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Oops! You forgot your pasta was boiling and now you have a soggy mess of overcooked pasta.
Now you’re looking up, “how to fix overcooked pasta” and hoping there’s an answer other than “sorry, pal, throw it out.”
If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place!
Fixing overcooked pasta is actually easier than you might think.
It requires a little bit more creativity than fixing undercooked pasta, but all is not lost.
Before you keep reading, let me tell you now: if you have literally just discovered that the pasta is overcooked and it’s still warm, read down to number 5 right now and then go back to the rest.
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Can You Eat Overcooked Pasta?
Yes, you can eat overcooked pasta.
It isn’t harmful to your health.
That being said, overcooked pasta is gummy and the texture is so soft and falling apart that many people do not enjoy it and need these helpful hacks to fix it.
For more information on how to tell if pasta is done (or overcooked), check out this guide.
What to Do with Overcooked Pasta
All of the articles telling you what you should have done before (ie, take out the pasta on time by following the cooking times for dry pasta or cooking times for fresh pasta) are pointless.
It’s too late now!
What do you do with your overcooked pasta now that we can’t turn back the clock on our kitchen disasters (it’s okay, we all have them).
Here are some genius ways of saving your pasta, using it in creative ways, or actually bringing the noodles themselves back to life and former firmness!
1. Turn it into a Pasta Bake
Baking the pasta in the oven is one of the easiest ways to turn your overcooked pasta into a delicious meal.
For instance, my husband loves a tuna pasta bake which is pasta, a red tomato sauce, cheddar cheese, corn, and chunks of tuna all mixed together and then baked until the top is golden brown.
When you combine the pasta with other ingredients and textures, the overcooked texture of it should disappear into the background and you should still end up with an edible meal.
Other pasta bake options would be a tomato and cheese pasta bake, a type of lasagna, maybe a creamy pasta bake with béchamel sauce – get creative and throw some sauce, veggies, and meat together in a dish with your pasta and see what happens.
2. Make a Pasta Frittata
If you’ve heard of a frittata, you’re probably thinking of ones made with eggs and vegetables, but you can do the same thing with pasta!
Simply whip up a frittata base with milk, eggs, a little bit of cheese and any other ingredients like meat that you want to add.
Mix the noodles up in this, and then fry the entire pasta + base mixture in a skillet with hot oil in it.
Let it crisp up and then flip it, cooking the other side until also crispy.
Serve with bacon bits and marvel at how you just saved the day!
3. Drown the Noodles in Sauce
If you don’t want to bake it in the oven, but still want to save your overcooked pasta, go sauce-heavy when serving.
The sauce will bind to the noodles and help hide the fact that it’s overcooked.
You can use alfredo sauce, tomato sauce, or even pesto sauce, but use more sauce than you normally would to drown your pasta and your overcooked sorrows in another flavor.
When everything is filled with sauce, the mushiness of the pasta noodles will be much harder to taste.
4. Make a Pasta Salad
If you can wait until the pasta cools, you may be left with a fantastic option for pasta salad.
Pasta salad noodles typically are served cold and pasta salad is absolutely fine with noodles that are a little bit overcooked.
You’ll also find that the pasta will firm up slightly when it’s cold, which is why this is ideal as opposed to trying to create a hot dish with the pasta.
Use any type of mix-ins and dressings you want, or use another pasta recipe that’s meant to be served cold like a delicious pesto pasta (really good cold!).
Other ingredients to throw in might be tomatoes, sliced onions, feta cheese, and even something like cold corn.
5. Run Under Freezing Water
If none of these options have appealed to you so far and your noodles are not too overcooked, you should get them under freezing cold water as soon as possible.
Your goal is to stop them from cooking more, which they will continue to do even if drained and left together because the noodles will still hold the heat and keep passing it back and forth.
You want to drain the pasta and then zoom it under the coldest faucet you can find, even throwing in some ice cubes if you have them on hand.
This will stop that cooking process and remove some of the starch on the outside (what makes pasta gummy, which gets worse when it’s overcooked).
It may just be enough to save your meal.
6. Sauté in Oil
Let’s say you’ve definitely overcooked your pasta, but you want to fix your overcooked pasta by actually saving the noodles rather than mixing them in with other unplanned ingredients.
This may blow your mind, but you can totally just sauté the noodles in oil to crisp them up!
Put the overcooked noodles in a pan of hot olive oil and sauté for about 5 minutes, tossing as you go.
Keep an eye on it so it doesn’t get too much like a stir fry if that’s not what you’re going for.
This should give you some of that firmness back into the noodles and make them edible with your favorite sauce.
7. Make a Pasta Soup
Soup and pasta go hand in hand in many households in favorite dishes like minestrone soup or an Italian sausage soup with pasta.
By using your overcooked pasta as an ingredient in soup, you’re going to completely mask the texture and it’s going to be much easier to eat your pasta that way than carrying on with your original pasta plans if you took the cooking too far.
The soup is wet and soggy anyway, so the fact that your pasta noodles are soft and squishy with not much “bite” to them is not going to matter much in the recipe.
