Myth or not: Sauce won't adhere to pasta if you add oil when boiling

I’ve never heard that cooking pasta with oil will keep the sauce from sticking. I have heard that adding oil is supposed to keep pasta from sticking to itself but I have not had problems with sticking as long as I give the pot a regular stirring at the start. If I recall, I saw an episode of Good Eats a long time ago where Alton Brown was going over whether to add oil to the water to keep it from sticking. I think the conclusion was that oil didn’t really help sticking but what it really helped with was minimizing the boil over that can happen as the starch builds up in the water. He said adding oil was worthwhile for that reason alone. But nothing about oil keeping sauce from adhering to the pasta. That doesn’t make any sense to me when I consider how many sauces I make that are heavy with olive oil. Like aglio olio. The way I make sure that the pasta is well sauced is to use the Italian method of finishing the cooking of the pasta in the sauce.

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