Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Answering those questions that make you go, um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Molly Bloom. Thank you for calling the Brains On Poetry Hotline. This is Molly. How can I help you? Oh, hi, Mark.
You were working on your meatless meatball recipe in the Labra kitchen when poetic inspiration struck? Hmm, and now you're up to your elbows in marinara so you dialed the poetry hotline with your nose? I mean, first of all, Mark, what a talent. But yes, I'm happy to help with any poetry needs. You want a poem about pasta? You got it. Just give me a few minutes to use my noodle. Get it? Mark?
Alrighty, pasta poetry. Pasta poetry. Oh, I think this calls for iambic pentameter. Okay, here's a start. Okay.
The time has come, and now I'm fully ready to sing to you the praises of spaghetti. At dinner time, piled high upon my plate, the tender noodles make me salivate. Once hard and brittle, pasta from the box becomes, um, becomes, oh, raviolis. I need to know how pasta goes from being all hard and crunchy to soft and noodley if I'm going to finish this masterpiece.
Eleanor was wondering this too. How does pasta turn from hard to tender? How does pasta turn from really hard to soft and tender is such a great question. My name is Julia Tertian. I write cookbooks and I teach cooking classes.
So pasta begins actually as pretty tender. It's usually made from flour and water or some type of flour, some type of grain and some type of liquid. But the dried pasta that most of us eat, spaghetti, macaroni, that kind of thing, it's usually just flour and water. So those two things get combined and they turn into a dough. Not unlike Play-Doh and it's soft and you can put it into different shapes.
And then they dry those shapes. That way the pasta can stay on our shelves for a really long time. We don't have to put it in the refrigerator. It's really sturdy. It doesn't go bad. But if we didn't include the water, it would just be a pile of flour. So we can't make the shapes. So we need the water to create the shapes.
We put it back in water. We put it in boiling water. And that boiling water basically rehydrates the dried dough. So it puts all the water back into it. So that way it goes from being really hard and not very good to being soft and delicious. And it allows the pasta to...
absorb whatever we want to put on it. So if we want to put like tomato sauce or pesto or butter and cheese, when the pasta is soft, it holds on to all that stuff a lot better. And it's just a lot easier to eat and easier to digest. I would say my favorite shape of pasta is spaghetti because I really love to twirl.
I love getting a few pieces of spaghetti in my fork and turning it and getting this big delicious bite of spaghetti. Um, uh,
Mmm, delicious. Pasta actually starts out as a dough made from flour, water, and sometimes egg or other ingredients. Once you have the dough, you can make it into noodles and cook it right away, or you can dry it out. Once it's dry, the pasta can be kept in the pantry without getting all icky and moldy until you're ready to cook it.
Okay, now I have all the inspiration I need. Let me just finish this stanza and then I'll head down to the Labrador kitchen and read it to Mark and obviously taste test the meatless meatballs. If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts.
And if you love all things pasta, check out the Smash Boom Best podcast where we have a whole episode all about noodles versus rice. Want to see our shows come to life? Head to YouTube where we've got awesome animated Brains On episodes. Search Brains On Universe on YouTube and subscribe. If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then, um...
Mark, did you like my joke? I said I was going to use my noodle. Get it? Come on, Mark. It's funny. Noodle. Is there a teen in your life who needs a little extra help learning how to manage their finances? Financially Inclined from Marketplace is a podcast you can trust to help Gen Z get serious about money.
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