22 hours Ago By Alexander Nazaryan
A group of Italian physicists has dared to tinker with the traditional recipe for cacio e pepe, the Roman dish consisting of pasta, pecorino cheese and black pepper. In a new study, the scientists claim to have “scientifically optimised” the recipe by adding corn starch. Cacio e pepe , which means cheese and pepper, is a staple at Rome’s classic pasta joints, where chefs steeped in tradition may not look kindly at scientific lessons on culinary thermodynamics.
The authors were aware they were treading on sensitive ground. “I hope that eight Italian authors is enough,” said Ivan Di Terlizzi, a statistical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, who is originally from Puglia, Italy. The recipe may be simple, but getting it right is anything but.
The silky sauce comes together when pecorino cheese and ground peppercorns are mixed into the starch-heavy water drained from the cooked pasta. But as many cooks have discovered, the mixture of cheese and steaming pasta water can result in what the researchers called the “mozzarella phase.” Hot water causes whey proteins in the cheese to bend out of shape.
They then bond with each other or with casein, the other protein in cheese, causing clumps. How to make Bar Liberty's cacio e pepe pasta “It’s very hard to get the right balance,” said Fabrizio Olmeda, a statistical physicist who worked on the new study and is from Rome. The scientists heated variations of the sauce with a sous vide machine, which maintains a consistent water temperature.
They also built a wooden platform to hold the saucepan in place to ensure even heating. After heating, the sauce was poured into petri dishes that were then set on a cardboard box, the top of which had been replaced by a transparent film. A light bulb illuminated the petri dish from below.
The resulting arrangement made the cheese clumps stand out as dark blotches in photographs. The scientists tried the experiment at different temperatures and used different starch concentrations, and found that starch had much more of an influence on the consistency of the sauce. With enough starch, the entire process is “less sensitive to mistakes in temperature,” the paper said.
The scientists’ method does away with pasta water entirely; instead, store-bought corn starch is dissolved in plain water and then heated before the addition of cheese. Their optimised recipe, for “two hungry people,” calls for about two thirds of a cup of cheese and just shy of one teaspoon of starch. New York Times Cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper) pasta recipe How to cheat at making meatballs (plus 49 more perfect pasta recipes).
