on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
*It’s not art, but it’s Italian and how could we not blog it on ARTMAKER.
Pasta alla Cacio e pepe” is a traditional Italian dish made with pasta, pecorino cheese, and pepper. Despite its simple ingredient list, achieving the perfect texture and creaminess of the sauce can be challenging. In this study, we systematically explore the phase behavior of Cacio e pepe sauce, focusing on its stability at increasing temperatures for various proportions of cheese, water, and starch. We identify starch concentration as the key factor influencing sauce stability, with direct implications for practical cooking. Specifically, we delineate a regime where starch concentrations below 1% (relative to cheese mass) lead to the formation of system-wide clumps, a condition determining what we term the “Mozzarella Phase” and corresponding to an unpleasant and separated sauce. Additionally, we examine the impact of cheese concentration relative to water at a fixed starch level, observing a lower critical solution temperature that we theoretically rationalized by means of a minimal effective free-energy model. We further analyze the effect of a less traditional stabilizer, trisodium citrate, and observe a sharp transition from the Mozzarella Phase to a completely smooth and stable sauce, in contrast to starch-stabilized mixtures, where the transition is more gradual. Finally, we present a scientifically optimized recipe based on our findings, enabling a consistently flawless execution of this classic dish.
I. INTRODUCTION
On several occasions, pasta has been a source of inspiration for physicists.1 The observation that spaghetti always break up into three or more fragments, but never in two halves, puzzled even Richard Feynman himself, and the explanation of this intriguing phenomenon earned Audoly and Neukirch the Ig Nobel Prize.2 Pasta packaging offers a natural framework to study separation upon shaking3 and inspired the design of “morphing flat pasta”.4 Furthermore, the deformation and swelling behavior of various pasta varieties upon cooking has been experimentally and theoretically investigated.5–7 Finally, analogies with pasta shapes have proved useful in different physics fields, from polymer rings to neutron stars.8,9
Pasta water also exhibits fascinating physical properties, primarily due to its starch content. When heated, starch-water solutions undergo a gelatinization transition,10,11 altering their viscosity and structural properties. Additionally, mixing water with 1.5–2 parts of corn starch is a well-known method for creating a non-Newtonian fluid, often referred to as oobleck.12 Starch-enriched water also plays a crucial role in stabilizing emulsions, as seen in the classic dish “spaghetti aglio e olio,” where it helps form a smooth, creamy sauce by preventing the separation of oil into suspended droplets….