Passive cooking, Barilla’s sensor to be 3D printed to cook pasta with the heat off

There passive cooking of the pasta with the heat off has become a very popular trend in Italy after the rise in gas prices due to the war in Ukraine and for the occasion Barilla presented a special accessory called Passive Cooker that can be made at home via a 3D printer and components easily available online to monitor and optimize this way of preparing pasta on a budget. The device appears as a sort of disk to be placed on the lid to ensure that the cooking is perfectly al dente even without leaving the gas always on once the pasta has been thrown away, this is how it works.

The body of the Barilla device for cooking pasta with the heat off is 3D printable and the use of a filament capable of withstanding the inevitable high temperatures due to contact with metal. There are 5 files in Stl format, even a cheap 3D printer (like these) is enough to obtain the pieces in a few minutes, preferably opting for biodegradable materials. The brain of the system is a board Arduino Nano 33 Ble equipped with integrated low-consumption bluetooth: the wireless communication code with computer or smartphone is already prepared and is also open-source to facilitate updates or improvements.

Then there is a sensor that detects the temperature and transforms Passive Cooker into a sort of wireless thermometer with bluetoothpowered by two ministyle batteries (which hopefully will be adequately protected from the heat): when the degrees are right, you receive the notification, throw the pasta, cover the pot and follow the table proposed by Barilla with cooking times with usually two minutes with the fire on and the rest with the fire off (you will receive a notification) by starting passive cooking. Nice idea, even if the cost of realization is not so low and as an alternative a simple glass lid could be enough to have a visual control of the water boiling in combination with the cooking times table.