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. Der hat in Rom Ökonomie studiert, ist hetero und soll zusammen mit seinem älteren Bruder die Nudelfabrik der Familie übernehmen. Er wohnt in Rom mit seinem Freund, hat Literatur studiert und ein Buch geschrieben. The team observed how the noodles come together when lifted from a plate by a fork. Männer al dente (2010) Tomaso ist ein Freigeist. When the pandemic hit, the idea gained traction, and students and postdocs started working on it at home and in the lab. “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.” “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.