’re counting), then don’t worry.

To easily clean the oil from the cooked pasta, just rinse the pasta or re-boil it briefly to heat it up (at the restaurant we cooked the pasta until just shy of al dente and then finished it off to order).

Either way, submerging or re-cooking the pasta in water will remove all the oil from the pasta.

This happens because oil is hydrophobic. No, it isn’t scared of water.

When something is hydrophobic it means that it cannot mix with water.

When oil is added to water, it immediately wants to separate. It just floats around until it eventually, because oil is lighter than water, gathers on the top of the water forming two distinct layers, like this:

Many people suggest adding oil to your pasta cooking water to prevent sticking. However, that is actually a misconception.

Adding any type of oil to your pasta does nothing except for waste your oil. This is especially wasteful when using high-quality extra virgin olive oil.

There is a much easier, and much less wasteful, way to stop the pasta sticking while cooking: just stir the pasta regularly as it cooks. Kenji discussed this technique, along with other surprising pasta-cooking insights, in a past article on Serious Eats, which is definitely worth a read.

That should answer the question of how to stop pasta sticking together when cold. Once you’ve managed to perfect your pasta cooking, and perfectly preserved it, why not put your new skills to the test with this fool-proof carbonara recipe?