The secret is that restaurants which make traditional cacio e pepe are using pasta water to emulsify the sauce.
But it's not the same pasta water you're using at home!
Only a tiny amount of starch is coming off of the 500g of pasta you just cooked in the proper ratio in 5000g of water (with 50g of salt). They've been cooking with their pasta water all day or all week; It's completely full of starch that came off the other pasta.
Dump a bunch of cornstarch or flour in there to get above 1% concentration (or more efficiently, into a tiny portion in a bowl) to replicate the emulsifying effect, or just use a different emulsifier.
I’ve been doing it with little water since forever. It would take ages to boil a lot of water before I had an induction stove, so I tried with little and it worked the same.
froh 3 days ago [-]
yesyesyes!
100g of dry pasta turn into about 230g of al dente pasta. thus 200g of water per 100g of pasta is plenty. bring to boil. pasta in.
lid on(!), heat way down, to a simmer, very very slight boil. stir after 40% of the cooking time. taste and chewiness testt
after the advertised overall cooking time. if the pasta form is very fluffy then have a little preheated water handy should your pasta unexpectedly need more water. hint: it won't. but an unusual pasta form may rarely ask for more water.
drain and catch the starchy water if you think you need it. (I personally don't like the taste and prefer adding starch to the sauce if needed, but ymmv here). rinse pasta briefly to stop the cooking and ensure all dente chew.
energy saving compared to "recommended standard method": 80%. eighty percent less energy. (200ml instead of 1000ml). more actually, because the lid is on.
heh. sounds interesting. will try. thx for the pointer.
andybp85 4 days ago [-]
did this recently and it totally works
JumpCrisscross 4 days ago [-]
> 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].)
Or just use less water to cook the pasta? What’s the downside?
mapt 4 days ago [-]
First, temperature dynamics and being able to reliably determine doneness by time. Boiling water is nature's thermal measuring stick, and if your water is dropping to 150 it's a Problem. This is especially the case if you like to let the water 'coast' heat-off so that your pasta doesn't burn to the bottom of the pan during an unattended rolling boil.
Second, clumping. You want the ability to freely stir and get water between pieces of pasta, or if the heat is on for the boiling bubbles to stir, in order to avoid the pasta sticking together.
Third, use 80% less water and you only get a 5x higher concentration of starch. I don't have measurements in front of me but I suspect this simply isn't starchy enough to take a tiny portion of that water and use it as an effective emulsifier. The article pins 1% starch as a threshold of effect, and I doubt I'm losing 0.2% of pasta weight when cooking to al dente.
Note: This is all for dried durum wheat-flour pasta, the generic industrial 'macaroni' of American agribusiness. Egg pasta is a very different product, with different cooking characteristics, that happens to share the name. Durum semolina pasta, whole-wheat pasta, gluten-free "pasta", rice pasta... no guarantees that this is applicable.
mapt 2 days ago [-]
Correction: To attain 1% of 5kg of water, I need 50g of starch. In 500g of pasta, there's no way in hell I'm losing fully 10% of the weight of the pasta. If I cut the water to pasta ratio by 80%, I would still need to lose 2% of the weight of the pasta, and I don't think that's happening.
crazygringo 4 days ago [-]
You certainly can, but:
- It's still not going to be enough starch
- You can't rely on box cooking times even as a starting point. Your pasta will take significantly longer to cook, since it will bring down the temperature of the water when you put it in, since there's so little water
aardvarkr 4 days ago [-]
1. The starch comes from the pasta, not the water. Decreasing the water increases the concentration of the starch in said water. That’s why every good recipe for cacio e Pepe I’ve seen recommends using as little water as possible
2. This has been thoroughly debunked. Kenji did a full write up of this but suffice to say that starches absorb water starting at 180 degrees. As long as you have the water above that temp it will cook in the same amount of time.
Have not seen that article but I agree. I’ve been cooking pasta with less water and using box times for years. Has never ever failed for me.
messe 4 days ago [-]
In my experience box cooking times are never quite right, and irrelevant if you're going to be finishing your pasta in the sauce anyway.
Unless you're extremely familiar with the exact brand of pasta, temperature of your stovetop, etc., you should be tasting your pasta toward the end of cooking to decide when to stop cooking it.
> - It's still not going to be enough starch
I'm inclined to disagree, but only have anecdata on this, so I can't really get into an extended debate over it. So I guess now I get to look forward to experimenting with starch additions the next few times I cook pasta.
wahnfrieden 4 days ago [-]
simply lift pasta and observe (and do this enough that you learn what to look for). that's enough to avoid tasting it until a final confirmation.
messe 3 days ago [-]
For a longer pasta, sure. But something like Fusilli can be more difficult to judge, I've found.
wintermutestwin 4 days ago [-]
Here is a great video on cooking pasta with less water:
I don't get clumping. I use an adequate quality pasta (De Cecco mostly), stir it when I put it in the water, and a few times after that, cooking to al dente. If I'm making a Caccio e Pepe or Carbonara I cook the spaghetti or (my preference) Buccatini I'm aiming for the minimum amount of liquid left, ideally just enough to put in the sauce. I use a frying pan so I can lay the noods out flat to minimise the water.
As I said I don't get clumping, it is absolutely possible to cook noods in minimal water without clumping because I do it so try switching some thing up if it's happening to you.
Aloisius 4 days ago [-]
How do you stir long pasta in minimal water before it has softened?
While small pasta shapes are relatively easy to stir such that they break contact with anything nearby right from the beginning, long pasta tends to move together when stirring until they’ve softened - at which point they’ve already started sticking together.
You can try to stir it so that the pasta isn’t all running parallel before it softens, but then you get ends start sticking out of the water until it softens more, leading to uneven cooking.
For long pastas, I’ve found using more water and just adding a little flour while cooking to be a lot easier.
wlll 4 days ago [-]
I use kitchen tongs to pick up and jostle the noods as another commentator mentions. It starts out parallel as you say. Flour would add a flavour I didn't want and I don't have an issue with uneven cooking or clumping so I don't need to.
ikawe 4 days ago [-]
It’s more of a “jostle” than a stir when cooking spaghetti in a frying pan.
thefringthing 3 days ago [-]
Boil long pasta in a skillet, not a pot.
bobmcnamara 1 days ago [-]
Ooh, I've never thought to use a pan.
eecc 4 days ago [-]
De Cecco? Nah, that's pretty bad. You want to try Garofalo or Molisana.
wlll 4 days ago [-]
I live in the NW England, De Cecco is "middle" quality where I live and affordable, the brands you mention aren't available.
eecc 2 days ago [-]
shrug then go with De Cecco, it's still better than Barilla. But if you find a Molisana or especially a Garofalo, do grab a pack and taste the difference.
wlll 1 days ago [-]
I'll pick up a pack if I see it. The top quality the supermarket we go to has is Rummo, it's the next step up from De Cecco (in the supermarket at least) and I buy it sometimes, but to me there's not a hell of a lot of difference between the two for the price difference.
wahnfrieden 4 days ago [-]
Nonsense
eecc 2 days ago [-]
Please articulate more, I'm listening (mind you, I'm italian and opinionated about my pasta)
greggyb 4 days ago [-]
Stir.
tanvach 4 days ago [-]
Sometimes I forget to stir and have to reboil the pasta. Long noodles like spaghetti will stick like crazy and have inconsistent cooking. If I need to cook quickly I use less water. Otherwise more water is hands off.
greggyb 4 days ago [-]
Reduce your pasta water. You can even save it like stock. Adding some is also a savior when reheating sauces that break easily.
4 days ago [-]
speff 4 days ago [-]
Or use the normal amount of water and reduce the liquid after straining the pasta out?
wlll 4 days ago [-]
By the time you reduce the liquid the pasta is going to be pretty cold. Just using less water takes less time.
PartiallyTyped 4 days ago [-]
If you do that, you gotta strain into another pot, and then reduce that. No need. Just use a lot less water, and barely cover the pasta.
XajniN 4 days ago [-]
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.
s0rce 4 days ago [-]
This is what the paper suggests.
jounker 4 days ago [-]
but keep it below 4% to prevent it from getting too viscous.
peoplefromibiza 3 days ago [-]
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hsuduebc2 4 days ago [-]
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.
greenthrow 4 days ago [-]
They aren't using the same water for a week. The GP comment is nonsense.
ta988 4 days ago [-]
Wait until you hear about 38y and more soy sauce from China or broths (with meat and fish) that cooked for years in Korea in the same pots.
hsuduebc2 4 days ago [-]
Edit:
That makes sense, but using the same water for whole week at a time seems a bit disgusting to me. Even if it is boiled quite often.
Sorry I wasn't able to edit it.
mapt 4 days ago [-]
In a restaurant that makes pasta as a focus you don't "boil it quite often", you boil it constantly. Many gallons of boiling water takes forever to come up to temperature, and once it's there the pot can be thermally insulated to keep it there above 200F with minimal additional heating. Customer orders, you dump it in, customer is served in 5-15 minutes.
You keep it at a slow boil, and properly salted, all day long. If you're using it more than one day, you'd probably want to keep it hot overnight, like "perpetual stews", but I can't attest to how common this is, especially in restaurants that aren't constantly plating pasta.
You can manage it as a batch process, throwing the water out when it gets too starchy, but doing this unaided leaves you unable to use the water as emulsifier at the start of the cycle. You could also do it as a perpetual process by pouring some off the top and refreshing with clean water.
Mystery-Machine 4 days ago [-]
What? What is gross? Did you ever saw raw meat? It's probably gross. There are also insects walking over your vegetables. Gross.
hsuduebc2 4 days ago [-]
Gross part is that you are boiling same liquid in open space where people are working and making a mess. Also you are going to accumulate residue ar the bottom.
Unlike meat or vegetables this can't be washed.
crazygringo 4 days ago [-]
Do you find it gross when there's a big stockpot simmering stock for 12 hours without a lid in order to reduce?
And what's to wash? You don't wash food after cooking, and pasta is like bread -- it certainly doesn't need washing beforehand either. It's just flour and some other ingredients.
It's not like vegetables where you need to wash off dirt, pesticides, etc. Or meat where you wash off bacteria. Those aren't issues with pasta.
astrange 3 days ago [-]
I guess you don't wash flour, but it does need to be disinfected (eg by cooking it) - it's a little unsafe to eat raw, which is the problem with raw cookie dough.
If there was a way to get rid of the insect eggs people would presumably want to do it too, but iirc they're just too small to filter out.
hsuduebc2 4 days ago [-]
I do not. I didn't make myself clear in first comment. Sorry for that. I was talking about using same water for a whole week. I felt that it is not optional. The residue building at the bottom, open space of messy kitchen with lid open and constant reheating because it cools overnight is what seems little bit off for me.
crazygringo 4 days ago [-]
Oh, I see - yeah I've never heard of a restaurant using the pasta water across days. I don't think that's a thing. In fact it's a whole thing about how the pasta gets better throughout the day, because you start with fresh water each day. And remember that water is constantly being added to the pot as it gets soaked up by the pasta.
Just from a food safety perspective I'm not sure it's legal to reuse across days, given that it's going to take all night to cool, only just in time to be reheated again.
aardvarkr 4 days ago [-]
If it’s constantly at a boil I doubt there’s a food safety issue though high volume pasta shops probably don’t need to keep the water more than a day
Mystery-Machine 4 days ago [-]
Ahhhhhh, I also misunderstood your comment. Yeah, I hear you. Maybe you can keep the starch water in airtight container...not sure. I don't keep starch water for the next time I'll cook pasta. I just use the currently made starch water to create a sauce. Highly recommended! But, as mentioned in the research, wait for the water to cool down a bit. Or make a risottata in a pan. <- also highly recommended if you have a pan big enough.
csantini 4 days ago [-]
The trick is to:
1. Cook the pasta in very little water ("pasta risottata").
2. Vigorously agitate (emulsify) the sauce with that super starchy broth
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.
chongli 4 days ago [-]
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!
quotz 4 days ago [-]
The pasta plate is called Primo Piatto meant to be eaten as the first part of the main course. The Secondo Piatto is the second part of the main course usually a meat dish, is meant to be eaten after the pasta. Hence why, the pasta course is small and needs to be small. However, there are exceptions, where pasta dishes can be the full main course on its own. The reason most italian pasta dishes are only a part of the main course is because they're not a balanced meal, and therefore will not properly feed you.
The concept of having multi-course meals is foreign to the USA both historically and culturally. The word "Entree" actually means appetizer in french, while in the USA it means main dish for whatever reason. Its even more ridiculous that USA restaurants that pretend to be fancy put "entrees" instead of "main dishes" on their menus.
jancsika 4 days ago [-]
> Its even more ridiculous that USA restaurants that pretend to be fancy put "entrees" instead of "main dishes" on their menus.
I smell "epic-ism": you know the French definition proximal to your own lifetime, but not the earlier one that essentially meant hearty meat courses.
Also, there were even "large entrées" from the same period. From Wikipedia[1]:
"Large joints of meat (usually beef or veal) and large whole fowl (turkey and geese) were the grandes or grosses entrées of the meal."
Maybe that definition was just from an influx of "ridiculous Americans" traveling to France during the Enlightenment so they could pretend to be fancy.
Still too small for that. It’s barely bigger than an amuse bouche.
I think this must be a tasting portion, maybe a cooking school thing or similar.
quotz 4 days ago [-]
Not amuse bouche. To me it looks like a standard sized primi in a prix fix menu
Mystery-Machine 4 days ago [-]
No, you don't. That's why USA suffers from high obesity rates. You need to eat a small portion that is just enough. You won't starve, trust me.
zolland 4 days ago [-]
They were really just making a fun comment about how good the food tastes...
chongli 4 days ago [-]
Thank you! I was totally caught off guard by the swiftness and harshness of the response to what I thought was a pretty innocent comment about the joy of Italian pasta.
If I had to guess, the pasta serving in the video was no more than about 150-200 calories. Dry pasta is 370 calories per 100g and pecorino is 390 per 100g. That serving was maybe 30g worth of pasta and maybe 10g worth of cheese.
Needless to say, that’s a snack-sized portion of pasta, not a meal.
shermantanktop 3 days ago [-]
> what I thought was a pretty innocent comment about the joy of Italian pasta
There are few punishments more swift and severe than what happens after you express any opinion at all about Italian food on the internet.
washadjeffmad 4 days ago [-]
I wouldn't sweat it. It was probably just one of our resident "transcendent biohackers" who thinks eating is an impediment to maximizing their human potential.
Stim use is an effective appetite suppressant, after all.
Mystery-Machine 4 days ago [-]
Sorry I misunderstood your comment.
wahnfrieden 4 days ago [-]
It's a small portion because pasta isn't a meal, it's a kind of starter dish before the main meal.
iamacyborg 4 days ago [-]
That's still a very small portion.
greenthrow 4 days ago [-]
Only by insane american portion sizes. It's normal for an italian restaurant. And it's plenty of food.
hansvm 4 days ago [-]
740 kcal of pasta and cheese went into the dish, and under half (370 kcal) ended up on that plate. People vary, but even short, old people with no exercise have a maintenance metabolism of 3x that. To maintain my weight I need 10x that.
I suspect most of the reactions here are cultural (do you get most of your calories with breakfast, are restaurant meals larger or smaller than home meals, is that the only food with the meal or do you typically have other starters and desserts, do you snack throughout the day, ...).
I typically eat once a day, sometimes adding in a small breakfast, I don't snack, I don't really care for desserts, and certainly for a weeknight meal I might make cacio e pepe but definitely won't also whip up breadsticks, cocktails, and a few sides most of the time. Nearly anyone with those eating habits would find this a small amount of food (in the sense that if they ate it instead of their normal dinner regularly they'd lose weight quickly, at least 3lbs per month, 25lbs in my case).
Even people who eat 3 square meals and snack some (no more than half a family-size bag of chips) through the day will find this on the small side (losing weight if all 3 meals are that portion) if they're moderately active, no older than 40, and no shorter than 5'10.
iamacyborg 4 days ago [-]
I’m not American, I’m a short, skinny French guy.
I’d be left very hungry if someone served me a portion of pasta that small.
vinceguidry 4 days ago [-]
This is why cacio e pepe is most often served as an appetizer, rarely as a main meal.
BobaFloutist 4 days ago [-]
Ah yes Italians, famous for being stingy with portions, feeding you the minimum portion possible.
Melting_Harps 4 days ago [-]
> Ah yes Italians, famous for being stingy with portions, feeding you the minimum portion possible.
So, this is an often [0] repeated misconception: you have to differ from family style eating, and that of professional cuisine gastronomy. The former is what you are attributing this POV, whereas a professional kitchen that focuses on the tre/quattro piatti format (prix fixe) the whole point is to provide small(er) portions between courses, often in order to get the waiter/sommelier to drop the wine card to match the palette/dish, which is where the real money is made in restaurants.
When I ran kitchens in Italy, we often sold proteins at a loss (at least the first 5-10 orders) in order to promote the local wine/vineyards that we got a massive discount on by buying half the harvest/yield seasons anf sometimes years ahead and could mark-up the bottle--it's your basic loss leader approach, and pre-service is often where these things are tweaked and refined with a very clear intention for FOH to move the booze to make up for the losses in the kitchen. The owner I worked for during this time had a family owned dairy/caseficco business where we got our cheeses where we also got lamb from as well depending on the time of year.
Its fun, to an extent, especially with weekend specials and selling out low-cost high margin dishes every night, but honestly after 3 seasons of this I realized I was just a middle man for back room deals with vineyards/distilleries that happened long before I ever worked there. I realized I preferred to cook seasonal in agrotourism settings as it hit all the goals I wanted to accomplish, and took the spot light more towards the farms/farmer, where I also worked at in the morning while working in kitchens in Europe.
Sidenote: While I had half of Sundays off and free access to a table on the slow hours (along with anything on the menu and maybe a bottle of lambrusco or prosecco on a good week) when I was in Italy, the truth is I would peddle my bike to the nona's house to eat for like 4-5 hours with a nap which had those generous portions you are mentioning.
Thanks for clearing this up because I was confused by the other comments about how multi course meals are common in Italy but unknown in the US.
So nobody in Italy is going to nonna’s house and sitting down to 10 courses of tiny amounts of pasta, proteins, vegetables, soups, and salads. They’re sitting down to one big feast with a much smaller number of dishes being passed around the table, like you’d see in The Godfather.
Melting_Harps 3 days ago [-]
> So nobody in Italy is going to nonna’s house and sitting down to 10 courses of tiny amounts of pasta, proteins, vegetables, soups, and salads. They’re sitting down to one big feast with a much smaller number of dishes being passed around the table, like you’d see in The Godfather.
For the most part yeah, we ate previously opened jars of pickled veg anti-pasto, salumi and ragu while drinking non-fancy house wine, but when I was living and working with a legacy family in Maranello we'd sometimes go to Modena/Bologna/Reggio Emilia to a patrons/business partners home where expectations were different... we did a multi-course menu, but that was a business arrangement or celebration of some sort, hardly what I'd call a regular Sunday dinner.
I just liked going to the nonna's home to have whatever was made and rest for a bit and get away from work as I had already spent over 60+ hours on the farm/kitchen by weeks end.
Those days were so exhausting but incredibly fulfilling.
chongli 3 days ago [-]
That sounds amazing. And I bet you slept like a baby during those times! Nothing better for sleep than a hard day’s physical work!
bigstrat2003 4 days ago [-]
Bro what. That is maybe four bites. It is by no means "plenty of food".
deadbabe 4 days ago [-]
It’s 50g of carbs, all you need in one meal.
chongli 4 days ago [-]
No way that’s 50g of carbs. They started with 150g dry pasta and the serving they plated was less than 1/5th of it. I’d be surprised if there’s 20g of carbs in that serving.
4 days ago [-]
devit 4 days ago [-]
50g of carbs per "meal" are only enough if you eat 10-15 meals per day.
hollerith 4 days ago [-]
Or if you get most of your calories from fats and proteins.
deadbabe 4 days ago [-]
And then you wonder why your triglycerides are screwed eating 500-750g of carbs a day
iamacyborg 4 days ago [-]
That’s enough for a mouthful when you’re mid-run.
supercurry 4 days ago [-]
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tommiegannert 4 days ago [-]
The phase diagrams are great. This really raises the bar for cook books. If you can't show a diagram to explain why you chose that ratio of ingredients, why should I trust you to have made the optimal sauce?
gorgoiler 4 days ago [-]
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.
sonofhans 4 days ago [-]
Those egg manufacturers can be temperamental, eh? Perhaps Clara’s found some midnight snacks somewhere. I know mine got rodents every now and then to supplement the feed, but I never measured lecithin content on the, uh, production output.
joshvm 4 days ago [-]
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.
Far as I can tell, Jonathan Gagné doesn't have a dedicated page on his website, it's hosted by Scott Rao. His blog does have a lot of interesting experimental work on the physics which led to the book. As I mentioned, I think this is an interesting academic piece which is at least supplemented by some genuine research. In practice, I feel like getting better pourover is 90% about finding beans that you like, buying a quality grinder and using them while fresh.
For confectionery, Chocolates and Confections (Greweling, Culinary Institute of America), 2013, ISBN 978-1-118-76467-1 is a fun book. It's quite pricey but you can pick up used copies now and again. It's a technical book and requires a lot of equipment that the average home cook doesn't have, but I would consider it fairly authoritative for looking up how chocolate things are made (and even discusses considerations for setting up a business). Most CIA books are pretty good on the practical side and they tend to be very exact with ingredients (almost always by weight).
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.
PittleyDunkin 4 days ago [-]
> this level of detail is pretty standard for advanced cooking
Cooking so advanced you need a fat wallet hehe
ceejayoz 4 days ago [-]
I can't speak for the others, but Serious Eats tends to be more of a "skip the silly gadgets, just use a knife" sort of place.
walthamstow 4 days ago [-]
Huh? Serious Eats is a free website, so is Kenji's YouTube channel
djtango 4 days ago [-]
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
s0rce 4 days ago [-]
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).
fvdessen 4 days ago [-]
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.
cantSpellSober 4 days ago [-]
What about replacing other charts?
The equivalent in amateur aviation? "Instinct and years of experience replace..."
ambicapter 4 days ago [-]
Well, I am neither an italian grandmother nor a skilled home chef so I don't care.
IncreasePosts 4 days ago [-]
Can we rent a nonna?
cantSpellSober 4 days ago [-]
The Recipe section is mostly to show the problem is solved
> small temperature variations can
completely compromise the recipe’s outcome
supercurry 4 days ago [-]
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joeross 4 days ago [-]
lol “optimal sauce” is such an HN approach to describing good food
dbfclark 4 days ago [-]
Another completely viable solution (other than adding extra starch) I’ve found is to sprinkle a bit of sodium citrate (the sodium salt of citric acid, a common food additive and cheap on Amazon) over the cheese before adding to the pan. This improves the melting qualities of the cheese and avoids the starch issue altogether. You’re basically using pecorino velveeta.
righthand 4 days ago [-]
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.
Aloisius 4 days ago [-]
> Sodium citrate is already in citrus
Citric acid is in the citrus. You're making sodium citrate when you add baking soda.
I keep citric acid around for cooking and adjust water pH for plants since SF water is so alkaline, so I just make it from that.
For x grams of sodium citrate desired, mix 0.744x grams citric acid and 0.976x grams sodium bicarbonate in enough water to dissolve. Stir until reaction stops. Boil off water if desired.
You need 2-3g of sodium citrate for every 100g of cheese.
righthand 4 days ago [-]
I think it’s important to discern that sodium citrate is part of the base of citric acid. So while yes the sodium bicarbonate, baking soda, will break down the rest of citric acid and leave you with sodium citrate, the citric acid will be just as effective on it’s own for those without baking soda at the ready. The baking soda changes the flavor as well which may not be desirable. In the case of a cheese sauce you may not want lemon acidity flavors pulling through.
kwk1 4 days ago [-]
>I think it’s important to discern that sodium citrate is part of the base of citric acid.
There are no sodium atoms in citric acid, and losing protons to form a conjugate base won't create them. The citric acid will have to react with sodium already present if you don't add some, which may not be in sufficient quantity to neutralize the acid. Sodium citrate is only one of many citric acid salts, and even that has three varieties, so I hardly think you can say it's "part of the base of citric acid", no?
righthand 3 days ago [-]
I won’t respond to this pile-on of criticism as you wrote this in an attempt at humiliation. I did however respond to the similar duplicate comment from another user below. Hope that helps. Know that it was just a typo.
kwk1 3 days ago [-]
I'm sorry you got that impression as it wasn't my intent.
Aloisius 4 days ago [-]
Em. I just tried it with citric acid and it didn't work at all - just get an acidic grainy soup - probably from lowering the pH too much. I'm not entirely certain how it is expected to work.
AFAIK, sodium citrate works by sequestering calcium in insoluble Ca-paracaseinate during the ion-exchange with the emulsifying salt, leaving soluble Na-paracaseinate, a potent emulsifier. Citric acid, though, doesn't have a sodium ion and the amount of citric acid you'd need to separate the calcium would make the cheese sauce too acidic.
righthand 3 days ago [-]
Apologies I meant to write:
> I think it’s important to discern that part of sodium citrate is part of the base of citric acid.
That’s because the base of citric acid is citrate. So when combined into a solution with some kind of sodium you get the effects of creating sodium citrate. As you mention it is a thickener. There is sodium in the cheese you are using as well to help this process hence why you only need a little of sodium bicarbonate to help speed up and complete the break down.
As for why it didnt work for you, I also tried it this morning and had no trouble smoothing out and thickening a basic alfredo sauce. It works great. I now have a bowl of breakfast pasta.
Perhaps you didn’t wait long enough for the reaction to take place or your cheese didn’t have enough sodium.
vicioms 4 days ago [-]
Author of the paper here! We actually tried the sodium citrate trick and it totally works. We did not explore the phase diagram in that case as thoroughly but we might see whether to put it in the published version in the supplementary materials. Thanks everyone for the great welcoming!
TypingOutBugs 3 days ago [-]
What measurements did you use for everything, cheese/sodium citrate/etc?
righthand 4 days ago [-]
The baking soda trick works wonders with canned tomatoes that may have a tin-like taste too.
calf 4 days ago [-]
That's nice, I remember reading about sodium citrate and maybe having to bake baking soda in the oven or something like that. Getting it from lemon juice would be a lot easier.
4 days ago [-]
righthand 4 days ago [-]
And if you want the acid, don’t use the baking soda. You still get the sodium citrate.
wrboyce 4 days ago [-]
What is 1T? Given the context I am assuming tablespoon, but that’s not an abbreviation I’ve ever encountered before (tbsp being the only abbreviation I have seen).
righthand 4 days ago [-]
Big T is tablespoon, little t is teaspoon. Probably not common since a tablespoon is 3x the size of a teaspoon and people would mix them up and the flavor profile would be wrong. You might encounter these abbreviations in cookbooks or from more experienced cooks for the sake of brevity.
jmvoodoo 4 days ago [-]
When I read the paper I immediately wondered if this would work. Good to see that someone has tried it and indeed it does!
mgaunard 4 days ago [-]
One interesting aspect of pasta sauces is that the amount of starch they need is usually incompatible with the recommended amount of water to boil the pasta in, and if you use less water, your italian friends are going to complain.
Cheating by adding some starch is the right approach, and works much more reliably.
Hikikomori 4 days ago [-]
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.
soared 4 days ago [-]
> It turns out that not only do you not need a large volume of water to cook pasta, but in fact, the water does not even have to be boiling.
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.
fph 4 days ago [-]
Not sure about the energy costs: surely a short wide pan dissipates more heat than the classical pasta pot.
gavindean90 2 days ago [-]
You could be right but if you do it in a large pasta pot so only put in enough water to cover the noodles. No more. Add more if needed as the noodles soak the water.
mgaunard 4 days ago [-]
You will, but italians will insult you for not respecting the 1 liter per 100g of pasta rule.
In practice, cooking it like a risotto is actually a great approach.
bromuro 4 days ago [-]
I’m Italian, and I don’t have any insults for you until you overcook your pasta or cook it unevenly.
portaouflop 4 days ago [-]
I heard this a lot but when I actually try it like go describes my pasta gets mushy and mealy - what am I doing wrong?
douglee650 4 days ago [-]
Pasta being overcooked. Also may be using lower quality pasta.
mgaunard 4 days ago [-]
temperature too low?
toolslive 4 days ago [-]
Note that if you're after the perfect recipe and you want to find the ideal ratios/temperature aso, changing the setup "one factor at a time" is a working but sub-optimal strategy. You want to look into DoE (Design of Experiments)
Metacelsus 4 days ago [-]
time to do a fractional factorial Cacio e Pepe!
Keysh 4 days ago [-]
I like how the arXiv sub-category this paper is in is "Soft Condensed Matter".
Because of course it is.
(Also, the Acknowledgments ends with "We further thank [list of names] for their support and for eating up the sample leftovers.")
gfna 4 days ago [-]
I would also like to see a study which considers the age of the pecorino.
I seem to have an easier time of getting the proper emulsion with older drier pecorino, and less risk of clumping
dboreham 4 days ago [-]
Costco peccorino works well.
fosk 4 days ago [-]
Whole Foods has superior quality pecorino, the one with the black crust.
The last 10% quality improvement is the hardest to achieve without good ingredients, even if you can make it work otherwise.
neom 4 days ago [-]
I've made a lot of Cacio e Pepe over the years, the best video on the subject is Ethan Chlebowski imo. Ethan Chlebowski videos are generally REALLY great.
I’m going to be upset if this doesn’t win an Ig Nobel
Oarch 4 days ago [-]
Only 4 days into 2025 and we've already found the winner. At ease, HN.
smegger001 4 days ago [-]
I mean its good but is it to the Ig Nobel level?
I mean its no "Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas Platyrhynchos"
dwattttt 4 days ago [-]
It's a shoe-in
saagarjha 4 days ago [-]
Please keep your footwear out of the sauce ;)
dwattttt 4 days ago [-]
Ramen to that
serial_dev 4 days ago [-]
I prepared this dish a couple of times, the second time I randomly got lucky and made a great cacio e pepe, since then all my attempts turn out clumpy, “mozzarella-like” and not creamy.
No matter how many videos I watched, I could never make it well enough.
I’m glad someone got to the bottom of this issue.
dboreham 4 days ago [-]
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.
ggm 4 days ago [-]
Subjects: Soft Condensed Matter
This has to be targeting igNobels
larodi 4 days ago [-]
I must admit, the paper inspired me cook a pasta as close as possible to suggestions, together with Claude ingesting the PDF and the result was really good.
Thanks, physics PHDs!
marsavar 4 days ago [-]
"We thank Tetsuya Spippayashi for enlightening clarifications on the historical origins of Cacio and pepe"
That surname can't be real...
dismalaf 4 days ago [-]
Probably a bad transliteration.
ziofill 3 days ago [-]
The main trick (to add cornstarch in order to achieve the right creaminess) is good for lots of recipes where you have milk/cheese and you want to make it creamy. It's a real ace up the cook's sleeve.
paultopia 4 days ago [-]
Cooking would suck a lot less if physicists who cared about clarity and precision wrote recipes.
bdauvergne 4 days ago [-]
Conlusion: just add some (possibly cooked) flour to your sauce. It's called "singer" in French.
sebtron 4 days ago [-]
The authors suggest corn or potato starch, not flour.
Hikikomori 4 days ago [-]
Kinda prefer sauces that use flour over those, different mouth feel.
bdauvergne 4 days ago [-]
Using flour is easier, you can use corn flour also.
lordmauve 4 days ago [-]
What we call cornflour in British English, and cornstarch in US English, is flour heavily processed to remove everything except starch, giving a flavourless thickener.
If you use wheat flour you will change the flavour and also add a slight graininess as the flour grains don't completely homogenise.
duskwuff 4 days ago [-]
But watch out - "corn flour" in the US is unprocessed finely ground corn - like cornmeal, but less coarse. Not a substitute for corn starch.
gattilorenz 4 days ago [-]
Starch is what does the trick, flour contains some too but it’s definitely not easier than adding some maizena
mastazi 4 days ago [-]
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.
riffraff 4 days ago [-]
This is addressed in the paper, there isn't enough starch in the water for it to reach the ideal proportion unless you "risotto" the pasta (I don't think there's "risottare" in English sorry).
Adding corn/rice starch is advised by some Italian chefs too cause it's just a lot easier to get a reliable result (see the videos on Italia Squisita by Monosilio).
You can eyeball it with pasta water, it's just harder.
MezzoDelCammin 4 days ago [-]
That's one thing I never quite understood on the "Italian" way to cook pasta (basically "use a bucket of water"). Using just the bare minimum ("risotto" as You call it) is in my opinion way more efficient and opens up a lot of interesting options (i.e. using the residue for a sauce). There's an extra step (the need to stir occasionally), but it can also remove a step (straining may be superfluous if the residue is used for a sauce base).
riffraff 4 days ago [-]
I think you need to define "efficient" :)
E.g. continuously stirring the pasta while you could be doing something is a waste of time where you could be doing something else, so less "efficient".
Turning off the heating and letting the water cook covered uses very little energy but takes more real time so also less "efficient" in a way.
More active stirring also tends to break up the pasta, so depending on what kind you use you may end up with a different outcome (works great for pasta e ceci or pasta e fagioli! Wouldn't want it for spaghettini)
Mostly, I think the traditional way seems unnecessary because modern pasta is a lot stronger than it used to be. I you try to make a one pot pasta with low quality pasta (low protein) you may end up with glue (source: am Italian, live in country which produces shitty pasta).
Hikikomori 4 days ago [-]
You dont need to stir continuously though? Maybe every 1-2 minutes.
MezzoDelCammin 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, lot of cooking is up to personal preference. In my case efficient here means using less water/energy. Optionally it can also be using less time, but that depends on what the end result is supposed to be.
As for the stirring, I'd say "it depends". Personally, I prefer to use fresh egg pasta. It cooks in maybe 2-3min and does require maybe 1min of stirring (maybe 20-30s in the beginning and end and perhaps one or two quick checks in between). I'm fairly sure I'd stir it somewhat of I used more water and I'd definitely need to strain it, so there the amount of time / effort is at worst the same, at best slightly in favor of using "risotto" method.
When it comes to dry pasta, I guess it depends on volume. If You're cooking a batch for 10, the traditional method probably makes sense. Otherwise, I pay attention anyway to how much the pasta sticks and clumps together.
mastazi 4 days ago [-]
> (basically "use a bucket of water")
the traditional way to cook cacio e pepe and the other recipes I mentioned in my GP comment is to move the pasta from the pot to the pan, then add some of the water from the pot to the pan so you have the "risottare" phase (most people in Italy would call that mantecare, at least in central Italy). I appreciate that adding something like corn starch would make it thicker, but also different people may have a different understanding of the concept of "creamy".
riffraff 4 days ago [-]
risottare and mantecare are different things.
Risottare is cooking the pasta in little water (or other liquid) so all the starch stays in the pan/pot, adding water or sauce as needed. This is the part you do with broth when cooking rice for risotto.
Mantecare is when you mix the pre-cooked pasta with condiment in a pan, possibly adding some pasta water. This is the part you do with butter and parmigiano when making risotto ("mantecare" comes from "manteca", spanish for cream/butter).
You can do one, none, or both for a given dish, and get different outcomes :)
OK I get what you mean, I've seen risottare before used as a synonym to mantecare (I think it was some Italia Squisita video) but it makes sense that it's actually what you describe i.e. cooking pasta like a risotto, hence risottare. Thanks for the link
gpderetta 4 days ago [-]
Risotto-ing[1] the pasta works very well, but it is definitely more time consuming.
[1] I know you can verb anything, but this just doesn't work.
vitus 4 days ago [-]
One small clarification: rather than cooking your pasta in less water, the paper actually describes boiling down the pasta water to further concentrate it ("risottata") by reducing its weight by 3x (presumably shifting your starch concentration from 0.5% to 1.5%).
That said, as you mention, it's just a lot easier to get the consistency right by adding your own starch in measured proportions.
dboreham 4 days ago [-]
This seems wrong. My Caccio recipe begins with specifying the exact volume of water, derived from some experiments I performed when my son first asked me to make the dish. I also performed experiments to get the exact time the pasta should be boiled (it has to be removed to the skillet prior to being done so you either need a time machine or prior experience to know the time, which varies with altitude). Nowhere does this dish call for "yeah just fill the pot and throw in some salt". The salt also needs to be carefully controlled because the water ends up in the dish and the cheese is salty.
mgaunard 4 days ago [-]
except that doesn't really work, it usually doesn't contain enough starch unless you used little water and worked with very starchy pasta.
even famous italian pasta restaurants use the cornflour technique.
Someone needs to train their LLMs with original italian BESTEMMIE and posted this link to encourage Italian people to write a lot of them.
Smart move :)
DiscourseFan 4 days ago [-]
Corn and potato starch have almost no flavor and are far easier to use for making Italian sauces than pasta water, which has a far lower starch content.
messe 4 days ago [-]
You can get starchier water by using less water to cook the pasta. I usually do it in my sautee pan, and just barely cover the pasta.
DiscourseFan 4 days ago [-]
It’s far more technical to do so and produces the same effect
Metacelsus 4 days ago [-]
My wife attempted this recipe several times over the last few years, it always turned out to be a gunky mess. Maybe this will help!
Darioros 4 days ago [-]
As an Italian it is depressing that we only make headlines for pasta sauce...
philshem 4 days ago [-]
Not only pasta sauce ;)
> Detection of buffalo milk adulteration with cow milk by capillary electrophoresis analysis
Sorry the randomness worked against you in this case! It does even out in the long run, as randomness will :)
NicholasGurr 3 days ago [-]
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ppp999 4 days ago [-]
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amarcheschi 4 days ago [-]
A few days ago i complained about my internship to a friend of mine who answered: "scientific research isn't an arrow, it expands like an oil drop on the floor"
I get it now, i get it
btw, on italian subreddit cucina (cooking) they talk about how an italian chef had previously done a similar thing based on his experience
Now, please allow me a bit of sarcastic nationalism, but
Welcome to Italy. The cradle of civilization.
YeGoblynQueenne 4 days ago [-]
>> Pecorino cheese was ideal due to its extraordinary shelf life, black pepper was used to stimulate heat receptors, and homemade spaghetti provided the carbohydrate intake
Likely people just happened to have pasta, pepper and pecorino chesse (since they raised sheep) and they put them all together because that beats eating each one on its own.
Or of course the article is right and pre-industrial sheep shepherds knew about carbohydrates and heat receptors.
strken 4 days ago [-]
"Pre-industrial sheep shepherds" had mouths and stomachs just the same as us. They didn't grab ingredients totally at random. There's a reason the dish uses substantial and filling pasta instead of boiled celery or mint leaves or something.
4 days ago [-]
Culonavirus 4 days ago [-]
And they say "cooking is art, baking is science"... pffft
bigstrat2003 4 days ago [-]
People who say that are wrong anyways. Cooking on the stovetop benefits from precision more than is popularly believed, and baking requires less precision that is popularly believed. Both are pretty similar: you have leeway to change things up as you see fit, but go too far and you will absolutely fuck it up.
s0rce 4 days ago [-]
Yup, tons of home cooked recipes that rely on emulsions (gravy, cream soups, salad dressing, pasta sauces) often end up oily and broken.
TeMPOraL 4 days ago [-]
And process engineering is when you're actually serious about quality and consistency of results.
dismalaf 4 days ago [-]
You don't need to know about the science for it to be science shrugs
conjectures 4 days ago [-]
science ftw
throwaway984393 4 days ago [-]
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Rendered at 19:40:21 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
But it's not the same pasta water you're using at home!
Only a tiny amount of starch is coming off of the 500g of pasta you just cooked in the proper ratio in 5000g of water (with 50g of salt). They've been cooking with their pasta water all day or all week; It's completely full of starch that came off the other pasta.
Dump a bunch of cornstarch or flour in there to get above 1% concentration (or more efficiently, into a tiny portion in a bowl) to replicate the emulsifying effect, or just use a different emulsifier.
100g of dry pasta turn into about 230g of al dente pasta. thus 200g of water per 100g of pasta is plenty. bring to boil. pasta in. lid on(!), heat way down, to a simmer, very very slight boil. stir after 40% of the cooking time. taste and chewiness testt after the advertised overall cooking time. if the pasta form is very fluffy then have a little preheated water handy should your pasta unexpectedly need more water. hint: it won't. but an unusual pasta form may rarely ask for more water.
drain and catch the starchy water if you think you need it. (I personally don't like the taste and prefer adding starch to the sauce if needed, but ymmv here). rinse pasta briefly to stop the cooking and ensure all dente chew.
energy saving compared to "recommended standard method": 80%. eighty percent less energy. (200ml instead of 1000ml). more actually, because the lid is on.
taste: indistinguishable and excellent.
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-...
Second, clumping. You want the ability to freely stir and get water between pieces of pasta, or if the heat is on for the boiling bubbles to stir, in order to avoid the pasta sticking together.
Third, use 80% less water and you only get a 5x higher concentration of starch. I don't have measurements in front of me but I suspect this simply isn't starchy enough to take a tiny portion of that water and use it as an effective emulsifier. The article pins 1% starch as a threshold of effect, and I doubt I'm losing 0.2% of pasta weight when cooking to al dente.
Note: This is all for dried durum wheat-flour pasta, the generic industrial 'macaroni' of American agribusiness. Egg pasta is a very different product, with different cooking characteristics, that happens to share the name. Durum semolina pasta, whole-wheat pasta, gluten-free "pasta", rice pasta... no guarantees that this is applicable.
- It's still not going to be enough starch
- You can't rely on box cooking times even as a starting point. Your pasta will take significantly longer to cook, since it will bring down the temperature of the water when you put it in, since there's so little water
2. This has been thoroughly debunked. Kenji did a full write up of this but suffice to say that starches absorb water starting at 180 degrees. As long as you have the water above that temp it will cook in the same amount of time.
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi...
Unless you're extremely familiar with the exact brand of pasta, temperature of your stovetop, etc., you should be tasting your pasta toward the end of cooking to decide when to stop cooking it.
> - It's still not going to be enough starch
I'm inclined to disagree, but only have anecdata on this, so I can't really get into an extended debate over it. So I guess now I get to look forward to experimenting with starch additions the next few times I cook pasta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=259MXuK62gU&t=219s
As I said I don't get clumping, it is absolutely possible to cook noods in minimal water without clumping because I do it so try switching some thing up if it's happening to you.
While small pasta shapes are relatively easy to stir such that they break contact with anything nearby right from the beginning, long pasta tends to move together when stirring until they’ve softened - at which point they’ve already started sticking together.
You can try to stir it so that the pasta isn’t all running parallel before it softens, but then you get ends start sticking out of the water until it softens more, leading to uneven cooking.
For long pastas, I’ve found using more water and just adding a little flour while cooking to be a lot easier.
Sorry I wasn't able to edit it.
You keep it at a slow boil, and properly salted, all day long. If you're using it more than one day, you'd probably want to keep it hot overnight, like "perpetual stews", but I can't attest to how common this is, especially in restaurants that aren't constantly plating pasta.
You can manage it as a batch process, throwing the water out when it gets too starchy, but doing this unaided leaves you unable to use the water as emulsifier at the start of the cycle. You could also do it as a perpetual process by pouring some off the top and refreshing with clean water.
And what's to wash? You don't wash food after cooking, and pasta is like bread -- it certainly doesn't need washing beforehand either. It's just flour and some other ingredients.
It's not like vegetables where you need to wash off dirt, pesticides, etc. Or meat where you wash off bacteria. Those aren't issues with pasta.
If there was a way to get rid of the insect eggs people would presumably want to do it too, but iirc they're just too small to filter out.
Just from a food safety perspective I'm not sure it's legal to reuse across days, given that it's going to take all night to cool, only just in time to be reheated again.
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!
The concept of having multi-course meals is foreign to the USA both historically and culturally. The word "Entree" actually means appetizer in french, while in the USA it means main dish for whatever reason. Its even more ridiculous that USA restaurants that pretend to be fancy put "entrees" instead of "main dishes" on their menus.
I smell "epic-ism": you know the French definition proximal to your own lifetime, but not the earlier one that essentially meant hearty meat courses.
Also, there were even "large entrées" from the same period. From Wikipedia[1]:
"Large joints of meat (usually beef or veal) and large whole fowl (turkey and geese) were the grandes or grosses entrées of the meal."
Maybe that definition was just from an influx of "ridiculous Americans" traveling to France during the Enlightenment so they could pretend to be fancy.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entr%C3%A9e#Large_entr%C3%A9es
I think this must be a tasting portion, maybe a cooking school thing or similar.
If I had to guess, the pasta serving in the video was no more than about 150-200 calories. Dry pasta is 370 calories per 100g and pecorino is 390 per 100g. That serving was maybe 30g worth of pasta and maybe 10g worth of cheese.
Needless to say, that’s a snack-sized portion of pasta, not a meal.
There are few punishments more swift and severe than what happens after you express any opinion at all about Italian food on the internet.
Stim use is an effective appetite suppressant, after all.
I suspect most of the reactions here are cultural (do you get most of your calories with breakfast, are restaurant meals larger or smaller than home meals, is that the only food with the meal or do you typically have other starters and desserts, do you snack throughout the day, ...).
I typically eat once a day, sometimes adding in a small breakfast, I don't snack, I don't really care for desserts, and certainly for a weeknight meal I might make cacio e pepe but definitely won't also whip up breadsticks, cocktails, and a few sides most of the time. Nearly anyone with those eating habits would find this a small amount of food (in the sense that if they ate it instead of their normal dinner regularly they'd lose weight quickly, at least 3lbs per month, 25lbs in my case).
Even people who eat 3 square meals and snack some (no more than half a family-size bag of chips) through the day will find this on the small side (losing weight if all 3 meals are that portion) if they're moderately active, no older than 40, and no shorter than 5'10.
I’d be left very hungry if someone served me a portion of pasta that small.
So, this is an often [0] repeated misconception: you have to differ from family style eating, and that of professional cuisine gastronomy. The former is what you are attributing this POV, whereas a professional kitchen that focuses on the tre/quattro piatti format (prix fixe) the whole point is to provide small(er) portions between courses, often in order to get the waiter/sommelier to drop the wine card to match the palette/dish, which is where the real money is made in restaurants.
When I ran kitchens in Italy, we often sold proteins at a loss (at least the first 5-10 orders) in order to promote the local wine/vineyards that we got a massive discount on by buying half the harvest/yield seasons anf sometimes years ahead and could mark-up the bottle--it's your basic loss leader approach, and pre-service is often where these things are tweaked and refined with a very clear intention for FOH to move the booze to make up for the losses in the kitchen. The owner I worked for during this time had a family owned dairy/caseficco business where we got our cheeses where we also got lamb from as well depending on the time of year.
Its fun, to an extent, especially with weekend specials and selling out low-cost high margin dishes every night, but honestly after 3 seasons of this I realized I was just a middle man for back room deals with vineyards/distilleries that happened long before I ever worked there. I realized I preferred to cook seasonal in agrotourism settings as it hit all the goals I wanted to accomplish, and took the spot light more towards the farms/farmer, where I also worked at in the morning while working in kitchens in Europe.
Sidenote: While I had half of Sundays off and free access to a table on the slow hours (along with anything on the menu and maybe a bottle of lambrusco or prosecco on a good week) when I was in Italy, the truth is I would peddle my bike to the nona's house to eat for like 4-5 hours with a nap which had those generous portions you are mentioning.
0: http://partaste.com/understanding-italian-menu/
So nobody in Italy is going to nonna’s house and sitting down to 10 courses of tiny amounts of pasta, proteins, vegetables, soups, and salads. They’re sitting down to one big feast with a much smaller number of dishes being passed around the table, like you’d see in The Godfather.
For the most part yeah, we ate previously opened jars of pickled veg anti-pasto, salumi and ragu while drinking non-fancy house wine, but when I was living and working with a legacy family in Maranello we'd sometimes go to Modena/Bologna/Reggio Emilia to a patrons/business partners home where expectations were different... we did a multi-course menu, but that was a business arrangement or celebration of some sort, hardly what I'd call a regular Sunday dinner.
I just liked going to the nonna's home to have whatever was made and rest for a bit and get away from work as I had already spent over 60+ hours on the farm/kitchen by weeks end.
Those days were so exhausting but incredibly fulfilling.
(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.
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.
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman, 2010, ISBN 978-1416571728 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman... . There's also a mixed-drinks companion book from 2023, The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails with ISBN 978-1668003398: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Book-of-Cocktail-...
https://ruhlman.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruhlman
Lateral Cooking: One Dish Leads to Another by Niki Segnit, 2019, ISBN 978-1635572643 (978-1635572643 US ed.) https://www.nikisegnit.com/lateral-cooking . Seems to lean on Segnit's prevous book, 2010's The Flavour Thesaurus, ISBN 978-0747599777 (978-1608198740 2012 US ed.): https://www.nikisegnit.com/the-flavour-thesaurus .
https://coffeeadastra.com/
Far as I can tell, Jonathan Gagné doesn't have a dedicated page on his website, it's hosted by Scott Rao. His blog does have a lot of interesting experimental work on the physics which led to the book. As I mentioned, I think this is an interesting academic piece which is at least supplemented by some genuine research. In practice, I feel like getting better pourover is 90% about finding beans that you like, buying a quality grinder and using them while fresh.
For confectionery, Chocolates and Confections (Greweling, Culinary Institute of America), 2013, ISBN 978-1-118-76467-1 is a fun book. It's quite pricey but you can pick up used copies now and again. It's a technical book and requires a lot of equipment that the average home cook doesn't have, but I would consider it fairly authoritative for looking up how chocolate things are made (and even discusses considerations for setting up a business). Most CIA books are pretty good on the practical side and they tend to be very exact with ingredients (almost always by weight).
https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Chocolates+and+Confections%3A+Fo...
Cooking so advanced you need a fat wallet hehe
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
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 equivalent in amateur aviation? "Instinct and years of experience replace..."
> small temperature variations can completely compromise the recipe’s outcome
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.
Citric acid is in the citrus. You're making sodium citrate when you add baking soda.
I keep citric acid around for cooking and adjust water pH for plants since SF water is so alkaline, so I just make it from that.
For x grams of sodium citrate desired, mix 0.744x grams citric acid and 0.976x grams sodium bicarbonate in enough water to dissolve. Stir until reaction stops. Boil off water if desired.
You need 2-3g of sodium citrate for every 100g of cheese.
There are no sodium atoms in citric acid, and losing protons to form a conjugate base won't create them. The citric acid will have to react with sodium already present if you don't add some, which may not be in sufficient quantity to neutralize the acid. Sodium citrate is only one of many citric acid salts, and even that has three varieties, so I hardly think you can say it's "part of the base of citric acid", no?
AFAIK, sodium citrate works by sequestering calcium in insoluble Ca-paracaseinate during the ion-exchange with the emulsifying salt, leaving soluble Na-paracaseinate, a potent emulsifier. Citric acid, though, doesn't have a sodium ion and the amount of citric acid you'd need to separate the calcium would make the cheese sauce too acidic.
> I think it’s important to discern that part of sodium citrate is part of the base of citric acid.
That’s because the base of citric acid is citrate. So when combined into a solution with some kind of sodium you get the effects of creating sodium citrate. As you mention it is a thickener. There is sodium in the cheese you are using as well to help this process hence why you only need a little of sodium bicarbonate to help speed up and complete the break down.
As for why it didnt work for you, I also tried it this morning and had no trouble smoothing out and thickening a basic alfredo sauce. It works great. I now have a bowl of breakfast pasta.
Perhaps you didn’t wait long enough for the reaction to take place or your cheese didn’t have enough sodium.
Cheating by adding some starch is the right approach, and works much more reliably.
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi...
In practice, cooking it like a risotto is actually a great approach.
Because of course it is.
(Also, the Acknowledgments ends with "We further thank [list of names] for their support and for eating up the sample leftovers.")
The last 10% quality improvement is the hardest to achieve without good ingredients, even if you can make it work otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10lXPzbRoU0
I mean its no "Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas Platyrhynchos"
No matter how many videos I watched, I could never make it well enough.
I’m glad someone got to the bottom of this issue.
This has to be targeting igNobels
Thanks, physics PHDs!
That surname can't be real...
If you use wheat flour you will change the flavour and also add a slight graininess as the flour grains don't completely homogenise.
Adding corn/rice starch is advised by some Italian chefs too cause it's just a lot easier to get a reliable result (see the videos on Italia Squisita by Monosilio).
You can eyeball it with pasta water, it's just harder.
E.g. continuously stirring the pasta while you could be doing something is a waste of time where you could be doing something else, so less "efficient". Turning off the heating and letting the water cook covered uses very little energy but takes more real time so also less "efficient" in a way.
More active stirring also tends to break up the pasta, so depending on what kind you use you may end up with a different outcome (works great for pasta e ceci or pasta e fagioli! Wouldn't want it for spaghettini)
Mostly, I think the traditional way seems unnecessary because modern pasta is a lot stronger than it used to be. I you try to make a one pot pasta with low quality pasta (low protein) you may end up with glue (source: am Italian, live in country which produces shitty pasta).
As for the stirring, I'd say "it depends". Personally, I prefer to use fresh egg pasta. It cooks in maybe 2-3min and does require maybe 1min of stirring (maybe 20-30s in the beginning and end and perhaps one or two quick checks in between). I'm fairly sure I'd stir it somewhat of I used more water and I'd definitely need to strain it, so there the amount of time / effort is at worst the same, at best slightly in favor of using "risotto" method.
When it comes to dry pasta, I guess it depends on volume. If You're cooking a batch for 10, the traditional method probably makes sense. Otherwise, I pay attention anyway to how much the pasta sticks and clumps together.
the traditional way to cook cacio e pepe and the other recipes I mentioned in my GP comment is to move the pasta from the pot to the pan, then add some of the water from the pot to the pan so you have the "risottare" phase (most people in Italy would call that mantecare, at least in central Italy). I appreciate that adding something like corn starch would make it thicker, but also different people may have a different understanding of the concept of "creamy".
Risottare is cooking the pasta in little water (or other liquid) so all the starch stays in the pan/pot, adding water or sauce as needed. This is the part you do with broth when cooking rice for risotto.
Mantecare is when you mix the pre-cooked pasta with condiment in a pan, possibly adding some pasta water. This is the part you do with butter and parmigiano when making risotto ("mantecare" comes from "manteca", spanish for cream/butter).
You can do one, none, or both for a given dish, and get different outcomes :)
See e.g. (in italian) https://www.dissapore.com/cucina/come-risottare-la-pasta/
[1] I know you can verb anything, but this just doesn't work.
That said, as you mention, it's just a lot easier to get the consistency right by adding your own starch in measured proportions.
even famous italian pasta restaurants use the cornflour technique.
We need more curiosity about things :)
Ohh... I know what you did here!
Someone needs to train their LLMs with original italian BESTEMMIE and posted this link to encourage Italian people to write a lot of them.
Smart move :)
> Detection of buffalo milk adulteration with cow milk by capillary electrophoresis analysis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203021...
(@dang i actually dont mind u dont gotta do nothin)
Sorry the randomness worked against you in this case! It does even out in the long run, as randomness will :)
I get it now, i get it
btw, on italian subreddit cucina (cooking) they talk about how an italian chef had previously done a similar thing based on his experience
https://www.reddit.com/r/cucina/comments/1htahbk/250100536_s...
Now, please allow me a bit of sarcastic nationalism, but Welcome to Italy. The cradle of civilization.
Likely people just happened to have pasta, pepper and pecorino chesse (since they raised sheep) and they put them all together because that beats eating each one on its own.
Or of course the article is right and pre-industrial sheep shepherds knew about carbohydrates and heat receptors.