Learn to cook pasta with even less fuss with this easy hack.
Boiling up a pot of pasta isn’t the most taxing job in the kitchen, and it’s something most of us can do without it going horribly wrong. After all, you simply need to throw it into a pan of boiling water for around 10 minutes and your job is done.
But what if we told you there was an even easier way? The trick takes the same amount of time as boiling the pasta on the hob, but the benefit to the hack comes after you’ve scoffed your dinner down – as you won’t be left with nearly as much washing up to do afterwards, which is always a plus.
According to one woman on TikTok, you can eliminate the need for a saucepan altogether by cooking your pasta directly in the bowl you’re going to eat it from.
Instead of cooking pasta on the hob, the method instead utilises a different kitchen appliance entirely – your microwave.
A woman named Lauren shared a video in which she explained that if you chuck dried pasta into a bowl with some salt and some freshly boiled water from your kettle, you can cook it in the microwave in the same amount of time it would take on the hob.
She said: “The kitchen hack you wish you knew sooner: cooking pasta. Did you know if you add salt, pasta, and boiling water to a microwaveable dish, you can cook your pasta in the microwave?
“So if you hate cleaning pots as much as me, this is a hack for you because the rest can be stuck in the dishwasher.”
Although Lauren still cooked her pasta in the microwave for 11 minutes, the overall time the hack takes will be slightly less as you’ve boiled the water in the kettle instead of waiting for a pan of cold water to heat up on the hob.
Once the pasta was cooked, Lauren drained it in a colander as normal. Her video ended there and didn’t show viewers how she served her dish, so it’s unclear whether she used a new dish to eat her pasta.
However, once the pasta is drained you could dump it back into the microwavable bowl you cooked it in and eat it from that, giving you even less washing up to do – and absolutely no annoying saucepans to scrub by hand.
Commenters on the post said they were eager to try the hack out for themselves, as they’d never considered microwaving pasta before. However, some others warned people to be careful as the water in the bowl can overflow if you add too much.
One person said: “That’s amazing! I’ll be trying that.” While another added: “Yes! I was without a cooker for a while and I tried it, and I’ll never cook pasta on the hob again.”
But someone else warned: “I tried this before but it just overboiled so then I had to clean the microwave too.”
