With a simple ruler you will know if your spaghetti is cooked perfectly (2024)

Researchers found themselves working from home like almost everyone else when universities were forced to close due to the COVID-19 pandemic – including laboratories, which poses a unique challenge especially for experimentalists. For example, physicists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) found themselves doing experiments that could be done at home in the kitchen. The physicists eventually went on to investigate the physics of cooking pasta; they first conducted home experiments and then repeated them. with greater precision in the laboratory when the university reopened.

Cooking instructions for most packaged dried pastas typically recommend a cooking time of 8 to 10 minutes, but this is an inaccurate method that can result in a wide variation in the consistency of the cooked pasta. Among other things, the UIUC physicists have devised a simple technique that uses only a ruler to determine when someone's spaghetti is perfect.al dente, without the need for the time-honored tradition of throwing a cooked wire against the wall – although the latter probably requires less preparation. (And yes, shocked Italians, the trial method works fine too. But where's the fun in that?)

A newspaperabout their results have just been accepted for publication in the journal Physics of Fluids, and two of the authors presented the work atthis week's meetingfrom the American Physical Society in Chicago. [UPDATE: The published articleis now available.]

A surprising number of scientific articles have been published attempting to understand the different properties of spaghetti, both when cooking and when eating: the mechanisms behind spaghetti.sloppy the pastain the mouth, for example, orspit it out(also called the 'reverse spaghetti problem'). The most famous one is how to make dry spaghetti strands break cleanly in half instead of into three or more scattered pieces.

French physicists with successexplained the dynamicsin a 2006 Ig Nobel Prize-winning paper. They found that, counterintuitively, a dry spaghetti string produces a traveling wave when it breaks. This wave temporaryis increasingthe curvature in other sections, leading to many more fractures.

i 2018,Ars reportedwork of two MIT mathematicians theI discovered a handy trick:turn the spaghettiat 270 degreesbefore slowly bringing the two ends together to split the spaghetti in half. The twist weakens the recoil effect, and as the wire twists back and unwinds to its original straightness, the stored energy in the wire is released, preventing further breakage.

In 2020, physicists at the University of California, Berkeley provided a thorough explanation of why a string of spaghetti in a pot of boiling water begins to sink as it softens. It will then slowly sink to the bottom of the pan, where it will curl back onto itself to form a U-shape.

Ifwe reportedAt the time, spaghetti, like most pasta, was made from semolina, which is mixed with water to form a paste and then extruded to create the desired shape (in this case, a thin, straight rod). The commercial products are then dried - anotheractivearea ofresearch, because this is easy on the wiresbreakduring the process.

What happens to the dried spaghetti when it is immersed in boiling water? It only takes a few seconds for the strands to reach the same temperature as the water, but it takes a little longer for the water to work its way through the starch matrix of the pasta. When this happens, the spaghetti swells and small amounts of a starch called amylose leak into the water. Finally, starch gelatinization occurs, a chemical process that controls texture changes so that properly cooked spaghetti is cooked properly.al dente.

Sameh Tawfick of UIUC, senior investigator on this latest work, obviously read the 2020 paper with great interest, given how closely it relates to his own lab's study. However, he pointed out that his team focused more on the surface adhesion and fusion of pasta strands, in addition to devising a simple ruler to determine when a person's pasta is perfectly cooked.

Pasta turned out to be a perfect fit for at-home experiments in the age of COVID, as Tawfick's lab explores soft materials, especially long fibers. Think of yarn, monofilaments, muscles, artificial muscles and the like. “Pasta is a long fiber from our perspective,” Tawfick said at a news conference during the meeting. “We study deformation, entanglement, adhesion, and all of these things are present in pasta.”

Adhesion was the primary focus of the at-home experiments — specifically, how strands of spaghetti move sideways and stick together when you pull cooked pasta from the plate. Tawfick likens the phenomenon to the so-called "Cheerio effect," where the last few delicious little "O's" clump together in the bowl: either drift toward the center or toward the outer edges.

The culprit is a combination of buoyancy, surface tension and the so-called 'meniscuseffect", which amounts to a typecapillary function. The mass of the Cheerios is insufficient to break the surface tension of the milk. But it is enough to make a small dent in the surface of the milk in the bowl so that when two Cheerios are close enough, they will naturally float towards each other. The "bumps" merge and the "O" clumps together.

"If you have particles floating on the surface of a liquid that is partially submerged, so that part of the structure is inside the liquid and part of the structure is outside the liquid, you will always have attraction if the particles of are the same species," said Tawfick. Similarly, "If you have pasta of the same species, it will always fuse." This would not happen if some pasta noodles were hydrophilic; then there would be repulsion between them instead of the surface tension bringing the pasta noodles together, the surface tension will cause the two different types of pasta to repel each other," he said. Fortunately for pasta lovers, no such monstrosity exists.