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Salt the water once it’s boiling. Use about 1 tablespoon salt per ½ pound fresh or dried pasta. Of course, you can begin with salted water, but it’ll take longer to come to a boil. Never add oil. It will result in slippery noodles that won’t catch the sauce.

Add the noodles. If you’re using dried pasta, don’t break dried noodles in half. Let them sit in the water, their ends exposed, until they soften enough that you can bend them with a wooden spoon and submerge them in the boiling water.

Stir well and often but gently. If you don’t stir them, the noodles will drop to the bottom and stick.

Cook until supple but still firm to the bite. For fresh noodles, that’s the moment they float to the surface, plus about 10 seconds. For dried noodles, they may never float and it can take anywhere from 5 to 9 minutes. It’s all balance: you don’t want to crunch the noodles between your molars but you also don’t want to mush them against your soft palate. The only way to know if they’re done? No, don’t throw a noodle against a wall. Scoop one out and taste it.

Drain the noodles in a colander set in the sink. If the sauce is ready, don’t rinse the noodles; the sticky glutens will catch the sauce. Always reserve a little of the pasta cooking liquid; use this to thin out a sauce that’s too thick. If the sauce is not ready, rinse the noodles with warm water so they won’t glue together.

Serve at once. Don’t let warm pasta sit around. Ideally, the sauce should come off the flame just as you’re draining the noodles. But in the forgiving world of pasta, a near miss is as good as perfection.

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Storing Fresh Pasta

While dried pasta has an indefinite shelf life, fresh pasta is perishable. Plan on cooking noodles within 30 minutes of making them.

If you want more lag time, toss the noodles with a little all-purpose flour or finely ground cornmeal to keep them from sticking and store in a tightly closed ziplock plastic bag in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours.

Beyond that, freeze fresh pasta. Wind the flour or cornmeal-dusted noodles into little nests and lay them out in one layer on a large baking sheet. Freeze until firm, then seal in plastic bags and store in the freezer for up to 3 months. Drop them directly from the freezer into boiling water, but treat them like dried pasta—that is, they’ll need a little longer cooking time, perhaps 4 or 5 minutes.

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Three Specialty Pastas

Here are our favorite pretenders: they act like pasta, are made from a pastalike dough, are extremely versatile (can be a side dish, main course, or first course), and yet are not pasta. Still and all, they go perfectly with most of our pasta sauces.

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Spaetzle

In German, the name means “little sparrows”; less prosaically, they’re malformed strips of dough. As a side dish, spaetzle are best with the Butter and Fresh Herbs Sauce. Once boiled, they can also be dropped right into a pot of soup during the last 3 minutes of cooking. Makes about 4 servings (about 4 cups cooked spaetzle)

1½ cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

2 large eggs, lightly beaten, at room temperature

½ cup plus 2 tablespoons milk (regular, low-fat, or fat-free)

While you prepare the dough, bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Use at least 6 quarts of water, but leave a generous amount of headspace in the pot.

Whisk the flour, salt, baking powder, and nutmeg in a large bowl, then whisk in the eggs and milk until a sticky, wet batter forms. There should be no grains of flour visible, but stop whisking the moment they disappear to avoid setting up the glutens and rendering the spaetzle tough.

Create the spaetzle using one of these three methods. Do not use all the batter at once. Since spaetzle cook fast, make the dumplings in batches to keep the first rounds from getting waterlogged and overcooked.

With a spaetzle maker: Pour a small amount of the dough