How to prevent Orecchiette from sticking to each other while cooking? How to separate in water? This shape of pasta easily nests inside each other. A lot of times if you just pour it directly from the bag/box into boiling water, you will get stacks of them together.

Once they are cooking this way it is a major endeavor to separate them. The pasta won't cook evenly because they are stacked together. The ones stacked in the middle will have more al dente centers.

How do we prevent this? (One way is to make sure they are separated before entering the water.

Once they start cooking and some of them are stacked, what is the best way to separate them?
Adding your pasta to cold water before boiling it may help. You will need to stir more often overall, but the shells won't initially stick together as soon as you add them to the water, and then you can stir to prevent the sticking as they become softer. 

Harold McGee in a New York Times column wrote this:


  I prefer starting with cold water, because the noodles don’t stick together at all as they go into the pot, and because I don’t notice a difference in flavor once they’re drained and sauced.


What happens is that the starch on the noodles gets rinsed off in the water before it can gelatinize and stick to everything. So you will have to stir even before the water gets warm.