8 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:I call shenanigans. I have added a pinch or two of salt to my pasta and have not noticed any unsightly little white spots. That is what a mortar and pestle are for.
I'm betting you're right. Probably the reason pasta never contains salt is tradition. That's often the answer with Italian food. And since you can count on everyone salting the water when they cook the pasta, there isn't much motivation to change.
A writer at Serious Eats experimented with salting fresh pasta dough:
My dough was almost perfect; the only thing I wanted to test was whether I'd get even better flavor by adding salt directly to the dough, instead of just my cooking water or sauce. The simple answer is yes. Do it! Salting pasta water is still well and good, but there's no compelling reason not to salt your dough—I tried fine-grain iodized salt and slightly coarser kosher salt. Both work; I prefer the flavor of kosher salt. Just don't use a coarse sea salt, which will keep your dough from developing a silky-smooth texture. Hypothetically, you could salt your pasta even more and skip salting your pasta water, but I choose to make a dough that still tastes good after cooking in salted water since it gives me a little more flexibility when it comes to the flavor of the final product—I can make and freeze batches of dough and then decide how salty I want my pasta to be on a case-by-case basis.
Not exactly a scientific account, but her results make sense.
edited to add:
I just checked my own fresh pasta recipe that I worked out over a half-dozen or so trials, and see that I include 1% salt by total recipe weight. Didn't even give it much thought; it's in there just on general principle. 1% isn't very much, and some might leach into the water. I still salt the cooking water.
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