The Right (And Definitely Wrong) Way To Combine Pasta With Sauce - Chowhound

The reason this is the "right" way to mix pasta and sauce is because the pasta water helps bind the noodles and the sauce together, as well as thickening the sauce. This might seem counterintuitive since you'd imagine that water might actually thin out a sauce. But pasta water is a different beast: It has a cloudy color, and the cause of that is all the starch from the pasta that has leached out into it. That…