Stirring for minutes on end, adding salt during cooking, drying with olive oil or dousing it in icy tap water. What really helps to combat the greatest fear of every non-Italian pasta cook: sticky pasta? If you want to cook like a real Italian after all, you naturally know how to prepare the dish perfectly.

To start with, the pasta needs to be made from durum, (hard) wheat. The starch in the pasta is actually to blame. As soon as the spaghetti comes into contact with the boiling water, the starch grains on the spaghetti swell up and break. The starch spreads over the surface and the pasta becomes sticky. What to do?

The secret lies in the first two minutes. This is when the sticky starch grains stick to the surface of the pasta. So to make sure the spaghetti strands cannot stick together, keep them moving by stirring for the first two minutes!