I Turned My Dumb Food Dehydrator Into a Smart Pasta Dryer (PC fans, Sensors and all)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ก.ค. 2022
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Italians : Food dehydrators can't make Dry Pasta. Alex: Hold my beer.
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Never seen such a good cliffhanger in a pasta-themed video.
Yup. I could hear the capital letters in that comment.
> "EVERY day is a challenge in drying pasta."
That is a brand new sentence.
@@geraldbrooks2763 😂 Alex, bringing out all kinds of new feelings in us.
@@VideoSchoolOnline ALEX!!!! why?
Easily in my top 5 for pasta themed cliffhangers
"Every day is a challenge in drying pasta."
That guy's awesome. Giving it to ya straight. No sugar-coating. Exactly the kinda guy you want in your corner.
Exactly!
I was going to say the very same thing. Cavalieri seems like a great guy and is willing to share his expertise...as long as you're not going to open a pastificio.
For some reason that reminded me of davie504. Maybe the voice is similar as I think he's Italian.
I'd wear that t-shirt
Btw Cavalieri in Italian means Knights
I can only imagine this guy at Home Depot buying all of this equipment. "What are you making?" Alex: "Carbonara"
This guy will make a tandoor out of clay he found in a construction site and call on Indian masterchefs to make the best naan ever.
Check out the channel, "The Wood Fired Oven Chef" :-)
Don't give him ideas! No, wait, DO! I wanna see Alex-ified roti and tandoori chicken.
You can make a decent tandoor out of terracotta pots. Tried it myself and it works a treat 👌
I would watch that
@@petermarknimmo please tell me how!!! I can get many types of clay pots in my country, but very few people has ever seen a tandoor and even fewer has one.
I said this before and I know it may seem weird but its real.. you can also learn a lot from wood drying. Its the same exact principal. Dry, then allow a rest (which is some rehydration) then resume drying. Your fractured pasta result is exactly what happens with wood.
Exactly, you dont want to go too hard. Also vacuum is a thing, but probably a bit too complicated for something like this
@@PLF... Who said anything about vacuum? You can take a slow drying process where you slowly dry day to day allowing the charge to cool (and attract moisture) overnight to allow it to equalize then resume drying. Its much slower but also much easier.
Again... where the fu)k did vacuum come from? Thats a whole nother level.
Just check out cannabis drying , people really delve into keeping RH and ventillation on spot for 14 days exact dry , then comes the cure which is a whole other ballgame , I have a feeling the processis there would help out in Alexs journey
@@j.anthonyszepsy8712 My niece is a PHD bio and working on cannabis as a focus (not for passion but because its money).
Drying cannabis has nothing to due with maintaining structural integrity as it does with wood/pasta/cellulosic materials that are trying to be dried with a specific structure and integrity. Drying basil, oregano, cannabis, etc.. mold control, is about all you care about. Drying wood and pasta, your concerns are stress relieving the cellulosic fibers periodically throughout the process as not to create infinite numbers of fractures in the structure that all equate to the catastrophic failure Alex has seen consistently in his pasta.
@@fpoastro maybe not directly but im sure there are things to be learnt from the process im sure.
Ah, as an Electronics Engineer, this is what I love about your channel, and why I suscribed in the first palce. Don't get me wrong, I love everything you do, even if it doesn't have to do anythign with electronics, but I did missed seeing you building stuff with electronics for cooking.
Keep it up.
and yet he talks about turning the dryer on an off every hour with his finger, instead of hacking the guts out and controlling the heater and fan by his controller :D
@@kubeek HAHAHAHAHAHAHA That's the exact same thought I had. Just automate the hell out of it.
@@catos3045 I searched the comments to see if anybody else had thought this. Alex is also an electronics engineer, so why doesn't he just connect the built in fan to the arduino? I'm a lawyer, but I could do that :-)
@@rasmis I think there's a strong chance he will do that as one of the improvements.
I mean, he made a bluetooth angle measuring device for knife sharpening, for example :D
"Every day is a challenge in drying pasta" is the perfect cliffhanger. Love the series, can't wait for more.
I'm going to find some of Andrea Cavalieri's brand of pasta here in Australia, just to support him for being such a great guy in helping Alex! Great episode!
It’s possible that your extruder isn’t generating enough pressure to really homogenize the dough structure. Maybe let the dough sit for a while longer before sending it through the machine.
I was thinking about this, maybe the pasta is not really hidrated. In the Monograno factory they use vaccum in the mixing system, so the dough get hidrated faster. But whit a house mixer like the one Alzex is using, I think that the dough is not getting the time to actually get that hidrated.
This comment is so underrated right now
@@JonCLTV How is it overrated ?
@@rickross5421 It should have more likes to get Alex to read it. I find it very useful information that can change the course of the pasta drying series.
@@rickross5421 I mean underrated sorry 😣
Hey Alex, I’m sure you know this already but you can (probably) easily hijack the power to the fan and use the microcontroller to control it. If you need to control the heater you can also most likely do that with the microcontroller, you’ll just need to use a mosfet or a relay instead of controlling it directly from the gpio like I imagine you’re doing with the other fans. Lastly, I think it would be beneficial to find some way to add humidity. If it were me I would use an ultrasonic transducer to try and atomize the water as much as possible; that should make the “lag” between the addition of water and it’s acceptance as humidity relatively low. These are all fairly quick ideas though so I don’t know exactly how well they would pan out. Excited to see how you figure out each of these new challenges though!
I was thinking less complicated and just use a humidifier and connect it externally but yh 🤷🏾♂️ bit difficult to control the humidity but then that's what the fans are for
+1
Exactly was I was thinking. You already went out of your way to upload data and have nice graphs, adding these features should be easier.
Shoot, I would just go old school and put a relay between the motor/heater and the incoming power and control it with a programmable timer for lights. Doesn't matter if the unit is never turned off, and the built in temp control would still work, cause there would be no power to the fan/heating unit.
I have noooo interest in ever doing this, but I’m completely addicted to watching Alex slowly move towards pasta perfection. Keep it up man, almost there !! 🤓
Loving the pasta series Alex!! Keep it up! Can't wait for the saucisson sec series😉
You’ve already got the Arduino going. You can get ready made opto-isolated relay modules that are built for Arduino.
You mean for turning the original fruit dryer on and off? If he has arduino chops, and he clearly does, he could automate a lot more of this process. I'm imagining a source of humid air (either a humidifier, or even just an electric kettle) connected to the box with some of that duct hose, and a servo-controlled vent. It could turn on to warm up just before the active cycle ends, then the servo opens the vent and allows the humid air in to the box.
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon then he could add a PID controller and voilà!
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon Probably best to use one of those little ultrasonic humidifiers (can get USB powered ones that connect to a standard 500ml bottle for pennies on aliexpress). Using a kettle would add too much heat during the rest period
@@iacopob very much agreeing with proper CL control. As an electrical engineer, this should not be an issue at all
@@HaralHeisto oooh I forgot about those, that would be perfect
The only food channel that has a build/maker workshop vibe, loving the series Alex!
This is the best series on TH-cam right now! Your videos showcasing Luciano Monosilio's pasta techniques were a game changes to not only my own personal pasta making, but those of my customers at the shop I work at. As your videos educate me, I pass that knowledge on to many others in my local area to improve their pasta making. (I provide credit where it is due). Ciao!
You've got the arduino sorted for logging data, now it's time to disconnect the dryer's original control board entirely, and use the arduino to turn the fan and heater on and off :D
Some fans have a separate PWM line which you can use with the arduino to vary their speed, which might help too
Have you considered the possibility that your dough making process and extrusion method may be at least partially responsible? If the dough has a lot of air incorporated into its structure it could weaken its structural integrity after drying? Think hardtack vs a dried slice of bread. One is easier to crush than The other.
true that, even shown in his monograno factory video the dough is mixed and extruded in a vacuum to avoid that problem
my man will be buying factory at this rate
Its a factor but can be circumvented. It changes the material constant for the dough, likely making it require a more gentle drying program with longer rests.
Vacuum extruded pasta gives a more resistant result, and iin colored pasta a more vibrant color. If you put pasta that wasn't vacuum extruded in an industrial tunnel dryer, it will collapse, because the air bubbles will expand too fast for the air to escape. A tunnel dryer, that can dry pasta between 4 and 8 hours work with a hot cycle ranging from 80° to 115°C, the pasta is pre cooked after drying, hence the dark yellow color. Pasta is carb, and carb is sugar, it caramelize. For drying non vacuum pasta you have to make three long cycles, at a very low temperature and long time. Aim for at least 48h total time, and it's the minimum. By the way, his first mod got it right, in order to the pasta dries from inside out, the first stage should have a huge increase in humidity, then slowly going down. There's more to that, but it's the beginning.
@@RoboticParanoia how do you know this stuff
It feels illegal to be here that early
I'm usually asleep when he posts but currently I am up at 2:30 am
yea
If everything have to be Off at resting period, just hook the "dryer" to a timer socked. You can get some nice cheap digital ones that you can set to several intervals.
"Every day is a challenge in drying pasta." Words to live by. Perhaps you could set up something with a servo to allow a few milliliters of water to drip onto the bottom of the box like a minute before the fans turn off, so that it starts to evaporate. That way the humidity will increase during the rest period. Or you could make it really complicated. Set up a humidifier with some of that duct hose, and use servo to open a vent to allow the humid air to enter during rest.
Alex, I would recommend you look into the science of psycrometrics. The relative humdity depends strongly on the temperature; increase the temp and the RH goes down. This is why you need to turn off the heater and not just the fans during the rest peroids.
As an Italian we take dry pasta for granted and rarely dig deeper into its making. Ty Alex, you opened my eyes to a new amazing world. You got me glued to the screen with last episode👀
Rofl the hard close is one of the best I've seen in a while. Now pasta drying is a Bourne movie.
In the next episode, Alex builds his own pasta-drying street...
I'm half expecting him to go to Gragnano and dry it in the sun himself. He loves going to Italy and this sounds like the perfect opportunity to go back again.
I love this series because it clearly shows the amount of engineering and thinking went on before they where capable of doing the stuff they did on an industrial scale and most of this stuff was figured out a century ago before they had precise measurement instruments and so on. Respect.
So glad you mentioned benedetto cavalieri in this series. I am an absolute food lover and travel all over Europe in search of new things to try, I went to visit them at the factory and ended up talking with "Dottor Cavalieri" for over one hour. Such a great family business! Thank you for your great videos, I always highly anticipate to see where you are going next. Keep up the good work
Omg.... the thing I love most about Alex's videos is the sheer determination he has to get things done as close to perfection as possible. It's really inspiring. Also the community here in the yt comments so is great! Everyone who knows something comes to share their expertise while this who don't know how to help still like the helpful comments for more visibility. It's so great 😊
>mid April: okay guys, we're in Naples to try out some traditional italian pasta
>Early July: okay i just hijacked, re-engineered my drier and wrote a code to obtain the best degree of humidity for my homemade dry pasta.
This guy is crazy as hell and i can't do but loving him
next step: build a pasta dryer from scratch! get rid of the elements of the food dryer and build a new one that can be fully programmed as wished
I may be wrong, but that's what I think is coming for the next episode... can't wait to see it! congrats for all the great content Alex! \o/
Yay! Alex is back!
Thanks for more content! Your pasta types have been fun to watch in your shorts! Great production - I love the continuous loop style.
Alex, please more on the building process and programming! The combination of making and cooking is what brought me to the channel!
Love you step by step solution approach
And your passion
Bruh just how far is this man willing to go for pasta.Your tenacity is truly something to to be praised.
Have you tried cooking the pasta you have dried so far? I’m really curious whether it would be good or not.
Awesome Alex please never stop sharing knowledge. I dearly love it. thank you.
Someone give this man an Oscar! Thank you Alex, been following for 3 years now. You are the Best.
You gotta appreciate Alex coming at food like an engineer instead of an artist. Something so interesting about it
Fantastic series Alex! Thank-you for sharing!
I love that you show progression, very inspiring!
I think 95% of people would have quit like 3 episodes ago and of those left pretty much everybody by now. Keep it up Alex! You are an inspiration, not just in drying pasta but in sticking it through no matter what!
i mean, with all the respect for the french cooking, you can clearly see why Italian cooking is simply the best.
Alex you made loads of challenges and series, but this one was without any doubt the most complicated in a way that nobody would have expected; what I mean is that everybody thinks that pasta is a simple dish, but actually is one of the most difficult dish to make properly. If you compare what you learn from start to finish to other series, you can clearly see how this was the one you learned more, simply because nobody would have even thought what pasta really is.
I guess you're the first international youtuber that has been able to make pasta like an Italian would, davvero bravo!
I can't get rid of the feeling that I'm watching a very exciting TV show series :) Bravo Alex!
Can't wait for the next episode!
This series is so entertaining and educational. The production value is superb. Always eager for the next installment.
These are the best episodes! When cooking meets the saw, and circuitry!
I love you did this, I was thinking about getting the same one and hooking it up to an Arduino controller.
Just a thought and you probably already know this, but something might be helpful. Paulo originally said drying was cycles (cycle 1) high temp and low humidity to (cycle 2) low temp and high humidity. Cycle 1 will remove moisture from the outside edges of the pasta quickly, keeping in mind things move from areas of high concentration to low concentration this will begin the migration of moisture from the center towards the outside edges. Cycle 2 will maintain or even increase the moisture slightly to the outside edges. A repeat of cycle 1 continues the movement of moisture from the center to the outside edges. The cycles between low and high humidity are the way to balance the moisture from the outside edges to the center, my guess is your resting time needs some level of moisture/humidity added in. I would also guess that the highly automated process has been perfected by experience and they control the exact time and humidity of each cycle.
Really enjoying this series.
Incredible that you have the "best of the best world experts" helping with your project. It's like if you make hobby beer in your workshop and In-Bev is helping you.
I so enjoy your cooking/mechanical… tactics of the Kitchen!. Nice!
Incroyable, j'en reviens jamais (à chaque série) que vous vous impliquez autant et que vous n'abandonnez jamais. J'adore le processus de réflexion et d'ajustement mais ce que j'attends le plus (comme tous le monde) c'est le moment où vous allez enfin pouvoir manger le plat que vous aurez créé. J'ai hâte de voir le bonheur sur votre visage quand vous allez enfin pouvoir cuisiner avec les pates que vous aurez vous même séché puis manger votre travail.
Bravo, c'est excellent et je vous souhaite de continuer !!
"Every day is a challenge in drying pasta" 🤣🤣🤣
Funny thing, I went into the exact same issues and solutions for making my charcuterie dryer from an electrical wine cellar, humidity was the biggest problem. I couldnt pierce through the side but had to rework the door seal instead. Anyway, great work and engineering Alex, I keep learning here with you :D
Gosh I do so enjoy your videos, and they are so well made. Thanks!
Alex. Your dedikation is awsome !! I have followed you on TH-cam long time and it never desepoints !!
This is starting to look like those heat treating ovens for blade smiths. They can be programmed to a specific sequence of temperatures plateaus according to time to ensure proper hardness and toughness properties.
A heat treat microcontroller might be the readymade (and programmed) solution to Alex issues.
It really is like the pasta needs tempering cycles... at lower temperature.
They definitely need normalisation cycles too
So awesome Alex, I’ve been a fan for years, but this is amazing, above and beyond.
”Every day is a challenge in drying pasta”
You are comppletely insane to go through such fuss for a little pasta. But I love to watch you go through it!
Love the series and learn so much from your experiences!
One question though: do you eat all your experiments? Or just store them for the moment (and one absolutely marvellous progress picture at the end)?
Lots of love from Bavaria!
Just love this series….thank you
This has become my favorite series I'm watching right now.
OMG! This video is absolutely great!
The pure essence why I love this channel :)
Keep it up Alex! You are certainly one of my recent favorite youtubers. I love the fact that you are humorous and passionate about what you are doing!
Love this series don’t give up Alex!!!
Suuuper video Alex! Top editing!
Ad of course super topic for a pasta lover like me!
Loving this series.
Merci bien Alex, love to witness this journey.
I'm enjoying this series so much!
That cliffhanger!! hahahaha This series continues to amaze me Alex!
Hey, hey! Now I see why you liked my comment a few episodes back about how pasta drying was done in specific locations in Italy the past! Love the attention to detail you have Alex!
You definitely can't just dry pasta anywhere outdoors, you need specific conditions.
Alex, you are the textbook definition of patience and tenacity. Definitely not "impatient"
Checkout a Hot Box Incubator design, we use them for incubating snake eggs, add a couple more fans to increase your ventilation as needed. Might be a bit more effective than your modified dehydrator.
What a great episode! Amazing editing and music selection!
Definitely worth the wait I'm excited for the next video Alex!
I am loving the epic little twists at the end.
Brilliant video Alex! And yes, love the cliff hanger.
I'm so invested Alex!! 😂
I need to see that perfectly dried pasta!
I hope there are more mistakes to come. This is so entertaining and it is making my aerophonics experiments look easy.
This is so much fun to watch!
This is such a great series.
For drying beef-jerky you also try to control the humidity.. Depending on thickness you want different levels of humidity and temperature.. Having dynamic control of a extractor-fan based on current humidity does wonders.. Start the fan slowly at say 90% humidity and then increase fan-speed slowly as it climes up to 95% humidity.
Drying beef-jerky and some fruits too fast can create a shell that slows the drying of the center, but if the humidity is kept above a specific level you don't get that hard shell and allows much better control over the speed it's drying.
No clue if this is the same for pasta, but it did wonders for drying thicker pieces of jerkey.
Alex you’re an amazing content creator, chef, engineer and inspiration. Please never stop creating haha
This is such a good series, Alex. You're really outdone yourself this time.
Amazing series, thank you Alex! :)
Okay man, you and the channel Italia Squisita are definitely one cut above the rest. I can't imagine how much work it has taken so far. These pasta series are the most impactful watch I had this year, no joking.
Keep up the great work Alex !!
I can buy pretty much a truck load of dried pasta for what you spent so far but I still can't stop watching!
The production quality just keeps on going up!!!!!
You're one of my favorite maker channels. What better motivation for a project than food!
Su ch a nice guy to help you out, Hope you get it built, I love a good DIY story.
You say you are following science, you are science my friend. Like any good cook, trial and error, but you document it for us all to experience. Saint Alex! FYI...I still have cracks in my Monograno, so don't feel bad it's not parfait.
When you started talking about conecting the intake and outtake fans I had a slight “Apollo13” flash back… 😮😂😂❤
Same here! 😂😂😂
I bought your book Alex. Love it! I have to say it has a heavy Vancouver vibe about it. If you get the chance... visit... you will not be disappointed.
Once again you are challenging your engineers mind to get to the "why" behind any given result. Fried rice, meat balls, pizza, and now dried pasta; all approached from the mind set of cracking the code on your journey to excellences.
This what I love about following you on your different projects. Stay the course!
Impressive work
Bravo. Way to make an entertaining episode out of an otherwise only semi-interesting task. Bon courage cet semaine.
Love your energy Alex
At this point, i wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to build the machine from scratch. You know, with a heater element powerful enough, beefier fans (more like industrial fans, they can move a ton of air at full speed)
And also better electronics; i'd build a esp32 based board, on a custom PCB, with relays and mosfets to enable AC and DC loads (heater in AC with the relays, fans with the mosftets in DC).
All of this using esphome as software, so that you could have a pid controller rather than a bang controller : it would anticipate the heat rise/fall to not overshoot the wanted temperature.
And the best part is that you'd have nearly no code to do, only a configuration file to have it work.
As for graphs, you can have them go into home assistant/grafana automatically.
I would really enjoy building such a machine, but i have no use for it nor room :)
this is going to drive you crazy lol
excellent work, keep up. can't wait to watch next video
Your level of commitment here is unparalleled, congrats!
I feel like Alex got hit with a very polite “if it were easy, everyone would do it”
Arctics are a nice budget option for PCs especially as they have decent airflow and a nice noise profile so while they're not as silent as can be they won't annoy you, however, as I already recommended on a previous video, in this case Noctua IndustrialPPCs is where it's at. They're *not* silent, they're performant. With only two on the inflow you'll rather have trouble not blowing away the pasta, forget about the outflow the inflow fans are easily going to pull from that side, too: 3000RPM IndustrialPPCs have twice the airflow and more than seven times the static pressure of Arctics, very much worth the money.
Merci pour le video, tres bon !
I love how when I started watching this channel it was about recipes and foodhacks that I might try / have tried at home to a channel with recipes that I NEVER want to try but instead make me want to go to the store, buy a pack of premade pasta and think to myself: "You are going home with me, you somehow still affordable marvel of food science and engineering!"