Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on the new science-backed method for cooking pasta

If you’ve ever tried to cook pasta at home, you’ll know the struggle - one minute it’s undercooked and chewy, the next minute it has disintegrated into a sticky mush. If you’ve ever attempted to cook gluten-free pasta, your experience has probably been even worse.

So is there an idea way to cook pasta and does gluten-free pasta need different treatment? 

New research published in the journal Food Hydrocolloids used some of the most advanced research tools on the planet to look deep inside pasta as it cooks to find out. 

Using powerful beams of X-rays and neutrons from particle accelerator facilities usually reserved for studying materials, medicines and magnetic particle, they were able to figure out how to make better spaghetti. 

The researchers took regular and gluten-free pasta and used X-rays and neutrons to see how the pasta’s internal structure changed during cooking, specifically the behaviour of gluten and starch. 

They even used heavy water (which contains a different form of hydrogen) to make one ingredient invisible at a time. This way, they could isolate and study gluten and starch separately. 

In regular pasta, gluten forms a strong internal framework which holds everything in place even when the pasta is boiling and swelling. 

This is why: 

• Regular spaghetti stays firm.
• It doesn’t fall apart easily.
• It digests more slowly (lower glycaemic index).

In gluten-free pasta, there is no gluten scaffold. That means: 

• The starch granules swell and collapse more easily.
• The pasta can turn mushy faster.
• It breaks down more quickly in digestion.

Manufacturers try to replace gluten with processed starches, but the study showed these substitutes are much less stable, especially when overcooked. 

Most of us add salt to pasta water because it tastes better, but the research found it also strengthens pasta’s internal structure. 

The perfect amount of salt was found to be 7 grams (1.5 teaspoons) of salt per litre of water. 

Salt helps gluten hold its shape and protects the starch granules so the pasta stays firm. 

More salt is not better

When the researchers doubled the amount of salt, the pasta broke down faster. 

What did the scientists determine as the ideal cooking method for pasta? 

For regular pasta: 

Add 7 g of salt per litre of water and boil for 10 minutes 

For gluten-free pasta: 

Add 7 g of salt per litre and boil for 11 minutes 

Gluten-free pasta is simply less forgiving and even two extra minutes or too much salt can turn it into mush. 

This research isn’t just about perfecting dinner. Understanding how pasta breaks down at the microscopic level can help food scientists design better gluten-free pasta that: 

• Holds its shape better.
• Feels more like wheat pasta.
• Doesn’t spike blood sugar as quickly.

And more broadly, the study shows how cutting-edge scientific tools, normally used to study batteries, magnets and biological molecules are now being used to understand everyday foods. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
It'd be joining me now with her science study of
the week. Doctor Michelde can sink good morning, good morning.
I love this good news and bad news really on.
If you want to know how to cook past well.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Pasta is one of those staples. Food is so expensive
and pastor is one of those great fillers you can
bark out of food in Lots of people are now
going gluten free and they have gluten free pasta, which
I think tastes diabolical. But anyway, if you know you're
a sensitive, that great.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
But I don't know.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
If you're like me, you just sort of bug it
in and then I poke it every so often and
if it feels like it's not too sucky, that's my
pasta done. Often it's a disaster. Often I've ever cooked
it and it's like this sludgey, weird like everything sticks.

Speaker 4 (00:48):
Together slightly chelly, little undercooked little tasks.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
So somebody has saved us. New researchers published in the
Food General Food Hydrocolloids has done this in probably the
most expensive way ever. They have taken a particle accelerator,
and they have X rays and neutrons in a way
that like I'm a materials engineer and I have used
particle accelerators to look at like nanotubes. They have gone, yeah,

(01:15):
let's just throw some pesta in and see what happens.
So they have done it, and they haven't just done
it normally. They have done it and use something called
heavy water. Now, heavy water contains a different level of
hydrous it's not H two a rate, different type of hydrogen,
which makes one ingredient in the pasta invisible at a time.
It's a great way of controlling things, so they can
isolate when they're looking at it, the gluten and the

(01:37):
starch separately. Why have they done this. They wanted to
know how long you should cook spaghetti for perfectly, or
pasta for, and doing it in a really scientific way.
So when you're cooking pasta, what happens is gluten forms
if you've got normal pasta, and it creates this almost
like framework, like a ladder inside that holds everything in

(01:57):
place while the pasta is boiling and swelling. And that's
why regular spaghetti it does it. You can overcook regular
spaghetti and it still sort of holds structure. Those of
you've ever tried to cook with gluten free spaghetti, you
knows that if you go over the time and the
time isn't always what you think it is, it just
turns into this mush at the bottom of your pen.
And that's the end of it. And so what they

(02:19):
did is they did pasta at different levels of boiling
and different amounts of salt, and they basically found the
perfect recipe. So are you ready for this? Right down
here you go. If you're cooking pasta, and you're cooking
regular pasta, you have to add seven grams that is,
one and a half teaspoons of salt per liter of
water and boil for only ten minutes, no more. Take

(02:42):
it out after ten, which I thought was shot, but
actually I did it yesterday and it worked. If you
have gluten free pasta, again seven grams of salt per
liter of water, but boil for eleven minutes. That extra
minute matters, go for twelve goes to mush. So they
were really glear. You don't have much leeway. You really
have to put the timer on this. You have to
have your water boiling before you put the pasta in,

(03:03):
so you can do your timing, you're not measuring the
time for it to also come to the boil. And
they looked at the structure and they said that gluten
free pasta is just not forgiving at all. Extra salt
turned to mush, extra minute turned to mush. And because
it doesn't have that gluten, it doesn't have that ladder
in there, so there's no supporting structure and so that's why.
So basically they used a part of the col accelerator,

(03:25):
probably one of the most expensive machines on the planet
to do research with, and they three your pasta in there,
so you now don't have to have yucky, horrible pasta.

Speaker 4 (03:33):
They probably could have just gone to a professional chef
maybe asked the question.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
I would have published a paper like this. It was beautiful.
There were X rays, there's all these beautiful diagrams, and
like for me, I nerded out on it. For most people,
you don't need to know any of that. Eleven or
ten minutes, seven grams of salt per liter of water.

Speaker 4 (03:49):
Good to know. Thank you so much. Michelle will catch
up next week.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudken. Listen
live to use Talks. It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio