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taylorvich [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/22 [aps.org]

A bowl of steaming hot pasta covered in your favorite sauce and dusted with a healthy dose of parmesan cheese comes high on the list of ultimate comfort foods. But cooking that pasta to perfection can be more difficult than seemingly simple recipes imply. Now two separate teams of researchers have explored two different aspects of executing a flawless dish. In one study, Phillip Toultchinski and Thomas Vilgis of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Germany, studied whether perfectly al dente spaghetti could be prepared in a more energy-efficient way [1]. In a second study, Matteo Ciarchi and Daniel Busiello of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Germany, Giacomo Bartolucci of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues developed a recipe for making perfect cacio e pepe, a three-ingredient cheese sauce that is surprisingly easy to mess up [2]. “It is very difficult to make this sauce,” says Busiello. “You are almost always doomed to fail.”

The study by Toultchinski and Vilgis was inspired by a brouhaha over a 2022 Facebook post by physics Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi. In that post, Parisi suggested that chefs could reduce the energy needed for cooking pasta using a “heat-off-lid-on” method. In this method, after the pasta is added to boiling water, the heat source is turned off and the pot is covered with a lid. The pasta is left to cook in slowly cooling water. Studies indicate than a significant fraction of the cooking energy could be saved this way. But chefs questioned whether this method could achieve al dente pasta—pasta that is soft on the outside and crunchy at its core.

To put a scientific answer to this question, Toultchinski and Vilgis studied three methods of cooking pasta. The first method is the most familiar one: Add pasta to boiling water and keep that water roiling until the pasta is perfectly cooked. The second method, which the team terms presoaking, involves soaking the pasta in cold water for one and a half hours prior to cooking. The soaked pasta is then cooked in boiling water. The third method was Parisi’s heat-off-lid-on method. For all experiments, the team used the same pot and the same amounts of dry durum-wheat spaghetti (150 g) and water (1.5 l). For the heat-off-lid-on method, the lid was a sheet of aluminum foil.

Toultchinski and Vilgis show that the heat-off-lid-on method used the least energy, while the traditional method used the most. Roughly 60% of the energy needs for cooking pasta comes from keeping the water roiling while the pasta cooks, so eliminating this step leads to significant energy saving, Vilgis says. Presoaking also considerably reduced the energy needs, as it lowered the cooking time from 13 minutes to 3 minutes. “Presoaked pasta cooks very fast,” Vilgis says. But do all three methods achieve perfect al dente pasta?

Original Submission