Every good pasta sauce has one ingredient we often neglect: pasta water. It starts with salting the water with enough salt that it tastes like the sea. Well, not really. But under-salted pasta water will turn out flat-tasting pasta that no sauce or cheese can perk back up.  There are guidelines online that tell you how many tablespoons per gallon to achieve the desired salinity. There's one problem with that. Every salt adds a different amount of saltiness. Diamond kosher salt is different from Maldon salt and so on. While the pasta is cooking, the water will absorb the starch from the pasta to make a tasty liquid (we like to call it liquid gold). Adding a 1/4 c or so of this water to a sauce will not only season the sauce, but also help the sauce stick to the pasta better.   Tip: It happens to all of us. We're planning to use pasta water as part of the sauce, only to rush to drain the pasta and suddenly…. yup, there goes the pasta water down the drain. Here's a neat trick for all of us not-so-perfect cooks: before you start cooking, place the pasta strainer or colander on top of a bowl in the sink. That way, when you're ready to drain the pasta (and forget to save the pasta water), the bowl will catch it for you. You can also just put a measuring cup on the bottom of the colander. That'll work fine too.