Why people prefer bronze die pasta to 'normal' pasta
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ธ.ค. 2022
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Thanks to Dr. Frank Manthey at North Dakota State University: www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/ag-h...
2005 book chapter co-authored by Dr. Manthey about pasta manufacturing: www.academia.edu/32989147/Ext...
2008 Italian paper on the effects of different pasta die materials: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
2007 book chapter that was the source of the above paper's claim about sauce retention: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1... - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
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Cool
Why don't comments have FAQs anymore? Do the sponsors not like sharing their pin?
maybe you should tackle this from a different angle.. since many sauces are built from the starchy pasta water...
I get that you need sponsors, but telling me to give access to my mailbox to some random company... no thanks
Adam, that ending was a very polite way of telling us that science doesn't show much of a difference, and that we should continue doing us.
I like pasta
Me too
Me four
Me too
And I don't care who knows. When I eat pasta my enjoyment shows. There are three things that every chef knows.
Me five
From my experience the increase in starch in the cooking liquid that you get from bronze cut pasta is super crucial for getting the right consistency of homemade sauces. But thats entirely anecdotal.
I can corroborate that anecdote. After trying out some of my favorite pastas with bronze die cut pasta, the sauces I've made using the cooking water were noticably smoother, especially so if the sauce had parmesan dissolved into it
i think adam touches on this at ~6:40. he mentions that you get cooking loss in the water but that if you use the pasta water in the sauce, you can achieve a thicker sauce.
@@dabundis Couldn't this be compensated by throwing a teaspoon of flour in with the pasta water?
to expound on the "bronze die pasta holds sauce better," it might be the case that people who care about pasta holding its sauce are often the same people that use pasta water in their sauce.
@@JohannesWiberg That would just gum up into a hydrated ball of flour into the water. The better way to compensate would be to cook the teflon pasta in less water so it becomes more starchy and concentrated.
This level of pedantic mini-myth testing is exactly the kind of content I subscribe for.
Love that you caught the cited primary source basically doing the scientific equivalent of;
“mother: go ask your father
Father: go ask your mother”
😂😂😂
Happens all the time in academia and good academics vigilantly guard against it by going to the source of information when and wherever possible.
@@broadh2o980 Also happens in the media all the time. Their "source" is just another shitrag that aligns with them politically. For example, HuffPo cites a CNN article...
I think there's an actual name for that, the Woozel Effect. Named after the time Winnie the Pooh was tracking down a Woozel when it was actually his own footprints that he was following. An example of this is when news articles kept saying the F-35 fighter plane is bad. They all kept quoting each other. And the ultimate source of that notion was Pierre Sprey, who knew nothing about the F-35 and had nothing to do with it's development, and was trash talking it for Russia Today as propaganda. Sources kept sourcing each other in a circle, and the ultimate source was a guy who's only source was that he made it the f___ up.
"trust the science"
@@hedgeearthridge6807 my favourite example of this is the story about gavrilo princip eating a sandwich
When my wife was doing her M.A. program, specifically the part about foreign language pedagogy, she was shocked to discover the high frequency of misquotation of original sources in the papers she was reading. Original sources would say A and the papers citing them would say B, claiming that’s what the original source said. She came away with a strong distrust of researchers in the field of education (people who research educational methods and results). She also concluded that you always need to drill down to original sources.
Just try watching the corporate news if you want to experience wild deviations from original material!!
@@monkeygraborange the difference is pretty much everyone knows corporate media sucks, but to discover that there's usually some very wild mistakes in professional academic papers is pretty terrifying. Not to mention you can take potentially years researching a topic only to ended up at one of those mistakes (watch some CGP Grey for refrences of that madness)
@@darkness74185 The most infuriating example of this is the theory that depression and other mental illnesses are the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Not only was that recently found to be completely unsupported by scientific studies, but when pressed about their misleading the public, many psychiatrists who had peddled the theory started denying they had ever taught it. Ronald Pies, MD, psychiatrist, of SUNY Upstate Medical and Tufts Universities said, "In short, the ‘chemical imbalance theory’ was never a real theory, nor was it widely propounded by responsible practitioners in the field of psychiatry." (From Nuances, Narratives, and the “Chemical Imbalance” Debate (April 2014, Medscape)) That was over 8 years ago, yet there have been no reeducation campaigns to correct the public's belief in that theory, nor has the field as a whole made any attempt to take responsibility for spreading it.
Of course, it's entirely possible that some mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, but because of so many psychologists', neurologists', and psychiatrists' lack of scientific rigor, all the research is tainted by their bias.
Useful when you just want a degree and get it over with, frustrating when you want to do actual research
@@Jhud69 It’s also frustrating if you want to apply the results of research in some practical setting. My wife was hoping to learn useful lessons about foreign language teaching that she could use in her classroom.
Imagine being able to say “I’m a pasta scientist” at a party (with truthfulness lol)
It was either that or a hamburger helper.
As an actual pasta maker, this guy is just clowning around. He seems to have a rudimentary understanding of physics.
When I watched Alex do his series, I couldn't stop thinking how the notion artisanal pasta holds more sauce could be a myth. Thx for this very educational video
Alex spouts a lot of unfounded stuff, sadly
@@monochr0m Almost every video of his is the same lately.
Learn how to make a final dish -> use lower quality/different ingredients to make a few prequal videos/series while pretending you are "learning".
Dude had some interesting stuff before but now its just a predictable formula for every video.
@@monochr0m I usually like Adam but this test was not even close to being "scientific" The pasta sauce extraction lacked exact precision, also you don't cook your pasta until it's done usually you use the paster water to cook and reduce the sauce. So the higher starch release of that pasta is significant. This topic is way more complicated than a simple and really not precise enough test. Also the sample size here is one. This is good enough for a youtube video, but it's not more of a scientific approach than what Alex did. Also to the flavor tests. A deep molecular analysis of that pasta with a decent sized sample size would me necessary to further look into these claims. It seems that Adam just wanted to frame this as a myth with some pseudo science.
@@Tobiasliese Erm... adam mentioned it ... but he wanted to test the pasta retaining the sauce inside of the pasta and not thicker sauces
For the record, I didn't call it a myth! I just assert that it's unproven, and perhaps the mechanism isn't simply that the pasta itself actually holds more sauce. Might have more to do with the sauce itself, if you're using the pasta water.
The first time I made pasta with bronze die pasta, my entire family noticed the difference without me telling them. It was just a "woah, dad, what did you do different? This tastes amazing!"
And this makes sense.
This video is honestly kind of bad at answering the question in it's title.
The quality of the ingredients used in the making of the pasta are most likely of a higher quality when being extruded through a bronze die. It's pretty hard to find 2 pastas where everything is equal but the extrusion method. The $1-2 extra for a box of bronze die isn't purely extrusion speed, but also ingredient cost.
But in general, if every step of making a pasta dish that uses pasta water from cooking is applied equally to a teflon extruded and a bronze extruded pasta, the latter will give a superior result due to more starch leeching into the water and less water being left behind with the bronze extruded pasta.
I dont care what anyone says, bronze die pasta is just simply much better. Might be better ingredients, but it is my go to and always will be, that cheap teflon pasta has no place in my home.
I think there’s one more thing to consider and that is the drying phase, which can have a massive impact on the texture and the way the pasta cooks and from what i read before, usually teflon pasta is not only extruded quicker but is also dried faster with higher tempratures.
The main selling point for me regarding bronze die extruded pasta is the extra starch in the pasta water, which is a key ingredient in so many Italian pasta dishes. It's a key part of successful "mantecare"! I think it results in creamier (or maybe just more fool-proof) carbonara.
You can get the same effect adding durum wheat to the water, no need to splash out for more expensive pasta just for that.
Just add starch to the water
@@niaimack Its more expensive to buy durum wheat plus cheap spaghetti. Plus, the difference between price of bronze cut and silicone cut is negligible
@@sonicman9910 all depends on where you're from.
In Germany I can get a whole package of Hartweizengries (durum) for 60 cents which is less than the premium from normal store brand (Teflon), to bronce cut for 1 package (500 grams/ / 1 pound of pasta.
@@sonicman9910 No it's fucking not. You're using less than a tablespoon of flour on one pot of water.
I think the factor that might make the claim of more sauce somewhat closer to true *might* (just a supposition, also might not) have something to do with a perception of stronger flavour due to the rough surface retaining the sauce better specifically when in contact with our wet tongue- while the smoother pasta allows it to dissipate+dissolve away quicker.
The best way I could describe my guess succinctly would be as the half-life of soluble flavourant dissipation on the tongue, rather than the penetration into the pasta surface like you tested at the end. I don't think absorption into the pasta will make a big difference, since we don't generally chew pasta to mush/paste before we swallow it.
Or it's just folk wisdom/attachment to 'classic method'/marketing.
I think this is a great hypothesis.
Just made a comment about exactly this! Nice to see someone else beat me to it. The dyed-pasta cross section is what lead me to think this. The perceived depth of the surface is much greater on the bronze-cut. More pockets and such that makes the flavor more available to our taste buds
poetically put!!
Exactly, rougher surface means more contact surface for taste buds. Same as with powdered sugar tasting sweeter.
Gotta get me an organoleptic eperience shirt!
Long live the empire.
🤬
The Britt's would call a grill.
All glory to the hypnotoad
Long live the empire! 🥸
@@Theeswaglord who do you think you're cursing at huh?
This would be interesting to do a blind taste test on. I really don't notice any taste difference myself ...but the mouth feel is noticable. The baking aspect is quite different and I think the Bronze die noodles hold up much better in baked dishes and slow cooker dishes.
The bronze kind hodles better. The cheap kind has to be eaten immediately and IMO inedible reheated.
@@paulblichmann2791 I agree with that, I really notice it in soups, like minestrone, where it is often reheated, sometimes more than once. Tiny conchiglie or farfalline are excellent.
Some people can't even tell the difference between a cookie that has been taken from a freshly opened package vs a cookie that has been on the table for hours and has absorbed moisture.
@@prawtism I can, and to be honest, I prefer they age a bit after opening - they release more flavor. YMMV.
Need to call mister Chlebowski
In my experience, you can't really make recipes like cacio e pepe with the smooth stuff. Even if you reduce the pasta water on its own and finish cooking the pasta in a small amount of that reduced water, the amount of starch you get out of it is pretty low. It's just a lot harder to get a good emulsion without the extra starch from the bronze die noodles.
In my experience, because it's generally closer to an artisanal product, bronze die pasta is also dried more slowly and perhaps has slightly different grain? Whatever it is, and texture aside, on average the flavour tends to be better imo
or just placebo because of that "artisanal" marketing. if it feels like a better product you might impose that on the eating experience. both are possible and it probably would vary from brand to brand
Personal experience as an Italian, pasta water appears to be more rich in starch when using bronze die pasta. Maybe you could have done an experiment analyzing the "thickening power" of the pasta water, which is not at all a secondary product of cooking but a main ingredient for any disg
I grew up watching "good eats" and it's wonderful to see someone filling that niche now. Love the content, can't believe I didn't find you sooner.
There's also the property of the pasta to remain at an al dente texture. The bronze-die pasta (e.g., Monograno Felicetti, De Cecco) can hold their al dente texture long enough for the cook to reduce sauce more or during the time it takes to make it to the table. The Barilla's and others smooth store brands of the world go soft QUICKLY. But maybe this has to do with the specific wheat, and/or the drying process of the extruded pasta. And, as you mentioned, the rough ones have a better mouthfeel.
Huh, I bet you're right on all those other factors probably influencing it too. I wonder which ones matter most? I'd think the wheat would matter quite a bit (and there's probably a pretty big diff between store brand/barilla and some nice stuff in terms of starting material quality)
Dont forget Garoffalo, our familys favourite
I've been using De Cecco for some 30 years now. Barilla is crap in comparison, the pasta literally disintegrates on you if you miss draining it by a minute.
I also buy La Molisana, Voiello, Rummo, and Del Verde when I can't find De Cecco, but I'd rather starve than to resort to Barilla.
I heard the reverse that due to the texture, it cooks through faster as shown with the higher water absorption and cloudier water.
Also due to the nature of the weaker integrity i've also heard to not cook with a rolling boil and just use a simmer.
You have a way of explaining things very clear and leaving nothing ambiguous, I appreciate this a lot
I agree,hes a bit too much of a foods food kinda guy for my taste,but he does great at explaining things clearly.
@@normalhuman9260 Well it’s a food channel afterall
@@PGproductionsHD I know that,but meat is food,everything else is what you feed to food.
@@normalhuman9260 cringe. People have different tastes and you need more than just meat in your diet to be your healthiest.
@@normalhuman9260 Dunno man, most people aren't carnivores.
i dont know if I would notice a texture difference on spaghetti or linguine, but the difference on the chubby grooved shapes is undeniable. i learned years ago before i knew about the bronze die business that even among cheaper brands the rough dull looking pasta was better.
Really interesting video. Some potential food for thought is that even if the bronze die pasta is only a few percent better in a few different categories, that can stack up to a quite noticeable difference.
Then again, higher quality brands also tend to use bronze dies. The difference in wheat quality could also be contributing to the difference.
nah. its just hipster shit.
8:43
"organoleptic eperience"
Love the video!
30% increase for Teflon pasta vs 33% increase for Bronze cut isn’t a 3% difference, it’s a 10% difference. Possibly more if you were saucing more heavily. Add the thicker sauce from greater starch content in bronze cooking water and I think you’re definitely achieving a noticeable taste/feel gain. Before you even get to mouth feel. Here in NZ basic supermarket bronze cut is only a little more than Teflon - I think it’s hands-down worth it ❤
Hey bro I’m a kiwi foodie too! What dried pasta have you’d found the best in our national chains? It’s hard to find stuff a rougher surface
It would only make sense to say that 30% vs 33% is a 10% difference if the numbers 30 and 33 were the percentages of the sauce in the pan that made it onto the plate, or some fraction-of-sauce like that. Since the numbers 30 and 33 are percent *increases*, they should really be treated like 1.30 and 1.33 (the factor by which the weight increased due to sauce), which is a 2.3% increase. In any case, in the full context of the experiment, it's a difference of 3 grams of sauce (ish) so we can tell that it's a very very small difference
@@CtHtThomas oh yes you’re right, thanks!
@@olivermalcolm7076 I get La Molisana from Countdown -it’s pretty delish!
@@CtHtThomas hey no hang on, it is 10% increase in sauce. Both of the increases are compared to weight of pasta only. So yeah it’s a small % difference of the whole plate, but it’s 10% difference in sauce, which is bringing the flavour
Nice vid! Never knew there was a claim on bronze cut pasta "holding" sauce better, I always assumed people meant that due to the extra starch in the pasta water, the sauce comes out thicker, as Adam mentioned might be the reason for this
I made the same assumption. That the sauce it self is better. In my own cooking I have found this to be true but that is far from a scientific study.
I could see the rough edges making some sort of very very small difference like how Adam tested it but obviously that test would need to be done a significantly more times and under way more conditions to pick up a statical difference of 3 grams.
If you into pasta hellhole, you'll immediately find this
Happy to see Dr. Frank back.
Great vid once again Adam! Very Informative! :)
I always scream "die, pasta!", when I chuck it into boiling water.
Personally I Personally perfer "cook God damn you, cook." (I ALWAYS forget to get the water boiling and am forced to stire the paste constantly before it clumps
"Eject the impasta"
This was great. I'd have liked to see an experiment done with a pasta that relies on pasta water to be part of the sauce, like spaghetti al nerano, because that's more of a test to see how sauce is "held."
I actually missed Frank Manthey, I've been digging these pasta videos, watching them several times to secure their knowledge, so thank you guys.
KING! Thanks for snoping this situation. Another great video!
37g of retained sauce is ~9% more than 34g. I think that focusing on the 3% difference in total final weight is misrepresenting the otherwise very well obtained result. Great video as always.
Fun fact: as a general guide it usually takes about a 10% change between two similar things for a person to notice the difference
Disclaimer: Spaghetti is my least favorite pasta. I have no horse in this race.
Good to know! I prefer the texture of the bronze die stuff and it definitely produces a starchier pasta water, which is critical for simpler pasta dishes that rely on starchy pasta water for emulsification.
You do such outstanding research!
I love how you can always usually manage to get proper primary sources interviewed Adam, it adds so much to an already interesting topic for me. Now in thinking about getting this guy and the PTFE prof from a few weeks ago together to learn about those combined effects. Thanks for the (always) great video(s)!
“Always usually”
I personally think the whole bronze thing is a red herring (probably a better term for this):
it's the old slower drying process that goes hand in hand with the brass dies that in my personal experience gives the better results, not just the rougher surface, the pasta absorbs much more water, making the remaining water a lot more starch-ier
Yeah exactly, this is something I was thinking about too. Additionally, even the quality of semolina could be better with bronze die pasta. So it’s probably hard to exactly pin point to what makes the pasta good. Though bronze die on the package is an easy way to see if it’s ‘good’ quality pasta.
Doctor Frank! one of my very favorite reoccurring characters in Ragusean lore.
🌾🌾🌾🌾👨🏫🔬📜🌾🌾🌾🌾
thank you Alex for giving me the enthusiasm to watch this video!
Great video. The reason I started using bronze die pasta over regular was due to the more starchy cooking water you can use. I've noticed it's a lot easier to make a nice emulsified sauce using the bronze die pasta water compared to the regular.
I think copper is tasty
I prefer silver personally.
I'll take the arsenic die
Copper thinks you're tasty too
The good ol fashioned way of roughening your pasta is sandpaper
“Organoleptic eperience”
- Old Man Ragusea’s shirt, 2022
Adam, you are a beacon of light on TH-cam. I wish you and your family a very happy and safe Holiday season.
Hear hear
I've said this before, but one of my favorite parts of the Monday videos is seeing the different food professors and experts in these super specific areas of food.
For me the benefit of bronze die pasta has been the increased starch release in the pasta water which makes for great sauces, not sauce adhesion. I think that explains the benefit you saw when baking the pasta uncooked, as all that starch was released into the end product rather than strained away.
That laddle of pasta water added to the sauce always takes it to a whole new level, and nothing triumphs the starchy water from boiling fresh pasta.
Adam, can you please make a video about the potential health benefits of using an air fryer versus pan frying? I'm trying to use less oil in cooking, but when using less oil my food comes out burnt and awful. The chicken is dry, and I am sad. I've been thinking about getting an air fryer to reduce the amount of oil I consume and still have well cooked food, although I'm having difficulty finding information online about this for my particular needs. Most of what I see online are comparisons in deep frying food, something that I don't do at all.
Brian Lagerstrom just made an interesting video on this exact topic last week called “Was I wrong about Air Fryers.”
@@monkeygraborange Thank you!
@@misocomplex 👍
Thank you, Mr. Ragu!
the lighting in this video is soooo good
I would love a follow-up video testing the difference between using Teflon die vs bronze die pasta cooking water, as most of my pasta sauces include at least a bit of the cooking water to help the sauce adhere better! Does the starchier water from the bronze die pasta actually make the sauce adhere more?
It'd be valuable to compare that to other variables that affect the starchiness of the water, such as the volume of water you cook it in(such as in a pan), or if you reuse the pasta water for multiple batches as a restaurant would. In which case a restaurant would be unaffected by the die(by the time it's cooking your batch, it's probably maximized the amount of starch it can hold), and you can get cheaper results by changing the technique(cooking in a pan) rather than paying for more expensive pasta(if the mouthfeel of the pasta itself what's worth the difference)
Adam, what else can we make a die with? Doesn’t have to be at a large scale; what tastes the best?
Steel reinforced ceramic probably
Lasers.
owls eat pasta ?
Those plastic play-do ones give the best result
I've enjoyed all of my Eperiences over the years with your videos adam
Thanks for another informative video, Adam! I think your comment about the extra starch in the pasta water might be worth another test. If using the pasta water in the sauce is part of the whole pasta-cooking process, I could definitely see the thicker sauce playing a big part in why bronze-die-cut pasta tastes saucier.
This video goes against what I have been taught my entire life, and as such I shall simply ignore it
Great video as always!
Great video Adam! I've actually run similar tests in the past myself and couldn't tell a huge difference in the amount of sauce retained. That being said though, I do prefer the texture and mouth feel of bronze cut pasta; it has a much more satisfying chew to it 😃
Beautiful job on not a pasta pun😂
Great videography!
Amazing video like always!
I'm loving the science aspects. So much respect
I love your armchair food science experiments. They remind me a lot of Alton Brown and his "Good Eats" show, which was always my favorite cooking show growing up. There's so much science in cooking, and knowing the underlying science can really help you become a better cook.
Thanks for the great videos, Adam! Cheers! 🍻
This was far more interesting than I expected 👍
Got to congratulate you for this video Adam! It's always really nice seeing you do this modest at-home science experiments. Keep it up!
As a current North Dakota State University student, thanks for including one of our own in your video. Been a fan of your videos for years, Adam. Keep up the high quality content!
Another idea came to me when you showed the dyed-strand cross section- The greater surface area leads to more sauce "availability" in such that the taste buds have access to more of the sauce in the bronze-cut pasta.
I never heard about bronze dyed pasta but Adam still makes me curious about it
Great video as always Adam! I think one of the main reasons you might prefer to use bronze die pasta (at least empirically from my home kitchen) is that it seems to release much more starch into the water (what you touched on for a few seconds in the video). It might really help with keeping the emulsion in more traditional pasta dishes like aglio e olio.
Would be great to see a comparison in how stable oil/water emulsions are with PTFE vs Bronze-cut pasta!
just realizing that "my god! it's full of stars..." quote and elsevier papers are among the reasons adam is seriously high quality!
I can’t wait to eperience this new merch!
that part of trying it with colored water was just *chefs kiss* wouldn't have thought to do it like that
Thanks for clarification on Bronze die pasta.
8:50 hm... at p
Such a good point about those primary sources. I spot this all the time. Citations that are completely worthless because they make a claim the original doesn't even come close to making.
It's honestly infuriating.
Informative video - as always! Very popular in pasta debate, are the various drying methods implemented in industrial pasta-making - e.g. - the gastronomical benefits to a slower drying process versus the faster/far more cost-effective alternatives many pasta manufacturers employ today / a bit off-topic (apologies) but there you go
definitely getting the shirt when it comes out
I haven't finished watching this video yet, but man I love how you actually test out these kitchen myths.
You can actually get _textured_ spaghetti made with teflon dies, or at least something with much higher surface area.
There are _instant_ pastas which don't have round cross section - it looks a bit like Sierpiński's triangle, or 3 arrows connected in the middle.
Alternatively you could maybe boil teflon made pasta slightly longer in sauce to get higher penetration.
I enjoyed eperiencing this video!
I wonder if the sauce choice reduced the difference between the two. Classic red sauce is pulpy and chunky, so the microscopic crevices in the die cut don’t hold onto the sauce much better than the Teflon. I think that, in addition to the extra starch in the cooking water thickening their emulsions, the rougher exterior works better to catch a smoother, more loose sauce like a Cacio e Pepe, Carbonara, or just butter.
Love seeing what I imagine is a small fraction of the research that goes into these videos. You're doing Alton Brown proud by coupling cooking with science!
I'm just going to admire Prof. Manthey's classic Steelcase office.
You don't understand how much I genuinely appreciate your suggestion to always check primary sources. So many people just blindly believe what they are told by other people who also didn't read the source. One of my heros Dr Richard Feynman has countless tales about him and his colleagues arguing about literally everything and scrutinizing each other's findings. There is no such thing as scientific consensus according to any real scientist
Applause! This was good. Very good.
.
Super interesting, in my country, we have a huge Italian community, but I have never heard about bronze cut until recently and there is only one commercially available national brand that offers it, I will do a side-by-side experiment of my own!
Bronze die pasta has a better mouthfeel imo. And it releases more starch, which is good for aglio e olio or carbonara (or any sauce in which you incorporate some of the pasta water)
Oof, that whiplash when I'm so used to clicking on a pasta video and it's not Alex. Awesome to see you covering it too.
VERY Interesting theory-proving, Adam! THX And - will you be posting some of your recipes using dry pasta/noodles into sauced casseroles? I'm most curious how you figure out how much dry- (ingredients) to-liquid the ratio should be so it works out perfectly after baking.
Nailed it again, Ragusea 🙂
Your stiring is huge variable in itself.
Which is why I stirred constantly each I time I did the experiment.
@@aragusea it didn't look that consistent is what I mean. But it's hard to make that a repeatable step unless maybe you used a vibration table? Anyway great topic and video!
I realized I just watched an entire video going on about a class of food I don’t even like.
But maybe you’re just that good at making something interesting to learn about.
very interesting vid as usual, gotta say, Ive never perceived bronze die as "holding more sauce" I always liked the texture better AND it makes a more starchy water which is used to augment the pasta sauce.
I've once or twice used cavatappi pasta shape with my thick style meat sauce when I didn't have any spaghetti on hand. I thought that the dish had a significantly stronger sauce flavor than with spaghetti. I've also noticed since then that the spaghetti leaves a lot more sauce on the dish as it slides thru the sauce when I wind it onto my fork. A thicker coating of sauce remained on the cavatappi due to its shape.
Your ad reads and transitions are always so good. Just looking at the pastas, the increase in surface area of the rough one would not be enough for a meaningful difference. I think if we were looking at somewhat deep pitting instead it would be a different story.
I completely hate when people poor the sauce over the noodles though. I can never get it mixed and flavored so I just have lots of naked noodle tastes.
The science is intriguing. The sample sizes are too small. "Breaking Away" Easter eggs in a video about italian food are priceless!
I was under the assumption that by "holding sauce better", it did refer to the method of transferring some of the starchy pasta water into the sauce, and letting the pasta finish cooking in said sauce, given that starch is a thickening agent. Also, I think it may have been more prudent to use some sort of small shaped pasta like fusilli instead of spaghetti, since all those interior curves hold tomato sauce better than the long noodles do.
From my experience, the two spaghettis from the store I like the best are the most expensive bronze-cut one, and the cheapest no-name one. I do feel like the expensive one puts more starch in the water, and since I stir in a healthy amount of butter with my spaghetti, that makes it come out less greasy and more creamy. The cheap kind ALSO puts more starch in the water than the "normal" brand-name stuff, and it puffs up extra big which gives it more surface area and makes more food per pound of pasta. The expensive stuff has better flavor, which makes sense, but the texture of the cheapo stuff was surprisingly nice.
One other thing I'll say is, the other day I made spaghetti for some other people for the first time in forever. I've been off on my own playing with my recipe for a while now. When I served it to some people who were used to jarred sauce, faces were melted. One of them even pointed out, "the noodles even taste amazing, what did you do?" Cheap pasta, half a cup of pasta water, and BUTTER. Lol
So there is this recipe for mac and cheese that i got from a baking with babish video where you dont strain the past, all of the thick starchy water goes into the sause, and it definitely makes for a really good result. Way better that adding the flour in separately imo. While I've done it with both pasta types many times, it just isnt the same. But idk, ill be honest, i mostly do it with this method because its easy and good.
It's the roughness that holds starches which then help with the emulsification of the sauce. If you have a premade sauce, I would agree the pasta wouldn't make much difference. IMO the less ingredients used for a sauce (Alfredo, gricia, cacio, carbonara) the more critical the starch is, and is why I always go for a good starchy pasta.
you mentioned that more of the surface starch gets dissolved into the cooking water, which when added to the sauce could cause more of it stick to the pasta. Would be nice to see an experiment with some of the cooking water added to just sauce to see if it makes the sauce more viscous or not.
great video, but i think it deserves a part 2 with a few more variables:
firstly, re-run the experiment from this video, but use part of the cooking water for the sauce (equal amount for both types of cooking water, to keep things equal.)
secondly, it might be interesting to see if the thesis still holds true for different types of sauce. for instance, what about carbonara or alfredo sauce? my educated guess is that it may lead to similar results as the first experiment, but does it equal the exact same values? for instace, the weight increase differential not being 30% to 33%, but something like 40% to 50% or possibly even something entirely different.
of course, that's only a suggestion, and maybe we don't need that many variables, but it's still a fun idea.