A Nobel Physicist Explained How to Cook Pasta And Now Everybody's Angry
www.sciencealert.com
Italians are notoriously – and understandably – protective of their cuisine, as regular arguments about the correct toppings for pizza or the appropriate pasta to use with a Bolognese ragu will attest.

Oddly, I hadn’t put much thought into the energy costs of cooking pasta before…

This article estimates the UK spends £4,690,000 per week on it! And suggests possibly greener ways of cooking it. It’s a small amount per person, but there’s a lot of people (I hope) making pasta!

  • rcbrk
    1·
    2 years ago

    […] We could cook wheat like we cook rice. That would leave out the pasta making process and therefor way less energy usage. If we soak the whole wheat before (like we soak beans), it would be even less energy usage.

    Pastiera napoletana is the dish you are looking for, and it’s delicious:

    By Mattia Luigi Nappi (Mattia Luigi Nappi) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1954385

    It’s made with grano cotto – cooked wheat grain – which unfortunately takes much longer to cook than pasta does:

    The wheat needs to be soaked at least 24 hours before it is cooked. When using durum wheat (the usual in Southern Italy), it needs to be soaked for 3 days and the water needs to be changed each morning and each evening. With our soft wheat, 24 hours is sufficient. The wheat is then cooked with milk, lemon zest, and butter until it is al dente. This takes about an hour and a half, or half that time with a pressure cooker.

    • Stoned_Ape
      1·
      2 years ago

      Pastiera napoletana is the dish you are looking for

      This looks delicious, indeed! :)

      But I meant literal wheat grains simply cooked to be eaten like rice. Technically speaking, you can eat any wheat grain like that, though you seem to be right that some wheat varieties need longer cooking times.

      This is true for durum wheat (“durum” means hard in latin). This wheat seems to be used for pasta and bulgur, and both are pre-cooked. “Common wheat” (in Germany called “Weichweizen”: soft wheat) seems to have only a fraction of the cooking times. This includes dinkel wheat, which seems to be rather quick to cook.

      I have no idea about the nutritional differences between those. But nevertheless, very interesting to think about the implications of wheat variets on cooking energy.