Reducing the cooking water-to-dried pasta ratio and environmental impact of pasta cooking

Abstract

BACKGROUND: During daily pasta cooking, the general consumer pays little attention to water and energy issues. The aims of this work were to measure the cooking quality of a standard format of dry pasta by varying the water-to-dried pasta ratio (WPR) in the range of 12 to 2 L/kg, and assess the environmental impact of pasta cooking. RESULTS: In the above range of WPR, the cooked pasta water uptake (1.3±0.1 g/g), cooking loss (3.7±0.9 %), and degree of starch gelatinization (11.2±0.8 %) resulted to be about constant. Also, the main Texture Analysis parameters (e.g., cooked pasta hardness at 30 and 90% deformation, and resilience) showed no statistically significant sensitivity to WPR. On the contrary, by reducing WPR from 12 to 2 L/kg, the specific electric energy consumption linearly decreased from 1.93 to 0.39 Wh/g, and carbon footprint and eutrophication potential of pasta cooking lessened by about 80% and 50%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: By using the environmentally sustainable pasta cooking procedure tested here, there would be no need to cook dry pasta in a large excess of water (i.e., 10 L/kg), as commonly suggested by the great majority of pasta manufacturers. However, such a great mitigation in the environmental impact of pasta cooking asks for novel more proper pasta cookers than those currently used.