Around the world people are feeling the pinch of inflation and ever-increasing bills. Faced with rising energy prices Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi began to worry whether he and his countrymen would be able to continue enjoying all of their favorite pasta. According to Science Alert cooking a single 100-gram serving of pasta in a liter of boiling water requires one megajoule of energy which equates to an energy bill of about 15 cents on an electric stove (about nine cents on a gas stove). That may not seem like much but when you consider that nearly 17 million tons of pasta were produced in 2022 (according to the International Pasta Organization) — that’s more than 150 billion servings. And it should be pretty clear which country eats the most pasta.
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 Piazza Talk Lucca - Enzo & Celia | 2022-09-11 17:00:12 |  2,067 Views |
COOKING PASTA – SAVING ENERGY – TURNING OFF THE HEATING – DOES IT WORK? – DO NOT COOK PASTA
Parisi co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics believes he’s found the solution to this problem. In a 2022 Facebook post he shared a more energy-efficient way to cook pasta originally devised by Italian architect Alessandro Busiri Vici. Instead of leaving the stove on for the entire cooking time Vici and Parisi suggest bringing a pot of water to a boil adding pasta turning off the heat and covering the pot with a lid to trap the steam. This only uses enough power to boil the water and lets the residual heat finish the job. It makes perfect sense from a physics standpoint but to Italian chefs it’s a different matter entirely.
After bringing a pot of water to a boil Giorgio Parisi’s method involves adding the pasta waiting two minutes turning off the heat and covering the pot. He recommends cooking the pasta for one minute longer than the package instructs then removing the lid and draining it (leaving some water to finish cooking the pasta in a pot). Parisi estimates that this saves eight minutes of energy use compared to cooking the pasta all the way through. With Forbes reporting that Italians eat about 23.5 kilograms (just over 50 pounds) of pasta per person each year switching to this method could reduce each person’s carbon emissions by more than 13 kilograms (30 pounds) per year.
The key to cooking pasta this way is to keep a tight-fitting lid on the pot to trap in the residual heat left over from the water boiling. This is similar to the concept of carryover cooking that is often used when cooking meat. Carryover cooking involves removing the food from the heat source when it is still slightly undercooked and allowing the residual heat to finish the cooking process.
