Perfect pasta? Science shows us how

A spoonful of cooking water, a drizzle of olive oil, salt in egg whites? No, to achieve perfect “cacio e pepe”, the famous cheese (pecorino) and pepper pasta, here's the key ingredient you need to add to the recipe.

While it's true that Italians recommend adding a ladleful of the pasta's cooking water to make the sauce creamier, that's not the whole story when it comes to cacio e pepe.

Researchers actually advise adding starch to the sauce. And although spaghetti already contains some, apparently it's not enough. To make the dish really creamy, the ratio of starch to cheese should be around 2 to 3%, according to Belgian media outlet RTBF. This tip works very well, whether you use potato starch or cornflour.

According to scientists, you should use 4g of starch for 160g of grated pecorino and 240g of pasta. It's also essential to make sure the dish is at the right temperature when mixing the pasta with the sauce. If it's too hot, the cheese could clump together, resulting in an unpleasant texture.

Pasta: An ongoing source of inspiration for science

And while this study, published in the journal Physics of fluids, might seem superficial, the authors point out that pasta has been aiding and "feeding" science for years. "On several occasions, pasta has been a source of inspiration for physicists. The observation that spaghetti always breaks into three fragments or more but never just two halves left Richard Feynman himself puzzled. And the explanation for this intriguing phenomenon even earned Audoly and Neukirch the Ig-Nobel prize," they recall.

(MH with Raphaël Liset – Source: RTBF – Illustration: ©Unsplash)