Telling the Italians how to cook pasta was never going to go smoothly.
Metro – Nevertheless, that’s exactly what Professor Giorgio Parisi attempted to do.
If you’re not familiar with Professor Parisi’s work, he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2021 for ‘the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.’
And he reckons most folks can produce pasta more affordably by switching off the heat mid-way through the process and allowing the residual heat to finish the job.
‘After bringing the water to a boil, just throw in the pasta and wait 2 minutes,’ he wrote in a September post on Facebook that he recently re-shared.
‘Then you can turn off the gas, put the lid on and calculate one minute longer than the indicated cooking time.’
Sounds smart, right? Well, Italy was having none of it.
Michelin-starred chef Antonello Colonna hit back at this idea, saying it made the pasta rubbery. Adding it would never be served in high-quality restaurants such as his own.
