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Material physics: Particle accelerators reveal the secret of perfectly cooked spaghetti
6.12.2025
Translation: machine translated
How much salt do you need? How many minutes of cooking time? To find the best scientific answer, researchers have decoded the inner structure of pasta - with the help of X-rays and high-energy neutrons.
How much salt do you need for the perfect pasta? How long does everything need to cook? And what role does gluten play? An international research team has answered these questions with experiments on particle accelerators. The scientists bombarded spaghetti with X-rays and high-energy neutrons and thus obtained information on the internal structure and cooking behaviour of the pasta.
Most people are satisfied with experience, feeling or a glance at the packaging when it comes to cooking pasta. Not so the researchers led by Italian materials physicist Andrea Scotti from Lund University in Sweden. They wanted to clarify down to the microscopic detail what happens in the pot - and what changes, for example, if you use a gluten-free alternative instead of pasta made from the usual durum wheat.
To do this, they first bombarded commercially available spaghetti - raw and after cooking at different salt concentrations and cooking times - with X-rays at a particle accelerator in England. Based on the scattered radiation, they were able to deduce the respective microstructure of the pasta and how it changes during cooking.
The scientists also experimented at a neutron source in France. To do this, they prepared the pasta with different mixtures of normal and so-called heavy water; it absorbs fewer neutrons and is therefore less visible to them.
In this way, the researchers were able to specifically highlight different structures in the pasta: on the one hand the starch and on the other the gluten protein, which forms a stabilising framework in the wheat dough. This revealed the precise influence of starch and gluten on the cooking process.
The result: gluten-free pasta is less forgiving of cooking errors than pasta made from normal durum wheat dough. If you cook it just a little too long or use too much salt, the artificially modified starch, which is supposed to replace the gluten, quickly loses its grip. The spaghetti becomes mushy.
With regular durum wheat pasta, a little salt during cooking helps to preserve crystalline areas in the starch granules. In addition, the network of gluten in the salt water can trap the starch for longer. This means that the pasta still tastes good even if you accidentally leave it in the pan a little longer. But here too, too much salt can be harmful. The researchers want to investigate its exact influence in further experiments.
So what is the ideal amount of salt? Seven grammes per litre, the researchers write. In addition, ten minutes of cooking time provided the best result with conventional spaghetti.
In addition to specific cooking instructions, the experts hope that their research will contribute to better food design. For gluten-free alternatives in particular, the methods could potentially be used to develop products that come even closer to their traditional role model.
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Original article on Spektrum.de
Header image: Shutterstock / Jakub Snabl
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