[Sca-cooks] Re Pasta Experiment Update

[Barbara Benson]

On 6/14/05, Vladimir Armbruster <vladimir_armbruster at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Keep us informed as to the futures of this, this missive was a very
> interesting read!

Greetings,

OK, an update. I went out and purchased standard semolina based pasta
as opposed to the whole wheat and repeated my experiment. The results
were not exactly what I expected. I began with linguine of between 1/8
and 1/4 inch wide.

The results at 30 minutes were almost identical. More "tooth" than I
expected, but not too sticky. When I was about 10 - 15 minutes past
the 30 min mark I began seeing "free range gluten" and a skin forming
as opposed to this occurring between 1 and 1 1/2 hours with the whole
wheat. But the texture at 1 hr was very similar to the 1 hr mark with
the whole wheat, only not as grainy. In the whole wheat you could
definitely tell there were larger bits of wheat in there with the
grainy texture among the silky feeling pasta. With the regular pasta
it was just silky with some slimy just for fun.

If you had just come in after an hour and a half and looked in my pot
you would swear that I was cooking Japanese Udon style noodles. The
noodles had puffed up to 3 times the original size and were snowy
white. And this is where I had my big surprise. They were fall apart
tender, but not so much as the whole wheat noodles were. They had a
lovely silky feel in the mouth and the weight of long noodles would
make them fall apart if lifted.

Again I saved the pasta water and again it gelatanized. (sp?). One
thing I did differently was that I left all of the pasta in the
strainer over the sink and then went out to eat. I wanted to see what
it did when it cooled. I expected what my hubby affecionately calls
"block o' starch" but that is not what happened. After a couple of
hours I was still able to toss the noodles and they did not stick to
each other particularly badly. They did stick, but it was not
difficult to separate them. Of course the noodles that were on the
surface of the mound had hardened and dried out, but the rest were not
in bad shape.

The other difference was that I had my husband home to taste the
process. He did not mind the 30 minute version, said it was a bit soft
but no problem. He really did not like the 1 hour version. He has
major texture issues with the elbow macaroni that you typically get
with macaroni and cheese and he said it reminded him of that. But
surprisingly he did not mind the 1 1/2 hour version. I believe it got
beyond that point of slimy and that is what bothered the hubby.

So, that's the scoop. Next step is to figure out what to serve it with
and how that works.

Glad Tidings,
Serena da Riva