Copyright Newsweek
If it's not tough and chewy, it's reduced to an unpalatable mush—there's certainly a fine art in cooking pasta perfectly al dente. And thanks to scientists and a surprising use of a particle accelerator, now you can master the secret too. Using the UK’s Diamond light source synchrotron and neutron facilities at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, also in the UK, and the Institute Laue-Langevin in France, researchers have been able to probe how pasta’s internal structure transforms during the cooking process. By scattering X-rays and neutrons off of both regular and gluten-free spaghetti, they revealed how the starch and gluten in spaghettie behave under different cooking conditions, varying factors from salt levels to cooking time. By mixing normal and "heavy water" (which contains an isotope called deuterium), the researchers were able to isolate gluten and starch. This technique made one component invisible to the neutron beam, allowing them to precisely analyze each ingredient’s role in the cooking of pasta. The team found that gluten acts as a structural scaffold in regular pasta, holding starch granules in place when boiling, which give pasta its firmness. Gluten-free pasta, on the other hand, lacks this support. This makes its starch granules swell and collapse much more easily, leading to a mushy texture and faster breakdown experienced when this kind of pasta is cooked in non-optimal conditions. They also tested the effects of salt in the cooking water on the pasta structure, founding that salt does not just make it taste better, but also strongly affects the microstructure of the spaghetti. When regular pasta is boiled in salted water, the gluten inside of it maintains its structure, and the starch granules are less deteriorated by the cooking process. The optimal amount of salt to use is seven grams per liter of water, with more water required for larger amounts of pasta. Doubling the amount of salt in the water disrupted the internal order of the pasta, damaging the starch structure. Gluten-free pasta, proved to be particularly sensitive due to the lack of protection of gluten. Even small amounts of salt couldn't compensate for the absence of gluten. Artificial starch compounds used by companies to substitute the gluten degraded fast, especially when overcooked or boiled in very salty water. As for the optimal cooking time, the pasta should be cooked for ten minutes for regular pasta and for eleven minutes for its gluten-free counterpart. According to the authors of the study, understanding pasta's structure on these very small scales will help the design of better gluten-free foods by identifying which ingredients and cooking conditions best recreate gluten's structure. Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about pasta? Let us know via science@newsweek.com. Reference
