Why they don't put salt in pasta dough

[kyeshi]

0:26 "Why not cut out the middle man?" I wholeheartedly agree, Adam, and this is why I salt my mouth instead of my food.

[mskills]

I love how these professors you talk to rarely seem to make any attempt to clean up their offices before being seen by potentially millions of people. Always keepin' it real!

[timseguine]

Asian noodles have salt because along with the alkaline usually present, salt helps maintain the elasticity necessary for hand pulling noodles. Most of the asian styles developed from hand pulled noodles, not rolled ones.

[greedygreedo]

Surely another big factor is culinary: depending on the sauce you are pairing with the pasta, a different amount of salt is required. E.g. when making carbonara with salty cured pork and salty cheese, many chefs recommend little to no salt in the pasta water, as otherwise the dish would become over-salted. Especially when you reserve a big cup of the cooking water to make an emulsion sauce.

If the pasta was too salty you wouldn't have a choice; you can't take salt out of the pasta if it is too salty, but you can add more if there isn't enough.

[rahimarif]

appreciate how you actually go into the food science to explain why you do things rather than others that just say "see"

[junkmail]

Some possibilities for why noodles are salted:

- A highly elastic, snappy texture is more desirable in Chinese noodles. Even moreso than in pasta, gluten development is extremely desirable in many Chinese noodle making techniques - they are often autolysed and go through several rounds of kneading. Chinese food places a high value on texture, often textures that europeans dislike.

- Chinese noodles often have bases added to them to increase elasticity.

- Chinese food often places a greater value on uniformity of seasoning.

[mickidymac]

Really just taking a second to recognize and appreciate Adam's distinction between theory, thesis, and hypothesis. There's so much pseudoscience out there, but it helps with picking out the good stuff when people acknowledge that really everything we "know" is actually just a best educated guess based on evidence and facts

[MajoraZ]

I think a cool video topic might be how much salt Pasta, boiled vegetables, or other things you stick in salted water actually absorbs. Or how much of the oil you saute or fry your food with ends up eaten vs left in the pan or frier or evaporated. I don't know about other people, but I always don't know how much salt or oil or butter to input into calorie trackers because i'm not sure how much I actually end up ingesting vs pouring down the drain.

[realkingofantarctica]

Adam is really embracing the meme. Seasoning the water instead of the pasta may be his most vaguely psychopathic out-of-context line yet. Very excited for "Why I season my mousetraps, not my cheese."

[smokeduv]

And this is with "modern" wheat, which has a lot more gluten from lots and lots of years of selective breeding to improve its quality (i.e. have more gluten to make the bread puff more), so I can imagine being a lot tougher to make in the ancient times

[teodjuyg]

You heard it here folks, he season his Exs and not his wife's

[leonardsvideos]

Simple question, lots of research, good cinematography, entertainment. Always love the effort put in all of these videos!

[EllaEllaAudios]

Alex having his pasta series on hold meant there was a huge lack of pasta content in my feed, thank you Adam

[nienke]

Just speculating in regards to Asian style noodles typically containing salt:
Asian style noodles are often a bit thicker, and more rounded, so for such a style having dough that springs back a bit might not be problematic (or may have resulted from the use of salt in the first place).
Some styles are even rolled into strands, rather than rolled into sheets then cut in strips.
And you also find some styles of noodles that use a mix of flours where the amount of gluten might be less, so having extra strength from the gluten that are present might help in such case.
It may also be that places near the sea traditionally used (pre-boiled) seawater as (part of) the water (rather than processing into salt grains to only dissolve into water again later), and this may also have been easier for export to more inland regions where salt may not have been as easily available, the noodles cooked in fresh water from springs etc. would still be seasoned.

[TBD]

Only a few minutes in, but I'm already impressed by the ever-heightening production value of these videos. The interview is incorporated especially well

[pufthemajicdragon]

Dude, I LOVE your scientific approach to everything. Your videos are brilliant and I follow just for the food science half. The recipe videos are just bonus material for me :)

[Miigga]

12:22 "traditional no-egg just salt and water Italian pasta dough". The oceans are now officially confirmed to be made of traditional pasta dough.

[mike]

So your theory is that the difficulty of moving the dough may have de-incentivized the mixing of salt into pasta. Maybe, but if we're looking at Italian style pasta, we should consider its early origins would likely have ties to Rome, where salt was used as a currency and preservative for meats.

Since using salt was the equivalent of spending currency, using it to prepare a food that already self-preserves may have seemed wasteful. Additionally, any preserved meats added to the pasta would have had plenty enough salt to satisfy the consumer.

One of Townsends videos on salted preserved meats from the Revolutionary War era showed that when boiling salted meats, a soldier would change the water two or three times in order to get enough salt out of the meat to make it edible.

[Alicapy]

Adam please never stop making these videos. I love having these very specific questions answered

[leightonlawrence]

This man is slowly giving me all the knowledge required to make doughs from scratch, and I’m not even trying to learn to bake