Does this change everything?

There always seem to be various holy rules in cooking that you cannot break because tradition says so. And it's so much the way to do things that you cannot even question it. But this sort of conventional wisdom often doesn't hold up to modern, Good Eats-like analysis.

I remember when I was in high school, just starting to learn to cook, when I saw a Good Eats episode in which Alton Brown demonstrated that the quickest way to defrost frozen food was by placing it in a tub of cold water, under running cold water from the faucet. I had up to that point thought that my only options were the microwave's defrost cycle (horrible, horrible method in retrospect), or letting it sit in the fridge (although that would require so much time, that I would always have to resort to the microwave anyway when the frozen food in question was still far from thawed after an overnight stay in the fridge).

Learning to quickly and evenly defrost frozen food changed everything for me during those novice years.

So a few days ago, I was very interested to read Serious Eats' analysis of what is the traditional method to cook pasta. Everyone knows that you have to boil up a ton of water so that the water quickly returns to a boil and the pasta doesn't stick together! That's just how you're supposed to do it.

And of course, at a minimum, the water has to be boiling, right?

Right?

Well, maybe not! Follow me below the fold.