The Right Way To Freeze Cooked Pasta For Optimal Texture

Pasta night is a go-to solution for feeding a whole family, hosting some friends, or even whipping up quick solo dinner after a long day. Grab the right pasta for your sauce, whether you use a celebrity chef-approved, store-bought brand or make a basic marinara recipe, and that's pretty much all you need. But sometimes, you might end up cooking far too much pasta, precisely because it's so easy to prepare. How do you store the leftover cooked noodles? If you prep them right, you can freeze them.

First of all, don't mix the pasta with any sauce before you freeze it. Freezing noodles with sauce will oversaturate the pasta and make it gummy when reheated. Next, make sure you cook it al dente. A lighter cooking job on your pasta will help retain its texture and keep it from getting mushy upon thawing. Smaller, firmer pastas, like penne and rigatoni, can be left to cool, then frozen in an airtight plastic bag. 

For longer noodles, like spaghetti, fettuccine, or angel hair, let the noodles cool and toss them in olive oil to keep them from drying out. Then, twirl them with a fork into little individual domes. Freeze each one flat on an baking pan or oiled plate, then transfer the bundles into plastic bags or an airtight container once fully frozen. To reheat, let your pasta thaw slightly in the fridge, then drop it in boiling water or microwave it with some sauce. When properly prepped, frozen pasta can last up to two months in the freezer.

If leftover pasta might be on the menu in the next few days, it can go directly in the refrigerator instead of the freezer — just toss it in olive oil to prevent clumping. In an airtight container, cooked pasta will last up to 5 days in the fridge. Turning the leftovers into a cold pasta salad can be a great way to use the noodles right away, setting up a future grab-and-go meal or snack. Prepping pasta salad can be as easy as adding some Italian dressing and chopped veggies, or raid the pantry and test out some secret ingredients you should be using in your pasta salad. Once prepared, you can even freeze pasta salad to save for at least a couple months.

For an outside-the-box transformation, you can stir fry your leftover pasta. Sauteing the noodles in hot oil will give them a nice, crisp texture, and they can be mixed with anything you would normally use in a stir fry. Almost any noodle will work, but when using spaghetti, the results are surprisingly similar to Chinese lo mein.

Another delicious option is to use leftover spaghetti in your next breakfast frittata. While it may seem unconventional, pasta frittata is solidly steeped in Italian tradition and is not limited to long noodles. Best of all, you can use pasta that's been pre-mixed with sauce, whether that's marinara, pesto, or meat sauce. Even if it's been forgotten in the back of the freezer for a month, when properly prepared, you can always bring new life to your leftover pasta.