The year is 2045. 35 percent of humanity's GDP is invested in improving pasta technology. The current record-setting pasta is being extruded through a bronze die which had been cast into a void produced by activated charcoal formed around transformer-derived non-euclidean topologies. A one-quarter-inch pasta has three square miles of surface area.
Extrusion is soooo 2032. Here in 2045 we direct nanobots to assemble our 3D-fractal pasta to atomic precision. Look for it under the brand name FractalDente™.
Not by 2045, at least not likely. The theory that for every thing you might want to manufacture, an infinite universe must contain a planet where it grows naturally is older than most people on hn, but I doubt that we'll find planet Raviolon that soon. How would you even start a serious SETP Project without a smelloscope? (scheduled for y3k)
> How would you even start a serious SETP Project without a smelloscope?
Obviously by using for the characteristic emission spectra of sodium, associated with pasta cooked in well-salted water. Unless of course you're looking for naturally uncooked pasta.
The most popular pasta meme, "Il Spaghettio", currently holds three of the Internet's 8000 congressional seats, and instances of it are commonly made from synthetic cruelty-free wheat, mainly for the purpose of worship.
Of course, the FSM holds the other 7997 seats, due to the rise of post-apocalyptic religious zealotry, combined with the use of directed microwave energy to systematically purge the old guard.
They said I was crazy when I stocked my panic room with 3d print stock (steel, of course) and emp-hardened colander designs. FOOLS! Who’s crazy now?
In 2054, multiple scandals erupted over influence from at least two clandestine NFT-holding polls. Improper influence led to reforms starting with RFC 451323, which first described the Memetic Transparency Protocol.
Massive Fire Raging at Pasta Factory in San Bixenino
March 20, 2045
A massive fire is raging out of control at the MegaFoodGrpInc Pasta factory on Foodstuffs Avenue this evening. Fire department officials report being hampered by the presence of eldritch inter-dimensional entities, as well as water supply problems related to non-functional fire hydrants in the area.
San Bixenino FD spokesbot XJa32l/14 reports that mutual aid has been called in from all over California, and fire-fighting operations are now in a defensive mode.
/14 adds "These new exotic materials they are using in foodstuff remodulation today burn longer and hotter than ever before. We've cautioned them about buying supplies from Nyarlathotep before, but they just don't listen."
No bot or firefighter injuries have been reported so far.
If you swap "pasta" with "keyboards", you'll get 2021 :D
Just the other day, I saw a prototype of a maglev-mounted keyboard. Vibration dampening is the trend these days, and going over the top (with questionable objective returns) is rather common.
I'm still waiting for the day the Space Cadet keyboard makes its long-overdue comeback. How am I supposed to use Emacs with a measly three modifier keys?
Wait until they manage to fabricate Gabriel's Horn [0] pasta, a shape with finite volume but infinite surface area. Pour a cup of pasta sauce in there and you are set.
Might take an new universe and infinitely thin sauce to do it though.
The year is 2083. The state of the art in pasta technology is to use artificial intelligences whose sole purpose is to produce functions that define a pasta’s shape as a function of time to produce variable surface area. Cheap three dimensional pasta is now eaten almost exclusively by basic income households.
So you are joking... but 3d printing allows us to manufacture new and different parts because 3d printing is ADDITIVE and "milling" is REDUCTIVE (removing?).
There is one technique where you have gell filled with aluminum particles. You then use lasers to heat up specific areas. It melts/fuses the aluminum and burns off the gell. In the end you have cast aluminum in any shape that is as hard as if you had milled it from a solid block.
Probably not many know of Marille (it's been basically forgotten by Italians, too), the first example - the first that I know of, at least - of "pasta shape deliberately designed to hold more sauce".
It was a sort of celebrity stunt by Voiello (quite a name in Italian Pasta, based in Neaples) who hired Giugiaro Design to create a new pasta type: https://www.italdesign.it/project/marille/
[Sadly, it did not work so well in the market: the point where the three "folds" met tended to remain undercooked, being way more thick than the rest].
This looks so cool. I notice that the pasta is symmetric in the “z” index dimension. As if it were a cylinder and the z was along the length of the cylinder. I think each pasta could be cut such that there is an arc making the thicker folds less long in that z direction that could make it cook more evenly! I could try to draw something if this needs further clarification. Manufacturing this might add many issues however!
In the end it was a commercial flop - albeit not critical: both Voiello and Giugiaro Design are still thriving in their respective fields.
I know someone who was working for Giugiaro at the time and allegedly the design studio had piles of that stuff lying around for whoever wanted to take home... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In a non-euclidean, vaguely Lovecraftesque way, you mean?
I never actually ate this stuff, but I am sure it was not that type of catastrophe when it was released to the public.
Planet Money just did a 25 minute podcast with the inventor on the business side of making the pasta, including getting the patent, manufacturing the die, and finding a pasta maker who would agree to produce a limited run:
Talking pasta shapes you can't get around Legendre's seminal Pasta by Design. It is the reference book when it comes to the mathematical analysis of your favourite noodle form.
It even has the invention of a new (back then) pasta shape.
Here is what the New York Times has to say about it:
"Mr. Legendre has even designed a new shape — ioli, named for his baby daughter — which looks like a spiral wrapped around itself, a tubelike Möbius strip."
One of their advertising points is using right angles and varying thicknesses to produce different textures... so while parts will be aldente others mushy I guess. Sounds a lot like marketing attempting to pass off a bad feature as a positive
"al dente" isn't really a quality _part_ of a piece of pasta can have. If the whole thing is al dente... that's just undercooked.
The entire appeal of cooking it that way is having the variance in texture in the same piece. It absolutely makes sense to design a pasta shape that optimizes for that. In fact a lot of pasta shapes already do, whether or not it was intentional.
This variance in texture is the main feature of traditional Chinese "knife-cut" noodles (刀削面 dāo-xiāo miàn) [0]. The chef cuts each noodle from a block of dough, letting it fall directly into hot water [1]. The noodle is fat (chewy) in the middle and tapered (soft) at the ends.
Have never tasted it in my life and it already looks delicious. I love thick, flat noodles. I undercook fettuccine and ensure they stick together but I wonder if that would provide the same experience.
Not really. I mean you want to cook it differently and slightly less if you're going to finish it in the sauce but that's a different thing.
Al dente is specifically undercooking it a bit because you prefer that texture over the fully cooked texture. If you pull it a little early then let it fully finish in the sauce it's not what I would consider al dente.
as an Italian, according to my personal understanding, "al dente" means the point where pasta is cooked but not yet overcooked (it starts becoming softer).
The meaning of cooked and overcooked depends a lot on personal taste, but generally al dente it's when it's still elastic but not mushy, like if you apply pressure with the border of a fork, it goes back to the original shape when you relieve the pressure and doesn't fall apart.
But that's simply the help visualize it and it's not even applicable to all kinds of pasta, practically we taste the pasta while it's still cooking and decide if it's all dente or not based on our experience.
Usually when pasta cooked the exact amount of time specified on the package it should be "al dente", but you shouldn't trust it and start tasting it a couple of minutes before that point.
Anyway not all pasta makes sense al dente, fresh pasta or stuffed pasta like ravioli or tortellini for example cannot (and shouldn't) be cooked al dente.
Easier ways of cooking pasta probably run into other issues. If you’re boiling the pasta it’s not hard to be there and pick a piece up, and really you can boil pasta in any vessel.
It’s different, from, say, a rice cooker, where all rice more or less gets cooked the same way with varying times, you can definitely screw up cooking rice in a pot, and you don’t, say, need to reserve rice water for anything. Also rice cookers keep rice warm for hours on end in a manner that doesn’t detract from the taste or dry it out, but I don’t know that that would work for pasta.
If you’re boiling the pasta it’s not hard to be there and pick a piece up
You say this but we're deep in a thread with terms like 'saucibility'. Surely if pasta science can address a problem that's also neatly solved by simply adding more sauce, it can spare a few mighty braincells on 'standing by a pot for two minutes frantically fishing out and tasting hot undercooked noodles'. Maybe every packet of pasta can come with a couple of noodles on teabag strings.
restaurants use pasta cookers[1], they use brands of pasta that they already know and don't need to taste it (also because it's a system that doesn't scale) they already know the cooking time.
Of course is not a science, sometimes it's not gonna be perfect, but on average it is
consumer models also exist, but are quite expensive.
My girlfriend bought a Cookeo[2] (it's an electric multi-cooker for different kinds of food, including pasta) and after a few failed attempts we have been happy of the results. It's quite cheap.
p.s. tasting pasta while cooking it at home is kind of a ritual here in Italy
So I may be navigating that Cookeo website wrong, but 150-250EUR is very expensive. I have a rice cooker that costs that much, but it's a high-end brand. You can get a pretty good mid-range rice cooker for $40 and a serviceable one meant for college students runs $20 USD.
Usually when pasta cooked the exact amount of time specified on the package it should be "al dente", but you shouldn't trust it and start tasting it a couple of minutes before that point.
Where did this idea come from?
I used to believe this too and did exactly as you suggest. But I always left it in longer.
So I started following the timing on the pack. It always works for me for normal dried pasta.
How much the pasta cooks after you drain it varies a lot depending on what you do to it after. For packaged dried pasta, I find the time on the box is only right if I rinse the pasta after draining it (or am doing a dish that involves adding a lot of room-temperature sauce); I'm too lazy to do that, so I subtract a minute if I'm using an already warm sauce.
To me the essential question is, do they taste it repeated times with the same spoon, double dipping it and getting their germs in there the way I see it on TV shows? Also, given your opening credentials, username noted with confusion.
Though it's not desired obviously, when testing pasta you're retrieving it from boiling water. Germs aren't a huge concern.
Beyond that, reusing spoons to taste test is more often done on fictional shows. Cooking shows usually either use different spoons or pour a bit on a saucer and drink from that.
Finally, ignoring all the other ways Afro-Italians exist, some Italian islands are technically part of Africa.
Yes, geologically they are part of the continent of Africa. I think Pantelleria is also part of Africa, but there's still some debate there as it's existence may predate Europe and Africa's breakup.
I like my veggies in curry to be cut in uneven sizes because of this reason. Some pieces are still a little hard and crunchy, some are soft, gravy like.
I think this is an underexplored idea. I often do it with onions, both putting some in early and putting some in very late. It's a cheap way to get "two" vegetables in your stir fry or chili or something for the effort of one.
One time I was cooking pasta, to mix with some left over, home made meat sauce in the fridge.
After I started the pasta, I realised there was no enough sauce. So I added fresh crushed tomatoes, which had only enough time to warm up, and not really cook much with the existing sauce.
I discovered that tomato having two flavours in the sauce, lets both flavours complement each other.
It seems like there are many possibilities, with more and less cooked things together.
It's common to see an ingredient "divided"* in recipes and used at different times. Though I wonder if there's a name for this specific technique. I do it too with garlic or bell peppers.
Hot take: I prefer eating pasta to eating sauce. A bit of sauce, sure, but “maximum saucibility” makes me think you should just grab a spoon and eat sauce.
I think it has more to do with the pasta taking in a lot of sauce, rather then it holding a lot of sauce. To make a good Italian pasta dish:
Take out the pasta a bit earlier out of the water and poor it into your sauce. The pasta will take in some sauce and get al-dente in the sauce. The pasta shouldn't bath in sauce but just be enough to give your pasta lots of flavor. Don't wash your pasta after cooking, because that will close its pores and hinder it from taking in sauce.
My Sicilian uncles prefer their pasta with a thinner sauce. My (German) grandma made very thick pasta sauce, and I was not a fan. (She also sweetened it, I found it gross. Sorry grandma. There were German dishes she made that I absolutely loved.)
I’m somewhere in between but my reaction was similar - I actually don’t prefer pasta that holds too much sauce. My penne is ... totally fine. But tastes obviously vary.
If you eat pasta with a spoon, you don't have to worry about getting enough sauce. And you also won't have the pasta fall off your fork because you didn't poke it hard enough. Just be aware that you may look uncultured.
Unsurprisingly the sea slug uses its ruffles for the same purpose of increasing surface area [0], albeit for photosynthesis instead of sauce carrying:
> This slug, like other Sacoglossa uses kleptoplasty, a process in which the slug absorbs chloroplasts from the algae it eats, and uses "stolen" cells to photosynthesize sugars. The ruffles of the lettuce sea slug increase the slug's surface area, allowing the cells to absorb more light.
This is counterintuitive to me -- if more surface area means more light absorbed, why are solar panels flat instead of ruffled? Or are they not as flat as they look?
I always thought that the "fun-shapes" macaroni had better mouth-feel than plain elbows. Apparently that is due to the right-angles and the term-of-art is "Toothsinkability".
Radiatore are currently my reigning favorite, especially for mac and cheese. This looks like it has less overall surface-area-to-volume than radiatore, but is better for holding thicker sauces vs the thin fin gaps in radiatore.
I've switched to fusilli from elbows for mac & cheese because it holds more sauce. But radiatore looks good for that too - I'll have to try and find some in my area.
The secret to good mac and cheese is to make it in a cookie sheet, so it is mostly sourdough cubes and crusty cheese, with just a bit of noodles underneath. Gemelli noodles. Also chopped soft green chilis and nutmeg. But you knew that part.
He didn't account for "storability": what happens 1) as the pasta sits in the collander awaiting saucification, and 2) what happens after a few days in the fridge.
Structural integrity is important for this condition, so I think the ruffles may help, but I think the main shape needs more corrugation to hold up under compression.
1. That's great, I'm happy for you that you cook so quickly. Sometimes the pasta sits in the collandar for a little while depending on how many things are being cooked at once, and how they are arranged.
2. That's great, I'm happy for you that you've dialed in your cooking to make exactly the amount you need. I like to have leftovers for several days.
As long as you follow the ancient proverb that melius abundare quam deficere, and the pasta is actually good, you'll never get it wrong - people will just clean up any surplus. A hungry person will easily eat 80g to 100g, so I typically make 100g per person.
I am firm believer that lettuce only exists to service a transportation vehicle for more delicious sauces. As such I enthusiastically support this effort to invent a better pasta transportation vehicle.
Ordered a box for their next batch. Shipping was $10 which kinda stings. Still cheaper than ordering a bunch of pasta from DoorDash.
Is there scientific proof that a bronze die makes better pasta? The myth is repeated here that it boosts 'sauceability'. Even if the die roughs up the pasta (why does only bronze do this?), I cannot imagine how this could make a difference after cooking.
It actually matters what shape of pasta you use for which food.
But even if it is technically better than the traditional models I think it has a low chance of going widespread enough to become the go-to pasta for any specific sauce though.
They immediately reminded me of tripes. We have a dish of tripes with paprika-cream sauce with pasta, usually gnocchi is used but these cascatelli would be interesting combination.
This is what the world needs, now more than ever - the eccentric inventor tilting at windmills. And the criteria for a good pasta looks perfect! Who can argue with toothsinkability?
one thing i keep wondering is that while we have several different pasta shapes (and invent new ones) there is pretty much only one pasta flavour (with a few minor variations)
meanwhile in china, most noodles there have the same spaghetti like shape, but they come in many different flavours, rice, wheat, potato, sweet potato, you name it
Chinese noodles also come in many shapes. When it comes to food and China compared to other cultures, one can always point out how China is like a continent and has a long culture. It’s like several times the size and age of many other places.
Chopstick are better suited for eating noodle shaped noodles. However in China there is a lot of variation on that form and also there are many shapes of filled pasta.
Where I used to live, there was a pizzeria that did a few things, like Pizza Pie [0], pizza with 'volcanic crust' [1][2], and they seem to be doing a pizza fondue [3] now
For whatever reason, this reminds me of that guy that salted a steak all weird and people lost their minds. This was right after Trump was elected and there were riots... general chaos in the world. Yet, some dude salting a steak egregiously was the big thing for a while.
I want this pasta shape to blow up just the same. I mean hell, spending 3 years on a new product is interesting and I hope the folks involved gain some sort of fulfillment from this. I won't lie though, the absurdity is what I want to see.
Maybe this says something about the human condition? To ignore chaos we try to find order or control somewhere, anywhere. Salt a steak unnecessarily, buy tons of toilet paper, redefine ownership with NFT and make a brand new pasta shape... because real problems are hard to deal with.
I mean, it wasn’t that much chaos, for most people. If you’re in the middle of a riot, sure, but otherwise? Trump’s election was dramatic but it was hardly show stopping.
I always wonder on what basis people conclude that the USA would have better COVID numbers than Europe if the Democrats had been in charge of the federal government.
I mean, we have better COVID numbers than Europe already. But I guess I mean better than that.
Regarding the general sentiment at the time. For the most part, if the average person never watched the news, they wouldn't know who was president at a given time. Hell, in the past 2 months, following CNN, it's hard to tell if Trump isn't still president. They talk about him so much and spin it that he still has so much influence, I have to consciously remember Biden is president.
I never thought of pasta as a gourmet delicacy. It's cheap and somewhat nourishing though full of carbs. This new shape sounds kind of interesting but it's $4.39 a pound in 5 pound bulk bags. Normal pasta is $1 a pound at Trader Joe so I'll stick to that.
