![]() The proteins in the flour also need to be broken down, or denatured, from tight globs to relaxed chains that humans can easily digest. To be fully cooked, the starches in the spaghetti need to break down, a process called starch gelatinization. The spaghetti on the bottom hasn't been soaked at all. The spaghetti at the top of this photo soaked in water at room temperature for two hours. Once it’s rehydrated, the spaghetti will be soft and pliable (shown in the photo below), but you wouldn’t want to eat it-it’s not fully cooked. Dry spaghetti rehydrates in about ten minutes in boiling water, and in around two hours in room-temperature water, so you can soak your spaghetti for a couple of hours to complete the first half of the process without using energy to boil water. Pasta absorbs water at any temperature it just does so quicker at higher temperatures. When you cook pasta in boiling water, it seems like these two processes go together-but they don’t have to. Two things happen when dry pasta cooks: 1) it rehydrates by absorbing water and 2) the starches and proteins in the pasta flour break down. Is there a more energy-efficient way to cook that pasta? Imagine you’re camping and short on cooking fuel. However, it uses large amounts of both water and energy. This method is straightforward and relatively foolproof. Cook 10–12 minutes, stirring frequently.Bring 4 quarts of water to a rolling boil.The pasta slips easily into a cramped pack but cooks into a satisfying shape.Cooking instructions on a typical package of dry spaghetti read as follows: A member of her team brought it along on a recent hiking trip. The pasta makes particularly good camping food, Yao says. This reversible bending process could be harnessed for other purposes, such as a grabber for robot hands, Yao says. Removing the silicone from the solvent caused the silicone to bend in the opposite direction. The gluey nature of cooked pasta helps lock in the twists by fusing neighboring grooves together, the researchers determined. But whereas the pasta held its curved shape, the silicone rubber eventually absorbed enough solvent to flatten out again. The technique isn’t limited to pasta: Another series of experiments, performed with silicone rubber in a solvent, produced similar results. Computer simulations of swelling pasta replicated the shapes seen in the experiments.Ĭarefully arranged grooves allow flat pasta to morph into tubes, spirals and other shapes, which may reduce packaging waste. By changing the arrangement of the grooves, the researchers controlled the final shape. That asymmetric swelling bent the previously flat noodle into a curve. ![]() As the pasta absorbed water during cooking, the liquid couldn’t penetrate as fully on the grooved side, causing it to swell less than the smooth side of the pasta. Yao and colleagues stamped a series of grooves onto one side of each noodle. ![]() But those shapes come at a cost of excess packaging and inefficient shipping: For some varieties of curly pasta, more than 60 percent of the packaging space is used to hold air, the researchers calculated. Pasta aficionados “are very picky about the shapes of pasta and how they pair with different sauces,” says Yao, who studies the design of smart materials at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The technique could allow for pasta that takes up less space, Lining Yao and colleagues report May 5 in Science Advances. When imprinted with carefully designed arrangements of grooves, flat pasta morphs as it cooks, forming tubes, spirals and other shapes traditional for the starchy sustenance.
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