I mean its no "Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas Platyrhynchos"
This has to be targeting igNobels
Cooking so advanced you need a fat wallet hehe
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 .
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...
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
(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.
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
If you use wheat flour you will change the flavour and also add a slight graininess as the flour grains don't completely homogenise.
even famous italian pasta restaurants use the cornflour technique.
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.
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/
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.
[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.
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.
The last 10% quality improvement is the hardest to achieve without good ingredients, even if you can make it work otherwise.
> Detection of buffalo milk adulteration with cow milk by capillary electrophoresis analysis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203021...
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 :)
1. Cook the pasta in very little water ("pasta risottata").
2. Vigorously agitate (emulsify) the sauce with that super starchy broth
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stim use is an effective appetite suppressant, after all.
There are few punishments more swift and severe than what happens after you express any opinion at all about Italian food on the internet.
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 think this must be a tasting portion, maybe a cooking school thing or similar.
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
(@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 :)
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.")
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.
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.
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?
Thanks, physics PHDs!
That surname can't be real...
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
We need more curiosity about things :)