Does Toasting Pasta Improve Taste?

Remember when trendy internet hacks were all the rage a couple years ago? Life hack internet kings like 5-Minute Craft were churning out compilations of videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.

Some were fairly clever hacks, like rolling dough with an old wine bottle or freezing coffee in ice trays for your iced coffee drinks. Others were downright ridiculous and unnecessary, like using a flat iron to pop popcorn kernels or taping a spatula to the tip of an opened umbrella to create a shield from splashing oil while cooking. One hack claimed that toasting dried pasta before boiling it enhances the flavor. This one caught my eye.

As an internet skeptic, I decided to put this one to the test and devise an experiment.

I gathered two of my family’s go-to pasta brands: De Cecco wheat pasta and Banza chickpea pasta. For each pasta brand, I had (1) a control group, (2) a pan-toasted group, and (3) an oven-toasted group. The control group was the plain untoasted pasta, and it is the standard to which the other groups were compared.

I toasted the pan group for 5 minutes on medium high heat, shaking the pan every minute or so. I toasted the oven group in the oven at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Here are my pastas both post-toasting and pre-boiling.

Pastas post-toasting and pre-boiling

Interestingly, the oven-roasted wheat pasta developed a deep brownish-burgundy hue and smelled nutty. Both the pan- and oven-roasted chickpea pasta developed little crisp-popped edges, and smelled like homemade popcorn.

I then boiled these pastas according to their package instructions.

Pasta post-boil

Next, the taste test! Here are my take-aways:

• Pan-toasted wheat pasta tasted the same as regular, or control, wheat pasta.

• Oven-toasted wheat pasta had the most noticeably changed flavor. It was nutty and deep, but more subtle than I expected. I think it would taste great with a simpler pasta sauce (like olive oil), which would allow the nutty flavor to shine.

• Don’t toast your chickpea pasta. While toasting did develop a nutty flavor, the puffed and crispy edges become like soggy cereal after boiling. Gross!

Why does toasting develop a nutty flavor?

As the pastas are heated, the sugars and proteins within the pasta react over and over with each other to form new flavor and aroma compounds, a process collectively called the Maillard Reaction. Classes of compounds created by the Maillard Reaction, like oxazoles or pyrroles, contribute to nutty flavors.

Is toasting your pasta worth it?

Yes! But I would only recommend the oven-toasted wheat pasta group. Sometimes, our taste buds need a little spice to their life, and toasted pasta is one easy and quick way to do it.