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- Scientists have made to explain why spaghetti curls as it cooks.
- Dry pasta is pretty widely studied, maybe because it’s a nearly universal product.
- The researchers found that the changes between the saturated outside and dry interior largely explains the curling.
Scientists, as they are wont to do, have as it cooks. Researchers Nathaniel Goldberg and Oliver O’Reilly, of U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, used their noodles—we’re so sorry—to put together a mathematical model that accounts for gravity, density, elasticity, and rigidity in cooking “rod-shaped” noodles like spaghetti.
Anyone who has ever well-meaningly dropped an entire pound of pasta into a too-small pot knows how much dry pasta swells and grows as it cooks. Dry pasta is rigid, but it absorbs water uniformly as it grows and becomes elastic. The researchers began with an observation that spaghetti standing in a pot of boiling water always ends up sagging the same way, which makes intuitive sense because of gravity and the growing bend-ability of the portion that’s in the boiling water.
But a finished spaghetti noodle wants to curl, more than you’d expect for something that starts out mechanically straight and even. Why is that?
It’s funny to think of spaghetti as a “rod,” but the idea of is kind of a novelty within mathematics. A rod is three-dimensional, but it’s also kind of not. It’s a line in real life! “Our approach has parallels to the use of rod theories for the mechanics of slender bodies undergoing growth and is inspired by a wealth of experimental data from the food science literature,” the researchers wrote in .
To learn more, the scientists carried out several experiments “that [included] soaking noodles in room-temperature water for several hours to see if they would bend the same way,” per the press release. Soaking is a novel way to reduce cooking time later or better without getting overcooked and squishy. The mathematical model could help explain in even more detail why pasta instead of boiled, based on the chemistry of when starch is activated and how it behaves at different temperatures.
So why is spaghetti so different from another similar rod that’s not boiled?
“An initially straight elastic rod that is bent by gravity will return to its initial shape when placed on a flat surface, an outcome not seen for spaghetti that has been cooked for even a few tens of seconds,” . “[I]t’s the change from rigid to viscoelastic behavior—and the strand’s resulting ability to develop curvature and permanently deform without breaking—that drives the shape change,” the authors explain.
In other words, spaghetti curls because it can, dammit, and because the entire length of dry spaghetti has potential to grow elastic and curl. Boiling water penetrates in stages while the core is the last part to grow soft and elastic, so the outside is rapidly growing in volume while being constricted somewhat by the stubborn interior. This is a natural ratio for bending and, in spaghetti’s case, curling. But what about bucatini, which is a thicker spaghetti shape with a hollow center? Maybe the researchers will follow up.