When I cook pasta with a hollow (eg, orecchiette), how do I stop it sticking together? The water is always boiling and salted, sometimes with oil, but last week my granddaughter and I spent half an hour going through the damn stuff.
David, Manchester
“Pasta is an engaged activity, so it’s really important that you don’t just drop it [in boiling water] and walk away,” says Dara Klein, of Tiella in east London. “Like a dear friend, pay it some attention.” David mentions orecchiette, which is a particularly vulnerable shape, says the Guardian’s Italian correspondent, Rachel Roddy: “They have a habit of falling into each other,” she sympathises, and in such times it’s best to check your basic principles. “It’s always the same rules,” Roddy says. “The water should be fast boiling, add salt, then stir, so you’ve got that double movement.” She isn’t one for adding olive oil, mind. Neither is Klein: “It’s just not necessary. And even if you’ve added a healthy glug of oil to the water, you’re still going to get clumping if you don’t stir.”

This may seem obvious, but make sure your pasta hasn’t intertwined in the bag before shaking it into the rolling water, and don’t be daft and dump the lot in all at once. “As soon as the pasta is in the water, give it a stir with a wooden spoon,” says Klein, who then stirs every minute to ensure those pasta shapes float free.

Once cooked, it’s a good idea to scoop out the pasta with a slotted spoon or sieve (“a spider or a regular one,” Roddy says) and put it in a big bowl. “You want to be doing this in batches, rather than pouring the lot into a colander – that’s just another opportunity for the pasta to clag because the water goes down the sink, the steam comes up and you glue the pasta together in the colander.” If you really must drain, meanwhile, Roddy would go for the double – ie, two colanders. “If you do all of these things – make sure the water is moving, you rain in the pasta, you stir regularly and lift out once cooked – then you should have liberated orecchiette.”

Where many people have fallen foul of the clump, however, is in one-pot dishes. Again, success, Roddy says, comes down to adding the pasta gradually and keeping things moving. That said, she would be minded to change tack: “I would be wary of using shapes such as orecchiette in a one-pan dish, because they like to stick more than others.” This inclination, coupled with the starch being released into the water and functioning like glue, can only spell trouble.

When it comes to the likes of pasta salads (ie, in which it’s dressed and served at room temperature), be sure to cook the pasta only to just al dente. “Clumping can happen if you take the pasta right up to the maximum cooking time,” Roddy warns, so keeping it harder will mean it’s less sticky. Again, once it’s ready, get that pasta in a big bowl, Roddy says: “You don’t want it to be in a small, claustrophobic space, because you’re then just letting that bit of residual water and the starch on the pasta stick together.” Just like the rest of us, movement and space are key.

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