Pasta is a staple ingredient for many UK households as it’s cheap, filling and quick to prepare.

It can be paired with various ingredients to make a diverse range of dishes, but if you don’t get the flavourings right it can taste pretty bland. Pasta is made from just two ingredients - flour and water - and so it relies on flavours from other ingredients to help enhance its taste. As such, proper seasoning is really important or you’ll likely end up with a pretty underwhelming dish.

But injecting a bit of flavour into pasta is much easier and simpler than you might think - and all you need is one ingredient: salt. Salt is crucial for bringing out the flavour of pasta and the key is to add it straight to the water in the saucepan when you start cooking.

By salting the water, this allows the pasta to absorb it as it cooks thereby seasoning it from the inside out and resulting in an overall tastier dish.

The Cooks Studio explains: “One of the primary reasons for adding salt to boiling water is to enhance the flavor of the pasta. Pasta itself is quite bland, and cooking it in unsalted water won’t impart much taste. 

“When you add salt to the water, it penetrates the pasta as it cooks, seasoning it from the inside out. This helps ensure that every bite of pasta is flavorful, even before you add any sauce or toppings.

“Another important reason for salting pasta water is its impact on texture. Salted water helps to firm up the pasta, giving it a better texture. This is especially important for achieving the desired “al dente” consistency, where the pasta is tender yet firm to the bite. Salt strengthens the protein structure in the pasta, preventing it from becoming too mushy or overcooked.”

As a general rule, cooking experts recommend adding about one tablespoon per litre of water, which works out as around 10g of salt for every 100g of pasta. Of course, this amount can be adjusted according to your personal preferences, so it depends if you like a more salty flavour.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is a big advocate for heavily salting pasta water before cooking to avoid a bland taste, so he encourages cooks to be generous with the ingredient.

Explaining the process in a video on YouTube, Ramsay said: “When I say salt that water, I mean really salt the water okay. It’s almost got to taste of the sea because you’re sort of basically, you’re making the pasta taste delicious as opposed to bland.”

He adds: “Really heavily salt that water. It makes a massive difference when you cook pasta in salted water.”