Discussed about half way through this post: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi...

> Dump a bunch of cornstarch or flour in there

Don't add powdered starch to hot water. It will clump. Add it to a small amount of cold water and then add that to the hot pasta water. (And the starch you want is amylopectin. Waxy potato starch will work better than corn starch [1].)

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Amylose-and-amylopectin-...

Or just use less water to cook the pasta? What’s the downside?

Also, if you’re using home-made, artisanal, or just some better rough-surface pasta, it will release a lot more starch than the standard smooth-surface sort.

This is what the paper suggests.

but keep it below 4% to prevent it from getting too viscous.

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That makes sense, but using the same water for weeks at a time seems a bit disgusting to me. Even if it is boiled quite often.

I make fresh tomato pasta sauces this way as well as the cheese based ones sometimes. A bit of butter and olive oil in the sauce, minimal water in with the pasta (I really like orecchiette) and finish the pasta off in the sauce with a bit of the minimal remaining water. Very clingy, very silky.

That video amuses me to no end! All that work to carefully make a delicious pasta and then such a tiny serving at the end!

The simple, classic Italian cheese pastas (cacio e pepe as well as carbonara) are so delicious you can't just eat a small bite. You need a big bowl!

I took a trip to my local university library once and found the food science section. It made On Food and Cooking look like Green Eggs and Ham in comparison and I learned more than I cared to about pineapple canning.

(To be fair, McGee’s work does exactly what I did but with multiple orders of magnitude more effort: summarizing food science journal papers into single paragraphs.)

One thing that’s always struck me as fun about cooking as a science is that your reagents need to be live calibrated by look and feel. Want to use the right amount of cyder vinegar but it’s from a brand / manufacturer you don’t know? You’re going to have to live titrate it with your mouth!

Don’t even get me started on inconsistencies between egg manufacturers. Clara’s lecithin content seems to be at least 10% stronger than Number 4’s, and she is also more tolerant of being stroked.

This is ubiquitous in baking at least. Also in confectionery where phase changes and structures are important (the canonical example being tempering). The extreme is probably Modernist cuisine.

You can look at the book "ratio" which presents a small number of standard recipes as proportions, with some hints for modification. I'd also recommend Lateral Cooking which describes recipes in terms of spectrums of ingredient variation or addition, usually starting with the simplest form. Finally there's a lot of interest in physics for coffee brewing, particularly pourover, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the rigour in that field and how much of it translates to better tasting cups.

Your comment is probably tongue in cheek, but this level of detail is pretty standard for advanced cooking. Serious Eats, Chef Steps or What’s Eating Dan have published loads of recipes backed up by research and accompanied by great graphs.

Science and empiricism usually eventually wins out over the long term but thankfully for human civilisation, people have been able to achieve extremely good outcomes in things with very loose models and folk wisdom - for instance sports people don't need to understand physics to "Bend it like Beckham"

In cooking, the folklore knew that salting your egg mix before beating an omelette long before Chemistry could catch up and explain it. In the meantime all the cynics were making worse omelettes

I'm not sure most cookbooks claim to offer an optimal recipe or even that there is an optimal one and that preference may play a big role. Some sites like serious eats do more investigation but I agree, I really like the phase diagram approach. Seems to best apply for stabilized colloids (mayo, ice cream, vinaigrettes, etc).

As the paper says:

A true Italian grandmother or a skilled home chef from Rome would never need a scientific recipe for Cacio and pepe, relying instead on instinct and years of experience.

The Recipe section is mostly to show the problem is solved

> small temperature variations can completely compromise the recipe’s outcome

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lol “optimal sauce” is such an HN approach to describing good food

You also can do this with basic natural and readily available ingredients:

1t-1T (teaspoon, Tablespoon) lemon/citrus juice and a literal two-finger tiny pinch of baking soda, without buying specialized chemical compound ingredients off of Amazon that may be lying about their contents.

Sodium citrate is already in citrus and the baking soda kills the acidity that may make the taste more harsh (another great trick is adding a pinch of baking soda to homemade tomato soup to kill the tomato acidity and blend it better with added milk/cream).

1T of white wine can do wonders for cheese sauce as well.

When I read the paper I immediately wondered if this would work. Good to see that someone has tried it and indeed it does!

Why do we need so much water when cooking pasta, is it even correct? I know pasta tend to stick if you have less water, boiling hard with lots of water alleviates that, but so does some stirring.

Use a short wide pan and just barely keep the noodles covered. You will get better pasta, easier cacio e Pepe and reduced energy costs related to pasta.

time to do a fractional factorial Cacio e Pepe!

Costco peccorino works well.

Only 4 days into 2025 and we've already found the winner. At ease, HN.

It's a shoe-in

I mean its good but is it to the Ig Nobel level?

I mean its no "Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas Platyrhynchos"

You had the temperature too high. I use an IR thermometer. Nonna from the old country just knows how long to wait for it to cool down enough which is why it looks like magic easy in their YouTube videos.

Probably a bad transliteration.

The authors suggest corn or potato starch, not flour.

In Italy we just add to the pan some of the water in which the pasta was cooked; this is rich in starch due to the cooking process. This works with other recipes as well, for example gricia or aglio olio & peperoncino. I guess that adding flour would produce a texture more similar to gravy and that's not what we're going for in traditional Italian cooking.

Or beurre manie.