The Versatile Asian Kitchen Tool Lidia Bastianich Uses To Strain Pasta

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Cooking pasta might seem simple, but there are a few basic steps you'll want to mind along the way, like a good tactic for draining your noodles. Italian-American chef Lidia Bastianich has her own tips in the kitchen when it comes to straining certain types of pasta from the pot, but there's one specific tool she swears by that's more commonly seen in Asian kitchens than European or American ones: a spider strainer. 

The spider is a shallow, mesh strainer that's attached to a long handle. It's a versatile utensil typically used for cooking fried foods, especially in Asian-inspired recipes like our Chinese takeout-style honey garlic crispy beef. The metal mesh allows excess oil to drip off the food as it's lifted from the cooking vessel. In the case of pasta, the spider strainer simply scoops the noodles (such as ravioli) out of the water pot. Bastianich once told TODAY, "It's inexpensive, but boy, does that do wonders to pull pasta out of the water! You just fish it out, it's easy." She doesn't use the spider strainer for every pasta-cooking occasion, however. To remove long noodles from hot water, Bastianich prefers using tongs.

The spider strainer is designed to grab food from hot liquid, so Bastianich's suggestion of using it to pull small amounts of pasta from a pot makes sense. And since it's a multitasker in the kitchen, you can also use a spider strainer for its intended purpose: removing fried food from hot oil. As one of the most practical kitchen tools for the home cook, you can use it to prepare just about anything, from wings to noodles to sweet treats, so consider purchasing a spider strainer if you don't own one already.

In addition to being handy for cooking pasta, a spider strainer is very useful for other kitchen endeavors, too, including baking. If you're trying to sort fine particles from extra-chunky ones, like in the case of, say, separating pieces of manually crushed peppermint candies for peppermint bark, the spider can roughly sift those out. Bastianich's fellow celebrity chef, Martha Stewart, uses a spider strainer to separate eggs. The wide rings on the strainer even allow for multiple egg whites to separate from yolks at once. Stewart also uses it to rinse off small amounts of vegetables by placing them in the basket and running it under water.