Territzi and his fellow authors all live abroad and meet frequently for dinner. Cacio E Pepe is one of the traditional dishes that we love to make, and as physicists, they couldn’t help but want to learn more about the unique physics of the process. Territzi said. They have previously built focused on the separation that often occurs when cheese and water are mixed together. Cooking experiment.
When pasta is cooked in boiling water, the noodles release starch. Traditionally, chefs extract some of the water and starch solution. This is cooled to the appropriate temperature to prevent the cheese protein from aggregating to “denature” and mix with the cheese to make a sauce and add pepper. However, the authors point out that this is not the only factor that could lead to this horrifying “mozzarella phase.”
According to the author, when you try to mix cheese and water without starch, the lump becomes more pronounced. Water containing small starch will have fewer masses, like the water in which pasta is cooked. Then, when you mix the cheese with pasta water “risottata”, it is collected in a pot and heated, resulting in sufficient water evaporation and a high starch concentration. There are almost no chunks.
Effect of trisodium citrate on the stability of Cacio e Pepe sources.
Credit: G. Bartolucci et al. , 2025
Therefore, starch plays an important role in the process of creating Cacio e Pepe. The authors devised a series of experiments to scientifically investigate the phase behavior of water, starch and cheese mixed at various concentrations and different temperatures. They mainly used standard kitchen tools to allow home cooks to replicate the results (not all kitchens have Sue’s video machines). This allowed us to devise a phase diagram of what happens to the source as the state changes.
