Scientists have created the ‘perfect’ recipe for fan-favourite pasta dish & their secret ingredient makes it ‘foolproof’
SCIENTISTS have created the perfect recipe for well-known pasta dish Cacio e pepe – and you can put it to the test yourself.
A small team of physicists discovered that the key to making “flawless” restaurant-quality Cacio e pepe lies in the starchiness of the pasta water.
“Despite its simple ingredient list, achieving the perfect texture and creaminess of the sauce can be challenging,” the team wrote in their study.
“A true Italian grandmother or a skilled home chef from Rome would never need a scientific recipe for Cacio e pepe, relying instead on instinct and years of experience.
“For everyone else, this guide offers a practical way to master the dish.”
The recipe includes just pasta (typically spaghetti), pecorino cheese, pepper and pasta water.
If the starch content of the water is less than 1% of the cheese weight, the sauce can separate or end up clumpy.
Without the right combination of hot, pasta water – which holds leftover starch from the pasta – the cheese can curdle.
This is what researchers have called the unwanted “mozzarella phase”.
But if the starch exceeds 4% of the cheese weight, the sauce will become stiff when it cools.
By adding varying amounts of cheese to a set amount of water and pasta at a constant heat, researchers found a clear link between starch and the ‘perfect’ sauce.
Cooking pasta that leaves behind lots of starch – which makes the water appear milky – will lend itself to a good Cacio e pepe.
But little starch will result in an “unpleasant and separated” sauce.
While the recipe famously only has three ingredients – or, four if you count the water – scientists have suggested including another, if you’re plagued by clumpy sauce.
If the pasta water is too clear, it has too little starch in it.
But the solution to this was to add a small amount of cornstarch to the water.
It’s this, scientists found, that enabled “a consistently flawless execution of this classic dish”.
The physicists behind the recipe are based at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems.
They worked alongside a colleague from Universitat de Barcelona and another from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.