While some chefs swear by adding oil to prevent pasta from sticking, researchers say that this step actually has little to no effect on the pasta. Salt is an important flavor enhancer that you’d probably miss if it weren’t there.Īs far as olive oil, the ACS says skip it. They also came to conclusions about two common and controversial pasta water additions: salt and oil.Īny chef would probably tell you that salting the water is an integral step in delicious pasta, and they’d be right. The rolling boil will keep pasta moving instead of sticking, and a little bit of that starchy pasta water improves both the texture and taste of any sauce. The ACS recommends also has two key tips: Keeping the pot at a rolling boil, and reserving some pasta water for your sauce. When you cook pasta, the protein and starch interactions are manipulated to create the al dente base for your favorite sauce (or gravy, for all you Italian-American guys from the Northeast.) The proteins in pasta hold the starches together to make the dough stretchy, but not sticky. As the video explains, pasta’s main chemical components starches (you know them as carbohydrates) and protein. Let’s start with the foundations: eggs, water and flour are all that go into pasta dough. Perfectly made, delicious al dente pasta, however, is another story.Īnd yet there are so many tips and tricks that chefs and Italian grandmothers alike swear by to achieve perfect pasta, it can be hard to figure out which methods work and which are a waste.įortunately, though, researchers at The American Chemical Society and PBS broke down the science of cooking pasta and provided some pro tips for getting it perfect every time. For further information, please contact the cited source.Pasta isn’t difficult to cook. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. This article has been republished from the following materials. Swelling, softening, and elastocapillary adhesion of cooked pasta. Reference: Hwang J, Ha J, Siu R, Kim YS, Tawfick S. Tawfick hopes the group’s work inspires others to find simple methods for studying soft materials and looks to investigate the role of salt in swelling. “So, depending on how much salt is added to the boiling water, the time to reach al dente can be very different.” “What surprised us the most is that the addition of salt to the boiling water completely changes the cooking time,” Tawfick said. The degree to which a noodle was cooked was directly related to the length of the portion that adhered to its neighbors. This provided them with a grounding of how water-driven hygroscopic swelling affects pasta’s texture.Īs pasta cooked, the relative rate of the noodle’s increase in girth exceeded the rate of lengthening by a ratio of 3.5 to 1 until it reached the firm texture of al dente, before becoming uniformly soft and overcooked.Īs pasta is pulled from liquid, the liquid surface energy creates a meniscus that sticks noodles to one another, balancing the elastic resistance from bending the noodles and aided by adhesion energy from the surface tension of the liquid. The team observed how the noodles come together when lifted from a plate by a fork. When the pandemic hit, the idea gained traction, and students and postdocs started working on it at home and in the lab. When you cook pasta, the protein and starch interactions are. “We then realized that specifically, the mechanical texture of noodles changes as function of cooking, and our analysis can demonstrate a relation between adhesion, mechanical texture, and doneness.” The proteins in pasta hold the starches together to make the dough stretchy, but not sticky. “Over the last few years, we joked about how pasta noodle adhesion is very related to our work,” he said. They combined measurements of pasta parameters, such as expansion, bending rigidity, and water content to solve a variety of equations to form a theoretical model for the swelling dynamics of starch materials.Īuthor Sameh Tawfick, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said exploring the properties of noodles was a straightforward pivot from the lab’s main work of studying the fluid structure interaction of very flexible and deformable fibers, hairs, and elastic structures. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the United States examined how pasta swells, softens, and becomes sticky as it takes up water. To boot, sometimes noodles will stick to each other or the saucepan. Noodles can take different times to fully cook, and different recipes call for different amounts of salt to be added. Achieving the perfect al dente texture for a pasta noodle can be tough.
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