Google “how to boil water” and you’ll get 461,000 results. Seriously. OK, so it turns out it’s more complicated than we might assume — especially when cooking pasta. Good pasta is more than boiling water, plus pasta, and ta-da. Salt Always add a lot of salt to the boiling water. As with the myth about the ease of boiling water, you’ll hear that the globe’s pasta experts — the Italians — enjoin that the water “should be as salty as sea water,” which is roughly 3.5 percent saline. That is way too much, really, because that translates to 2 tablespoons fine-grained salt per quart (or liter) of water.