pasta

Pasta, the milled semolina of Triticum durum, appears in two recipes. The carbonara takes 175 g of spaghetti, cooked in lightly salted water for about 9 minutes to just before al dente, with a mug of the water saved. The hot pasta is tossed into the pan with the lamb and its fat and a splash of that water, then the egg-and-cheese mix goes in, tossed without stopping until the sauce turns glossy and creamy, never scrambled. The harrak osbao takes 80 g of elbows, stirred into the lentils once they are tender and cooked 8 to 10 minutes.

The Journal's note on carbonara puts numbers on that sequence. In 2020 two food microbiologists in Brazil, Lopes and Tondo, instrumented the dish and recorded drained pasta at 86.0 degrees and a pan already below 60 four and a half minutes after the yolk mixture went in. The cook is falling through a window, not holding a temperature, and yolk has no single setting point: the literature runs from 62 to 65 degrees for a protein unfolding to 75 for a solid gel. The note also tests the ladle of pasta water. Ordinary pasta water holds near half a per cent starch, against the two to three per cent of the cheese mass a paper on cacio e pepe called for, and cooking loss stayed constant as water fell from twelve litres per kilo to two.