Do You Need All That Water to Boil Pasta?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/dining/25curi.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

by robg • 17 years ago

48 21 17 years ago

nytimes.com

rokhayakebe2• 17 years ago

Everything should be done with moderation.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

Sounds like a cached thought; from your presence at HN, I assume you support:

Working extremely hard to compress a lifetime's earnings into a few years, e.g. from a startup.

Obsessing over a small number of hobbies, e.g. coding, to get unusually good at them.

The idea that people can improve themselves and their lot, and that results are linked with effort.

Everything in moderation - unless you want to be particularly good at it, perhaps.

[Edit: Damn, I've done it again. Voting you down because I disagree with you, even though raised a point I wanted to reply seriously to. Sorry].

rokhayakebe2• 17 years ago

Even if you wanted to be particularly good, you should still do it with moderation. Whenever someone becomes successful we hear the same story across all industries: "started with nothing, worked 100 hours a week, etc...". Sadly enough 1 in hundreds is an exception and not a rule. What you do not hear about is how bad it is for the ones who did not moderate their input (physical, emotional, financial). Subsequently years later market crashes, housing bubbles, increase in divorces etc...make the news. What is the source of these problems? Lack of moderation.

mindslight2• 17 years ago

Yes, _I_ do.

If _you_ don't know why you use the amount of water you do, try it with less until you see a difference. (This advice goes for pretty much everything)

ja2ke• 17 years ago

The article is about the author and two chefs trying a series of different configurations of water volume and heat to try and find out what is traditional and what is the actual breaking point for making it not taste as good or be too much work.

mindslight2• 17 years ago

The submitted link points to a one sentence blurb, and I figured it was just a lead-in to an environmental fluff piece. I suppose if it contains hard data, I'll go through the "nytimes hassle". (thanks)

patrickg-zill• 17 years ago

Interesting but the "savings" are minimal if you account for someone's time. A billion pounds of pasta taking an extra 6 minutes to prepare is 600 million hours, right? For a savings of $20 million a year?

aneesh2• 17 years ago

I'm always suspicious of analyses like that. Most people's earnings aren't that granular. If I make $X/hour, I don't automatically get $X/10 if you save me 6 minutes in the kitchen. Even if I do bill by the hour, it's practically impossible to bill for 6 minutes. Now consider that fact that many (most?) people don't even get paid by the hour, but by the week/month.

For me, the marginal income from an extra 6 minutes of time is zero.

showerst3• 17 years ago

No, the marginal income (in dollars) is the smallest amount of dollars that you'd take to work for someone else for those 6 minutes.

Said differently, if I'd offer you six bucks at dinner time to give up cooking and work for me and you'd say no, then your time must be worth at least six dollars, or $1/min, otherwise you'd have done it.

Since it's a nice, clean, hypothetical we get to ignore things like the silliness of working for only 6 minutes, or the time it takes to leave your kitchen.

How you actually get paid is irrelevant, the question is 'How much would you have to pay me right now to stop doing this and work.' That's the value of your time, because in an open economy, you could go work instead (subject to the caveats above). =)

Usually the question is asked in terms of what work you'd get paid most doing (which is often work you enjoy). Even If I get paid $10MM/yr in one lump sum from a trust fund, the value of my time per minute is still however much money I'd take in lieu of my time, or, in economic parlance, the 'second best alternative'.

Just because you can't practically bill for a fraction of your time doesn't make it value-less. That's a common fallacy, and (imho) a wasteful way to look at life.

In this case, I'd argue that in light of what you said above that I would have to pay you a LOT to get you to quit cooking and go do work, so the value of that chunk of time is actually quite high.

xiaoma• 17 years ago

How much of people's time is the ecosystem worth?

Environmental costs are very clearly not computed very efficiently in our current market. Instead, they're external costs that get passed on to the public as a whole while the individual incurring them benefits. Maybe it's not worth cooking pasta in this way, but the dollar value you assigned misses all the externalities involved.

tricky• 17 years ago

Does anyone else keep the pot covered? I find that I can bring the water to boil faster. Once it is boiling I drop the heat to low and still maintain the heat. There's a bit of an art to keeping it from boiling over, but I'm "sure" I use "way less" energy.

chadgeidel• 17 years ago

I boil the water with the pot covered, and then cook the pasta with the pot partially covered - maintaining just enough heat to keep the water boiling. It does take more effort, but it uses less energy (water evaporating from the surface cools the remaining water, putting a lid on the water minimizes this evaporation). I'm not sure about "way less" energy, but it usually shaves a few minutes off the cook time.

I wonder how fast you could cook pasta in a pressure-cooker?

vorace• 17 years ago

This is the key, and the argument that grandmotherly Italian women will make: it's essential to bring the water back to boiling as soon possible after you put the pasta in. Therefore you need a lot of water so the overall temperature doesn't drop (more important for fresh pasta than dry), and you need to cover the pot too so less heat will escape.

Italian grandmothers who make the best pasta would hate this article.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

I didn't know cooking pasta was this complicated. Directions:

1) Fill pan with hot water (your water heater already expended a ton of energy heating the water, why waste that? Or if you have an energy efficient water heater that only heats water when you turn the tap on, well that's still tons more efficient than a gas or electric stove top).

2) Put pan on the stove and add copious amounts of water.

3) Insert pasta and wait ~10 minutes, or to your personal texture preference.

4) Drain pasta and place on plate.

5) Eat pasta; a good pasta is usually tasty just on its own.

Retric• 17 years ago

I think hot water leaches more stuff from your pipes, but it's probably not a big deal. The value in using less water is it takes money and time to heat extra water.

PS: There are lots of ways you can make it cheaper or faster such as covering the pot while you wait for the water to boil. In the end it's not a big deal, but if it's saving you time and money why not?

Do You Need All That Water to Boil Pasta?

Related Stories