Cooking pasta without gas, what science says

How this blessed method works? Simple: boil the water, add the salt, throw the pasta, mix it, wait for it to boil again and finally turn off the heat, closing the lid tightly and not reopening it until the end of cooking, if necessary lengthening the cooking time a little compared to that shown on the packet of pasta. In short, in order not to overcook the pasta or take it out too al dente, a little more attention is needed than traditional cooking: nothing impossible, however, especially if on the other side of the scale. there is an energy saving.

Always Bressanini, retracing the history of cooking food, even refers to a writing by Benjamin Thomsonone of the founders of thermodynamicsfrom 1799: “All the fuel that is used in boiling it vigorously is wasted, without adding a single degree to the heat of the water, or speeding up or shortening the cooking process by just one second. Since it is from the heat, its intensity and its duration that the food is cooked, and not from the boiling of the water that has no role in that operation “.

The boiling – the bubbles we see in the pot -, in short, has nothing to do with it: especially since the boiling temperature depends on the atmospheric pressure, and in fact at high altitudes the water boils earlier than at sea level, yet the mountaineers eat equally good pasta. A few more details: “There pasta cooking is mainly governed by three factors – continues Bressanini – there penetration rateand the water inside the dough, the gelatinization starch and the denaturation and consequent coagulation of gluten. All these phenomena depend on the temperature. Water penetrates the dough even at low temperatures, even in cold water, but the higher the temperature, the faster it enters the dough. Starch gelatinization is that phenomenon in which starch granules absorb water and form a gel. Wheat starch gelatinizes between 60 ° C and 70 ° C. Gluten denatures and coagulates between 70 ° C and 80 ° C. Note that these are all temperatures well below the common boiling temperatures in our kitchens. This means that it is possible to cook the pasta even keeping the water at 80 ° C, taking just a little longer because the water hydrates the dough a little more slowly “.

Do you really save money?

Assuming then that the result is good in terms of taste (and, we repeat, the experts are divided: the chef Antonello Colonnafor example, said a Republic that with this method there is a risk that the paste takes on a rubbery and unpleasant texture; other cooks claim instead that the result is indistinguishable from that obtained with traditional cooking), do you really save? And is it a considerable or negligible saving? Given that in times of crisis any savings, even if small, should not be underestimated, it must be said that the calculation is not simple. They tried to estimate it i Italian pasta makers from Italian Food Union: according to their calculations, relating to passive cooking with the heat off and with the lid on after the first two minutes of traditional cooking, the savings in energy and carbon dioxide emissions can reach 47% compared to the traditional method. An estimate that, spannometrically, seems to make sense, since the time needed to bring the water to a boil is comparable to the average cooking time of the pasta. Furthermore, according to the association’s estimates, this method is only adopted by one in 10 Italians, while the healthy habits of using less water would have taken hold (700 milliliters per 100 grams of pasta, as one in four would do) and always put the lid (nine out of ten would do it).