The advice of a Nobel laureate in physics for cooking pasta

With two other researchers, the Italian Giorgio Baresi received it Nobel prize of Physics 2021 for its contribution to the mission of making complex systems (such as our planet’s chaotic atmosphere) more predictable by mathematics. Baresi’s work has a few practical applications, ranging from meteorology to machine learning. And now he decided to appear on cooking.

Professor at Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy) Mutual Some tips, on his Facebook account, on how to cook pasta perfectly. Here’s my award-winning suggestion: Turn off the heat halfway through cooking the pasta—or leave it very low, after the water begins to boil—and cover the pan, so the residual heat can handle the job. What he definitely didn’t expect was that the mere publication would cause controversy.

Michelin-starred Italian chef Antonello Colonna He said This method makes the dough elastic. Another chef, Luigi Pomata, said adopting such an approach “would be a disaster”: “Let’s leave the kitchen to the chefs while the physicists run experiments in their laboratories.” And so the discussion began on the Internet.

Giorgio’s recipe appeared around the time that Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned natural gas supplier, announce The pipeline supplying gas to most of Europe will remain closed indefinitely. The physicist’s idea was to show a way to reduce gas consumption in cooking an Italian dish in the midst of an energy crisis.

But suddenly, there were chefs, scientists, and people like you arguing about the best (and most cost-effective) way to Prepare pasta. That’s when researchers from Nottingham Trent University (England) took the dough into the lab – and tested different methods of preparation.

They took as a basis the standard cooking method, which consists in immersing 100 g of pasta in one liter of boiling water for ten to twelve minutes. Then they calculated how much energy was expended at each step of the process. 60% of the total goes into boiling the pasta in water for ten minutes, while 35% consists of boiling the water before starting the pasta. A smaller part, 5% of the total energy, is left at the beginning of everything, while the pan is heating.

With these parameters in hand, they were able to determine which methods could deliver more gas at certain steps. And they found that Parisi’s proposal actually has a significant impact on the overall cost of cooking, because it improves the boiling step — the champ in terms of energy expenditure. The Nobel Prize in Physics cuts its total cost by at least half.

Another big reduction the researchers found — which, in their view, doesn’t hurt the bottom line — is letting the dry pasta soak for two hours. This would be a way to improve the rehydration process, in parallel with heating, as the water penetrates the dough when we put it in the pan.

With many tests, they also figure out what’s going wrong. Reducing the cooking water to one-third of the recommended range doesn’t make the pasta satisfying—but reducing it by half does. They also tried (and forbade) the use of microwave ovens. It would be a deadly sin for Italian chefs.

Is this you? Do you have a secret to making pasta like Giorgio Baresi?