News hardware A Nobel Prize winner finds a trick to save energy and everyone can apply it!
Published on 09/17/2022 at 10:30
In Italy, pasta (pasta) is sacred, and we don’t mess around with traditions! However, Giorgio Parisi, eminent Nobel Prize in physics in 2021, had fun sharing a cooking method which, if it can allow you to save energy, divides the whole country. Explanations.
Your pasta, do you prefer it al dente or rubbery?
The controversy has swelled since August 28 and
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rather innocuous in appearance, of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Italian Giorgio Parisi, awarded for “the discovery of the interaction of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic to planetary scale” (!) in cooperation with two other experts in the field, the Japanese Syukuro Manabe and the German Klaus Hasselmann.
Very concerned regarding the energy crisis affecting the whole planet and Italy in particular, Giorgio Parisi quite simply wanted to share his method of cooking pasta which allows, it is true, to make significant energy savingsespecially for those who cook pasta with every meal, as is customary in Italy.
He was probably far from imagining that the whole country was going to tear itself apart over this simple culinary trick…
“Put the pasta and turn off the heat”
Traditionally, we boil water (1 liter for 100 grams of pasta), then add a pinch of salt, lower the heat and let the pasta cook for the time indicated on the package depending on the type. We drain, we serve, and we put a drizzle of olive oil (or whatever you want following all, the tastes and the colors…). That’s for the theory…
Before revealing this famous method to you, you have to be aware that this post was not intended to question centuries of gastronomy, but to help households save energy by adopting a very simple physics-chemistry:
When the pasta is boiling, I put the gas on minimum, minimum, so that it doesn’t consume too much gas. You can also try turning it off. This saves at least eight minutes of power consumption.
The most important thing is to always keep the LID on, the heat is lost a lot due to evaporation.
Indeed, as chemist Dario Bressanini, a researcher at the University of Insubria, explains:
It’s not something new. We have known for 200 years that it is not the fact of boiling water, seeing it bubbling, that cooks, but the temperature of the water, which transmits heat to pasta, rice or a egg.
He explains it at length in a
video on TikTok
already seen more than 3 million times.
If everyone agrees that the most important thing, in any case, is to put a lid on to boil the water faster, others advise to use only 700 ml of water for 100 grams and to turn off the heat there too, but following two minutes of cooking.
A heresy according to the great chef Antonello Colonna, who brushes aside these methods and denounces all these techniques as “dangerous, making pasta rubbery”.
If you want to try, it’s up to you, following all, you don’t have much to lose.