Most pasta, no matter the type, has the same basic ingredients but the shape, and how it holds it’s sauce, can affect the way your pasta dish tastes. The same way a Burgundy glass can enhance the enjoyment of your fine wine, rather than, say drinking it from a Champagne flute or a coffee mug, it just so happens that the fettuccine noodle shape is perfectly made for an alfredo sauce and elbow macaroni for a cheesy Velveeta sauce. So, if you’re a pasta fan with varying tastes, your pantry may be full noodles in all shapes and sizes, leaving no room for your onions or Ragu. Fortunately for you, MIT is working on a new type of noodle – one that changes shape while you cook it.
This breakthrough, first reported in Popular Science, is due to MIT’s Tangible Media Group. This big tech think tank is responsible other cutting edge innovations like shape-shifting clothing and a type of snakebot that may soon replace all your digital devices.
With Lining Yao in the lead, the Tangible Media Group has turned it’s innovative hand to pasta. Originally aiming for a self-folding dumpling made from adaptive materials, Yao told Popular Science, in an effort please her mother, their experiments lead them to the shape-shifting noodle.
Composed of compressed layers of cellulose (plant fiber) and gelatin (what gives JELL-O its trademark jiggle), these noodles begin their lives flat and change shape in boiling water. The cellulose and gelatin soak up the water in different amounts, causing the water laden layer to fold around the dryer side. By controlling the ratio between the two materials, the final form can be controlled.
The benefit of such a noodle isn’t just space saved in your pantry but could equal money saved at the grocery store. Presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, this pasta research, partially funded by Target stores, could cut down costs on packaging and delivery since flat noodles tend to take up less space than a pre-shaped one. Saving space and money? Let pasta lovers rejoice.
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