The spiral, tube or shell shape only forms in the pot: Researchers present a process that allows flat noodles to be transformed into the popular 3D shapes while cooking. The pasta dough is equipped with ingenious groove patterns that cause the desired shape change during preparation. The so-called morphing pasta enables considerable savings in packaging, transport and storage costs. In addition to the food industry, the concept can also be used in technology, say the developers.
Anyone standing in front of the pasta shelf in the supermarket can easily tell the difference: The simply designed spaghetti is in very small bags – Spirelli pasta and co, on the other hand, require comparatively voluminous packaging. Due to the large worldwide consumption of complexly shaped pasta types, this difference is of considerable importance for environmental protection: The 3D noodles cause a comparatively large amount of plastic packaging waste and their space requirements for storage and transport are high, which is associated with increased energy consumption . Optimization options are therefore required.
“Lean” solutions in focus
Against this background, the researchers at the “Morphing Matter Lab” at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have now transferred their extensive experience in handling shape-changing materials to pasta dough. “We were also inspired by efforts by the furniture industry to save space by configuring products as flat as possible, to facilitate storage and to reduce the CO2 footprint associated with transport,” says the head of the working group Lining Yao. “So we decided to explore whether we could use the morphing matter technologies that we are working on to produce flat-packable pasta that would also enable more sustainability.”
The team made use of the natural changes that pasta makes when it is cooked: when water is absorbed, it expands and becomes soft. As a result, if the process does not run smoothly on a noodle, distortion can arise. This is exactly what the scientists achieve in their process by creating groove patterns in the pasta: The patterns punched into the dough slow down the softening in the respective area and thus ensure asymmetry. “The side with the grooves expands less than the smooth side, which causes the noodle to morph into a certain shape,” says co-author Teng Zhang of Syracuse University.
Grooves shape the pasta in the pot
By carefully planning where and how the grooves will be placed and what features they have, it is possible to control the shape the pasta assumes during cooking with astonishing precision, the researchers report. They were able to show how the characteristics of the grooves, including the side angle, gap, width, and depth, determine how the pasta transforms into various 3D shapes. The process works with both dried and fresh dough and apparently no great effort is required to produce it: the pasta can easily be given the groove structures using inexpensive methods such as punching or pouring into molds, say the scientists.
They have already used their technique to make different versions of morphing pasta from ordinary pasta dough. The special grooves led to the creation of spiral shapes, tube-like structures or shell structures that correspond to different types of pasta. “The morphed noodles look and feel in the mouth like conventional three-dimensional pasta types,” reports first author Ye Tao of a special tasting that also showed the space-saving potential of morphing pasta: the scientist put the flat noodles in Took her backpack on a hike and then got her into shape with a camping stove.
Tao and her colleagues now hope to use the concept to make a contribution to avoiding plastic waste. In addition, a reduction in the carbon footprint in the food sector seems possible through lower storage and transport costs. Co-author Wen Wang of Carnegie Mellon University also highlights the broader potential of the grooving technique. Because it can be used to control the shape of any swellable material, as the team also made clear in the context of the study. “The process could be used, for example, in soft robotics and in medical technology,” says Wang.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University, Article: Science Advances, doi: 10.1126 / sciadv.abf4098