Important Note: you have been misled about salted pasta water and what chefs claim it does (though home cooks do in fact usually get this wrong).
A sophisticated chef will say the salt is added to increase the boiling point of the water so that the noodles can be cooked hotter for a shorter period of time.
This is incorrect (for the reasons you noted in the post). The salt does not actually move the boiling point by enough to be useful. Instead, the salt itself helps change the pasta to have an “al dente” texture.
Conclusion:
The fallacy, I claim, is that 2.6s are nothing. Adding salt does not decrease cooking time. It doesn’t increase it either, it just does nothing (wrt cooking time at least). [emphasis added]
This is the very first example of “The salt in pasta water fallacy” fallacy — a difference being ignored because it seemed irrelevant. In the original post’s examples, people ignored small differences, imagining them irrelevant, but in the original post’s text, someone ignored a difference because it seemed irrelevant.
Important Note: you have been misled about salted pasta water and what chefs claim it does (though home cooks do in fact usually get this wrong).
A sophisticated chef will say the salt is added to increase the boiling point of the water so that the noodles can be cooked hotter for a shorter period of time.
This is incorrect (for the reasons you noted in the post). The salt does not actually move the boiling point by enough to be useful. Instead, the salt itself helps change the pasta to have an “al dente” texture.
Conclusion:
This is the very first example of “The salt in pasta water fallacy” fallacy — a difference being ignored because it seemed irrelevant. In the original post’s examples, people ignored small differences, imagining them irrelevant, but in the original post’s text, someone ignored a difference because it seemed irrelevant.
Salt your pasta water! Don’t salt it! Try both!