Food writer Harold McGee, writing in the New York Times’ Curious Cook column, has a suggestion for saving energy: Put less water in the pot when you boil pasta.
McGee says the standard recipe for cooking pasta calls for 4 to 6 quarts of water per pound of pasta.
He says experimentation convinced him that – with a little additional stirring of the pasta to keep it from sticking – you can get by with 1.5 quarts. He calculates that Americans cook a billion pounds of pasta a year, and could save “several trillion” B.T.U.s of energy, worth perhaps $10 million to $20 million at today’s oil prices, if they used less water and spent less time bringing it to a boil.
McGee doesn’t dwell on the water savings, but saving 4 billion or so quarts of water a year is not insignificant. And that’s why you are reading about pasta boiling in blog devoted to water. Go to the Times for McGee’s recipe.
Posted in Water, Science and the Environment