This is Why Drying Pasta At Home IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
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Salut,
Alex
I have learned so much about how to make dry pasta at home. The most important lesson is that you should go to the store and buy a quality dry pasta. Thank you Alex.
yea thats the real takeaway here, dried pasta is so cheap it makes no sense to make your own while fresh pasta on the other hand is not that cheap because it needs to be cooled along the entire supply chain and it also happens to be easier to make fresh pasta at home.
It’s the journey that’s important here, but dried pasta is definitely one thing that lends itself to industrial production with no loss in quality compared to diy methods
@@HNedel well said.
True, go and buy it in the shop, but do it with respect and understanding of the incredible complexity of the process and quality of the product!
@@Pixelplanet5 the real lesson is - certain pastas are better for certain dishes… Not fresh or dry pasta is perfect for every pasta dish.
I love how this series exemplifies that we learn by doing, not by succeeding. Success is the conclusion of learning, experience is knowledge.
The amount of commitment that this man is putting to making dry pasta is inspiring, keep going you will do it!
The amount of commitment he puts into everything he makes is impressive.
If you rewind a few episodes back you will see that it is all about perfecting his carbonara.
Watch his pizza series lol
Well duh. He's an engineer with a huge love for food. Why do you think he's always so scientific in each episode?
It makes for super entertaining vids because that is real life. lol. We all deal with hiccups. I love Alex's way of his workaround too. So much fun. Guy is an absolute treat to watch his journey from A to Z.
Also Alex, you need to increase the humidity as the pasta dries so that the difference between the inside and outside water content disappears.
Inserting a wet sponge during the rest times would probably do the trick
Yup. Just like charcuterie. If the outside dries too quickly the inside can't get its moisture out...
Maybe you could do that with a cup of water? I know some people do that when they are growing.... Ummm.. lettuce. Yes lettuce. Nothing else. 😛 Like literally just put cup of water inside the drier. 🙂 Edit: oh right i forgot to say that you wanna put it near fan(but not too close because you dont wanna short the fan. 🙂
Maybe I'm not understanding the problem here, but it feels like that futurama episode where they keep turning on the heater and the refigerator to find the perfect temperature
If the dryer is too fast and agressive, wouldn't drying it just on the counter be better? just.. leave them be for a while? Legit question. I've done plenty of biltong just hanging them in the kitchen
@@CarlosBunn I guess it would just rot if you leave it like that
Alex, look into DIY PCB reflow ovens. PCB reflow ovens solve a very similar problem to pasta drying. They have to follow specific heat/time diagrams to heat and cool solder paste correctly. People make their own reflow ovens out of toaster ovens. There are Arduino projects you can look at and even several kits you can buy to convert a toaster oven into a PCB reflow oven. The kit I have comes with extra heating elements and fans, which helps to heat up faster, distribute the heat more evenly, and cool down faster if needed.
this is actually the most Alex solution to dried pasta I've ever seen
Those were exactly my thoughts as well!
Speaking about electronics, the heat-dry diagram he was showing, remined me a lot of a PWM signal, LOL
In this thread: a bunch of meerkating control engineers
That’s the first thing that came to my mind as well.
"Now we set pasta to dry over 15 seconds at 265 degrees Celsius... wait a minute"
We own the same type of commercial grade pasta machine from Italy since 2 years now. We just dry them in the open atmosphere of our kitchen at drying racks. It usually takes more or less 2 days, but results are satisfiying.
Greetings from Austria.
Exactly, I think he’s doing too much lol. Just put the pasta on a baking sheet on a cooling rack with a tented dry towel over top
If it’s how they used to do it for (literally) thousands of years then they were obviously doing something right.
Alex's various series should be used in science classes for kids. It shows the value of testing, failure, and perseverance. Good stuff!
Paolo said “high temp and low humidity for drying zones, low temp high humidity for resting zones”. Shouldn’t you increase the humidity too during the resting part? Not just disable the fan and let it cool down… right?
Yup, that was my first reaction to his plan. My second was wondering if his dehydrator even can support proper airflow for what he wants, since it's designed to do something completely different.
The relative humidity in the dehydrator could increase simply by cooling the air that's already in there. The absolute humidity wouldn't change much with the temp, but, depending on how much the temperature change is, the air in the machine could be relatively high humidity during the cool phase. It all depends on the absolute humidity and the temperature delta.
I'm pretty sure proper air circulation is his biggest problem currently.
I think that during the resting period there will still be water vapor leaving the pasta from residual heat and the moisture level between the pasta and the drying chamber trying to reach equilibrium. The humidity wont vacate the area quickly during the resting phase. So my hypothesis is the resting phase will sort of auto regulate to a higher humidity in that small closed environment.
@@jonathankidwell6889 Unfortunately, most of the humidity leaves the chamber, because the fan is sucking the air out as part of the dehydration process. You need to have extra moisture added to the air to allow it to properly circulate and allow the outside of the pasta to moisten and get closer to equilibrium with the core. So long as it isn't wetter than the core, it'll keep drawing the moisture out of it in repeated cycles. That's why it's done the way that it is.
@@KainYusanagi How do you think that would work? E.g. should he simply open the dryer every 20 minutes and spray the pasta with a flower water spray bottle?
The papers you displayed look quite similar to the ones I studied during my phD on wood kiln drying. And the process was similar with kaolin drying for porcelain. So I'm going to take a guess and offer something that could work :
- Slow rise to the necessary temperature, with a high humidity environment, to get the pasta to temperature without drying them.
- Then a slow drying process, with the on/off thingy, while mainly controlling the humidity, but not moving the temperature (you lower the humidity to draw moisture out of the pasta).
- And then, at least a fifth of the overall process duration in equilibrium time : temperature and humidity at the level you need them for the pasta to be at 12%, for everything to equalize.
Wait for the temperature to go down if it's higher than 40°C, then open.
Now, the issue is to determine what the equivalent to the Keylswerth graph is for pasta. (It's a diagram that everyone uses in wood sciences, made in the 1920s, that shows what will ultimately be the moisture content of wood according to air humidity and temperature). So that you know what your temperature goal is, and how to move the moisture content in the air.
Also ... Well, you need a kiln in which you can control airflow, humidity, and temperature, and you'll probably have to run it with a time based program (because with wood, we can stick moisture content readers into the timber, but I don't think that's possible for pasta)
I can probably show you who to call for a small 1cubic meter one, but that's probably upright of 60k€ so ... Good luck :D
What about a PCB reflow oven?
@@gevorgvanarmenie9788 seems like a good fit, except it neglects the humidity variable.
It's a pretty common mass transfer problem, where the rate of internal diffusion needs to be matched up to the rate of evaporative transport away from the surface.
This comes up in wood gasification as well as wood drying, clay products drying and firing, and presumably in pharmaceuticals manufacture, just off the top of my head...
As you say, you need to control for time, temperature, humidity in the atmosphere surrounding the product, and the gas/air flow rate, especially as it relates to the surface conditions on the pieces to be dried.
@@gevorgvanarmenie9788 Do those operate in the 25 - 60 C temperature range, and are they made to control water vapor condensation with the resulting potential for corrosion?
Food grade materials of construction would also be a good idea...
@@CCNorse no really :) equipment to some kind of atomisier that disperse the water into fine droplets which then raise the air humidity. Jus a question of creativity
Drying pasta at home is covered in depth by Marc Vetrie in his book Mastering Pasta. The easiest way is putting it in the fridge on a mesh tray for a day or two, works great. For a more effective solution he uses a small humidifier set up under a milk crate, he puts the pasta on a tray on top and covers the whole thing with a cardboard box. He sets the humidity to about 75% and keeps the heat about 23 degrees C. Takes about 3 days to dry. Thank you Alex for a fantastic explanation of the mechanics of drying pasta. Wonderful video series, keep up the great work.
Exactement😅
Elastic = linear stiffness with no residual deformation
Plastic = non linear stiffness with residual deformation
I love when 'cooking shows' like this are actually teaching material science and mechanical engineering, proving that learning complex topics can be enjoyable.
I really like when you say : "what could possibly go wrong ?!?!!"
I can already feel the next video vibe 😅
Remind me the customized portable gas stove to stir fry 🤣👍
time for an additional series just for the customized dehydrator.
I believe the last time Alex asked "what could possibly go wrong?" there was a fire.
You need to add humidity during the resting time. Look at the science behind drying wood, which is exactly the same.
After the drying period the center is wet the outside is dry. When the water evaporates the pasta shrinks and if the outside is shrinking faster then the inside it will become brittle. Since the outside dries so much faster then the core, adding moisture to the outside won't really affect the drying time of the core. Also as long as the outside isn't becoming wetter then the core it will still be drawing moisture away from the core since the log as a whole is trying to reach equilibrium. This makes the drying and more importantly the shrinking more uniform and thus less cracking.
It's a two-fold problem...
You need a relatively low humidity in the drying air such that it can accept the evaporation from the surface, but you need to control the rate of evaporation to more closely match the internal rate of diffusion of the water molecules in the material being dried, which calls for a bit higher humidity.
The added complication here being that if the surface dries too quickly, you get a physical - and possibly chemical - change in the material being dried, with a loss of product quality.
Alex, the ability to recover from deformations is elasticity while the lack of recovery is plasticity. It seems that the elastic moduli go up with drying. The perceived hardness and softness partially depend on the elastic moduli as it determines 'stiffness'. But the main determinants of hardness/softness would it be about different structural properties. I think the more important property is that the tensile stress goes down too, leading to easier failures (cracks). Something you might want to think about is ductility and malleability. These properties would define how well the pasta deforms instead of cracking when the internal stresses are generated. Circumferential stress/strain and pressure vessel equations could give you some insight too. I've worked on cylindrical biomaterials and I'm getting flashbacks lol.
And if you want to visualize air motion, look into 'smoke studies'
He has a degree in engineering, fairly sure he just wanted to joke
Why are you suggesting Alex to start smoking sigarets?
I'd like to say his problem may be more akin to drying coatings on substrates. As the pasta dries, a thin, brittle later is being formed, but as the rest of the pasta dries (towards the center), there is strain mismatch which leads to cracking. I'd probably gander that that is why the factories have a high humidity resting time, so they can resaturate that dried outer layer (to make it elastic) to reduce/eliminate the amount of large cracking that would occur otherwise.
The more I see your intro segments, the production style, the more I realize how much the production quality has improved over the years. The writing, the structure, everything about it is excellent and would genuinely pass on TV in terms of quality. A proper product of media. And also very educational. I finally see the secrets of dried pasta.
As Italian I love these series!
As a curious minded I love you, your consistency and your method. You remind me of a scientist!
I want you to remember one phrase that I heard from another video of yours: the most important ability when you’re making anything is not having long pointy teeth to bite into success, it’s more like having a tougher skin to resist consistence repetitive failure”.
I'm sure Alex knows, but the definitions "plastic" and "elastic" refer more to how solid object deform to a certain amount of force. To a limit, every solid object will deform elastically (as in it will bounce back and return to its original shape) but when that limit is surpassed it will deform plastically (as in it will keep its deformed shape). Easiest example of this would be a spring.
There is also some notions of how hard materials tends to have a very little plastic deformation capability and, if deformed beyond, tends to failure (cracks). Problem that is solved through heating cycles at precise temperatures. Young modulus and heat treatments in a nutshell :D (even though the main driver for hardness here is the water content and distribution, where in metals, you look for cristaline structures)
This channel is simply beautiful. The passion for food and the desire to learn is the driving force. Goes really in depth into certain subjects. My favorite channel on youtube!
I'm italian. And this whole pasta series is so inspiring! You are achieving incredible results!
I live in a desert climate (Arizona). I leave my pasta to air dry for a few days. No problems with breakage or deformity. Maybe because the drying process is so gradual.
Egg pasta?
@@gevorgvanarmenie9788 My nonna for sure would dry egg pasta just in the air with maybe some fans and summer heat in northern California. I guess they didn't worry about salmonella then. It was typically 100f/38C in summer so I suppose it dried pretty fast.
@@gregmuon I guess salmonella needs a good amount of moisture to survive. Even if it can survive the drying, it can't survive 7-10 minutes in boiling water.
@@gregmuon that’s fine, but Alex is trying to create semolina dry pasta which has no eggs.
Alex will be so upset when he reads this.
The technique my family uses is to cover the pasta in centimeters of very coarse salt baked in the oven. Everything hermetically sealed. Leave it 4 to 7 days.
I'd love to learn more about drying pasta in salt. Can you give more details? Does the resulting pasta need rinsing or taste salty? Thanks!
Alex, that is a blower fan that center spot pulls air in and is pushed out the perimeter of the fan. You can see the grill when you shot the close up inside the dryer. Personally I think its already a good design since youre sucking air in from single point and then distributing it at the perimeter so you should not get a small hot spot. However that fan does seem to not be doing its job so maybe that should be fixed before you put in a new fan.
At this point he probably has already hacked it up with this own fan, but I agree -- it's clearly a blower fan that's distributing from the edges
I think also the fan might actually not be broken at all. For a normal fan the input air velocity is slower than the output, because the output is directed while the input sucks air from all around. Idk theres probably a name for this phenomena but basically you feel less wind behind a fan then in front of it even though the volume of air going in is the same going out. This blower fan is of course different as the output is directed to the perimiter but the effect could still be taking place making it appear weaker then it actually is
True, but considering that I think the 'good' pasta was the ones coming from the edges, (I was confused on why he thought the center was good when the first test piece was from the edge) the fan speed might still be too low. At the very least, *something* is still wrong.
Although, yeah, that was pretty clearly the intake lol.
I can't believe how excited, stressed and pumped I am to finally find out when/how some guy in Paris manages to try a noodle
Alex, I am expecting an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller solution to handle the fan speeds, temps, and power duty cycle. Lets see that engineer in you! Perhaps with hair dryers rather than the dehydrator. All controlled by a phone app over wifi. That would be awesome.
mans last words "What could possibly go wrong"
I love all your episodes Alex, please make more! It is so informative for people like me, the budding home chef.
Time temp and humidity control. A pasta humidor is in order😉
3:40 Yes, yes it does. I get excited every time I hear that shaking or see that fridge!
Question: Did they have humidity and temperature controls when dry pasta was invented?
Sort of. Naples had a very good climate for pasta drying naturally. So humidity and temperature controls were you figuring out what locations had the right climate for pasta drying and then to do your drying there. Is it the fine tuned tempature controls that we have now? Of course not, but it's not nothing.
TRADITOINALLY, you just leave them out to dry at room temp. NEVER had any issues drying any of my pastas on drying racks or noodle hangers, in the open without using a dehydrator. Been doing it for decades and never had the issues he is having using a machine to do it.
@@Tom-yc8jv Are you making egg pasta?
My grandmother had manual control of humidity. She was moving the pasta from sunny windy porch to back shaded and humid room at first several times a day, then about once a day. She would dry the pasta in about a week.
The drier is needed because we are talking about industrial processes. In a factory there is the need to dry a huge amount of pasta in little time to satisfy the market (and you can obtain the same results every time and all year around). Traditionally pasta was left to dry naturally and most of the countries that face the Mediterranean have a climate that is naturally good for drying pasta. The same principle applies to cured meats like prosciutto.
(7:20) “Off We Go!” … What a chat chat phrase. Love it!
This problem reminds me a bit of the Alton Brown "dehydrator" he used in the jerky episode of good eats. Because he didn't want the heat a residential grade dehydrator provided, he used a box fan and two furnace filters
As an addendum, my thought on a diy solution to this is twofold, a plastic tote to act as a circulation chamber, then use something like a hair dryer to provide a heated air flow, supplementing with other air mover apparatus to increase the flow rate where needed. Precise solution? Hell no. Providing the ability of heat toggle and flow rate where needed? Yep.
This is SUCH a cool explanation of pasta drying, Alex! As always you hit the perfect balance of technical, understandable, and thoroughly entertaining! Big fan, always!!!
14:40 the fan is not blowing over the pasta, the way in which fans work is accelerating air molecules at the intake and shooting them away in a highly directed manner.
This results in high speeds at the exit, which can then push the surrounding air around as well.
The air at the intake is relatively static and flows in uniformly to fill the gaps, where the prior air molecules have been scooped away.
In a short answer:
The intake sucks at blowing, but the exit is pretty good at su... I mean blowing.
I think it might even be a good thing, since blowing air over the pasta would take away the layer of water vapor around the pasta faster, which will dry out the surface faster and leading to stresses.
But i might also be wrong on that one, but we'll see in the next video 😅
Yeah turn that fan around
Alex slowly descending into madness during every series is my second favorite part besides the process.
Throughout this whole journey, I couldn't help but think that little old Nonna isn't worried about regulating her drying and resting cycles. Unless you are trying to pump out as much pasta as possible in as short a time as possible, I'm pretty sure a cool dry place and some patience will do your pasta wonders. But please; never stop overcomplicating things you beautiful man
Natural sun drying and day/night cycle seem to fit some process requirements :)
I assume its for content sake, but I agree, wouldnt air drying be the simplest solution? those are the kinds of things that DIY have the time to allow that can make home made better than mass manufactured.
Of course I assume the whole series is basically done, and we are just waiting on the editing, will be interesting if he ultimately arrives at air drying as the final revelation.
I've been watching Alex for years now, but I'll only maybe see three videos a year. Seeing his videos is like dropping in on an old friend!
Could you maybe do an in depth tutorial on how to do the Luciano carbonara, your last video on the carbonara was truly mesmerising and gave a lot of insight but I still don’t know the ins and outs of how to recreate it.
The steps were very straightforward. if you can't make it based on that video you are honestly hopeless. Sorry if that sounds mean.
Maybe you can state the problems you have so we can work this out?
I think it was well explained in the video
Yea, if you can share what you are struggling with, I’m sure ppl will help you
@@VinhNguyen-wk5qz yeah its really only small problems, I can make a very good carbonara. It was a great video and it helped me to improve a lot, by my comment I wasn’t trying to take anything away from the video. My problems mainly lie with heating the mixture over the double boiler and physically making the carbonara cream. If possible could one of you go through it in detail
I am Italian and I am watching a French guy explaining me pasta science… this is beautiful work!!!!
"Plastic" just means you end up with permanent deformations when you apply forces to the body. "Elastic" just means that it will recover its "reference state" after the externally applied forces are removed. It says nothing inherently about strain-ranges (i.e. "how much stuff actually deforms") at which these phenomena are looked at. In this case the elastic state is clearly a small strain regime, while the plastic state undergoes finite ("large") strain deformation (source: years of teaching continuum mechanics at uni)
he's moreso talking about how most common plastics today will deform then recover the deformation fairly easily but in pasta that means the hardened state that doesn't deform; in short, a joke.
@@KainYusanagi Yep, Alex is a degreed engineer, he just didn't like the career options all that much and found a way to earn his living while having more fun.
@@KainYusanagi I know, I was trying to explain why the "joke" didn't really work. "elastic" isn't making any statements about how easy something is to deform. sorry, professional-degeneration ;)
@@chemech he says in a video that he is a radio/telecommunications engineer, he probaly has no training in continuum mechanics, the same as I don't have any training in network-theory etc.
@@amarug ...Have you never fiddled with an elastic band?
Alex I noticed big grains on your extruded pasta and some air bubbles. I think vacuum during dough mixing and extrusion may solve your problems since Mr. Felicetti also mentioned that they are using vacuum during mixing to remove air bubbles.
This reminds me of the science of roasting coffee. The diagrams look similar and there is a lot of focus on the rate of rise (ROR) so lots of looking at multi line time series charts. You have to account for the steam too as once the first crack happens the heat from the large amount of steam being released changes the thermal energy inside the roaster. So you have to know beforehand when it will happen and adjust the heat and fan before it even happens or else it gets away from you.
Scott Rao is the authority on this, if you check out his books it's super interesting from the science end!
We keep coming up with analogous real-world applications of the mass transfer principles of drying!
This is one of those videos which remind me of how brilliant RUclips was when it first started. Absolutely brilliant work. Well done. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
I'm far from a chemistrist, but I was wondering if the temperature wasn't just too high. At 60 degrees, protein reacts and solidifies like an egg. It loses it's smoothness and elasticy, so it breaks easily. So taking the temp a big down may or may not help.
The names plastic and elastic are terms of Materials Science. Plastic referring in this case to the ''soft''' state they are in, malleable, without strength; elastic must mean the elastic regimen in which they have enough strength no to break and they relief that stress by ''bending'' like a elastic band (check a deformation x stress plot of a material). really like your channel and your passion for food
Alex, maybe try to dry pasta in different ways like sticking it in the fridge where the air is dry but cold so it would slowly dry over a longer period of time or leaving it to air dry outside to see the differences in results?
it is crazy how involved people in the comments are with alex' project. Full explanations of what could work and how. This community is amazing
Hi Alex, I stumbled upon this series recently, loving it so far. I'm curious why you're (still) using a food dehydrator? It seems to me that the professional factories are using the high temperature > low temperature cycles to rapidly get dried pasta, so they can quickly churn it out. I'm wondering if a more simple solution for the home pasta drier can be found in leaving the pasta to dry at room temperature. Surely that would combine the drying > resting cycles into one, where the water can evaporate, but it's not happening so fast that water from the inside can't move to the outside. Wishing you the best of luck either way
I'm wondering whether this is how they used go dry pasta before the industrialisation of it
I love how committed you are. It's been a pleasure to watch you dive into the science, speak with experts, and your willingness to modify your existing equipment.
This is almost exactly like drying wood. You just have to do it really slowly. I bet you can do it without the pulsing if you just do it over a long period of time.
That's the traditional method, used in Italy before commercial major mass production became a thing.
@@chemech Always trust traditional over industrial.
@@moonskyrocket tradition blows if its unchallenged. leeches and witch burning are just two examples that come to mind
Ooooh what could possibly go wrong… keep at it , such inspiration… dedication.. and a subtle sarcasm and humour…. Truly amazing
The pasta moisture diagram you drew reminds me a lot of dry cured meats. The same problem happens when you dry meats using too low humidity, where the outside becomes overly dry and prevents the inside from drying. Could it be done with pasta? Like lowering the humidity over a longer time to make the drying even.
As an Italian i'm always moved when i see how kind is Alex with my culture.
id love to see even more extreme caterpillars but then dried properly after you figure that out... i think they would grip a lot of sauce on the outside and probably provide a potentially interesting different texture
It should provide an interesting mouth feel.
3rd generation pasta maker here. Only times I ever made a good dry pasta were by following the same rule as when making concrete. The longer it takes to dry the stronger it'll be. I found leaving it on a drying rack for about 3 days in the refrigerator made for a really good dry pasta. It was strong and held its shape when boiled. Maybe worth trying.
Thank you for this comment! I love these videos but I’ve been trying to figure out the best simple way to just let my homemade pasta dry at home. I have a spare refrigerator and I am happy to wait days or longer for the pasta to dry, so I will try your method. I assume you have the pasta uncovered on the rack in the refrigerator, but if I got it wrong, I would appreciate any clarification. Thanks again. I am a first generation pasta maker so appreciate being able to learn from generations of experience🙏
Alex, you can buy very affordable Bluetooth plug adapters that let you turn an appliance on and off from your phone, or even set it on a timer.
I use a few of these plugs in my house to run my dehumidifier, my wax melter scent thing, and my reading lamp. I can just ask Alexa to turn them on or off, but I also just leave the dehumidifier on a schedule that automatically turns it on and off when I specified it to.
It’s a one time set up, and then you just let it go!
Give it a try!
I was expecting you to control the on off cycling with an Arduino, but I'm guessing that's gonna be next episode 😜
I'm really loving this series, and the little breakthroughs you have bring me so much joy! 💕
Have you tried using a dehumidifier ? It is a much more gradual process than hot air
homemade drying apparatus incoming
This guy is amazing, proper engineer/scientist mindset of problem solving. I hope my engineers are as meticulous as him, and approach each problem in a systematic method. Respect 👍
Could try using a 3d printer dehumidifier. You can dial in temp and humidity.
A lot of them you can add fans to as well.
man ive been watching you since the beef wellington video and the production quality has never gone down, keep up the great work
Plastic vs. Elastic nomenclature makes total sense from a materials mechanics perspective. It doesn't refer to "plastic" as in polymer, but rather the deformation type: plastic deformation vs. elastic deformation.
I love you dedication of trying to get it to work in your kitchen
I watched the interview in episode 3 again, the professional says: high heat low humidity for drying, followed by resting at low temperature and high humidity.
I'm guessing the drying process needs the humidity to make the outside expand to preserve the plasticity while the moisture migrates from the "core" of the pasta.
However, you are the expert, and I defer to you practical experience over my theoretical model.
Used to work at an italian restaurant, and we found out by boiling the die before putting in on the machine would help us achive a perfectly smooth pasta everytime. The heat helps it to slide out og the machine
Alton Brown did something similar when he made beef jerky. He made his own "dehumidifier" by strapping trays onto a box fan. If you could find a way to control temperature along with his set up, you might be able to move massive amounts of air while controlling temperature for a "cheap" price.
This man makes some of the most incredible content. So educational, creative, and engaging. I can't wait till he cooks the pasta he's made.
Hey, so I know a thing or two about plastics vs elastics. Usually, elastics are softer, but it refers more to the end result than how strong something is. Most materials have an elastic region and a plastic region. Metals in springs, for example, have a very wide elastic region to make sure when they're stretched they go back where they should be. However, a plastic deformation is something like if you hit that spring with a hammer and left a dent. That dent is plastic deformation because it won't go back.
What you may want to think of with the pasta is the change in yield strength, which is when the material experiences plastic deformation. Then the ultimate strength is when something will break. If those two are very close, you don't often see the elastic deformation. In essence, drying the pasta raises the yield strength of the material.
What could possibly go wrong? Everything and that's exactly why i want to see the next episode of this amazing dry pasta series.
Good that i dont drink wine ;)
So many years of watching your stuff, yet everytime im still amazed. love your stuff mate.
greetings from the swabian Alps
For anyone interested, plastic and elastic describe modes of deformation, not so much a state of a material. Elastic describes a deformation where the material returns to it's original state after the force is removed. Plastic describes a deformation where the material retains some portion of it's new shape after the force is removed.
That's hardcore commitment and devotion for pasta! Fascinating facts and video!
Matey - your (plausible) infinite patience absolutely boggles the mind - am both astonished and also seething with envy lol - very-much looking forward to the denouement - cheers
This gentleman's commitment towards pasta is awesome indeed.
Professional pasta dryers are expensive but you may want to look at the patents to see how they are doing it, then cobble something together using the same principles. As an engineer one of the first things I check is the patents for anything that may be applicable to my project. Sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't but it has many times saved me from reinventing the wheel.
2:59 : "Error 404: No Alex... Why don't you make one??" 🤣🤣🤣🤣
As someone with an MSc in Materials Science & Engineering, the difference between plastic and elastic makes perfect sense. _Platic deformation_ is permanent, by definition, while _elastic deformation_ means (also by definition) that the shape returns to its original shape when the load is removed. So: *Squish* = plastic, while *Bounce* = elastic.
when you use any type of dehydrator or when you use high heat to dry your pasta, you create air bubbles in the pasta which gives it that brittle texture, if you let the pasta sit at room temperature over night like you're staling bread, the starch will do most of the work of stiffening up your pasta before letting it sit in front of an air conditioner or a fan for a few days until the pasta is to the degree of dryness that you desire
One of my favorite youtubers and I feel like you are highly underappreciated on here. Love how you look at the science of cooking from the ingredients all the way down to the cooking aparatus and even engineer your own solutions. Much respect, brother.
I imagine part of the function of the resting periods is to allow the starch to crystallize. That will "squeeze" out more water that can be removed at the higher temp steps, and the crystalline structure will give it more structural stability. When you boil the pasta again the starch crystals will melt and gel with water again, making it soft.
I guess the trick is to really anneal the pasta. Make sure the dimensional changes from crystallization and water loss do not happen so quickly that cracks form, and allow resting periods to let crystals form and reorient to alleviate internal stresses (also to reduce cracks). No idea what kind of temp/time profile will look like though :)
I also looked up the glass transition temperature of amylose/amylopectin (starch). It appears to 50-60C, which aligns with some of the lower resting temperatures you showed in the scientific temp profiles. This temperature allows the starch molecules to be mobile, reorient, and crystallize. Being below this temp will lock them in a glassy, immobile state. They will not move to relieve stress. So, high-ish temps are still needed for resting, I think.
@@MrArmlicker1 Thanks for looking into this - I was thinking that there was a physical / chemical transition in the material as the moisture content dropped, and quite possibly that the threshold was slightly below 12% moisture, which would come about all too easily if the evaporation rate greatly exceeded the internal diffusion rate.
My thinking - admitedly not too deep - would be mor along the lines of the grains of the flour/starch losing mutual adhesion, but your point about a glass transition of the starch would also be a contributing factor in the loss of product quality / stability, and is something to be avoided.
In the 19th century Campania region, since it is situated between mountain and sea and it is very windy, I think people used simply to hang pasta outside for a few days, like we still hang clothes outside to dry them😌. Plus, can you imagine to dry pasta with the sea breeze? You have the sea smell directly inside it (that's not true, but I like to think it is)
Alex. I thought the same thing about the 2 materials labels plastic and elastic and the characteristics that they apply to. I am glad I am not alone.
look for one of those toaster oven mods they use for pcbs. they can be used for pasta, because they can use graphs.
Perhaps you should look into injecting steam into the dryer for the first stage of drying. Most industrial dryers will use steam for the first stage. This provides two things helps the pasta retain its shape and gives it a coat that strengthens the integrity of the pasta which as an added bonus improves texture after cooking.
I’ve sort of gone around this issue somewhat cheating by blanching the pasta before drying it in two stages at 110c and the 50c. For me this did change everything and my pasta does not crack anymore.
Love the series.
I would like to make a quick blurb about why materials science considers the "soft" pasta state plastic and the "hard" pasta state elastic.
As Alex said in the video, elastic deformation is when a force is applied to the pasta, the pasta will recover to the original shape. Conversely, if you push the material too far, it will experience plastic deformation, which is unrecoverable. This is all true.
It's not so much we consider a "hard state" and a "soft state" as elastic or plastic, respectively. It's actually how we describe the material properties of a specific material (and can be applied to soft or hard materials). Generally, materials exhibit a range of stresses in which they can recover from slight amounts of deformation, but push it too far and it will plasticly deform. We call this point, yield strength. Most metals (which are generally hard), usually have both an elastic and plastic regime. Polymers (which can be soft), also can have both an elastic and plastic regime. The amount of stress a material can handle is related to the stiffness of the material (incorporated in Young's Modulus)... we'll get to this later.
Now what Alex showed was that when he pressed too hard on his dried pasta, it broke. I would consider that a fracture issue. If we increase the stress of a material even more, most likely it'll experience fracture (occurs in metals, polymers, ceramics, etc.). From my observation, the dried pasta underwent brittle fracture (I can explain the differences in fracture types in the comments if someone asks). For brittle materials, we generally think of things like ceramics. They are super hard, but will shatter if enough stress is imparted into them. Classically, we generally considered brittle materials to fracture before they even plastically deform (meaning their fracture strength is lower than their yield strength). So, for a ceramic (in this case dried pasta) to withstand a higher amount of force/stress before fracturing, it's stiffness (Young's modulus) would have to increase. This would allow Alex to impart a larger force into the dried pasta without it breaking.
But we have to consider that he's using the same composition/processing (same recipe) for all of his batches (hopefully). The dried pasta that results from it will have a specific fracture strength (if dried properly). So with that in mind, there's something else that needs to be considered. It's defects in the dried pasta structure. Fast drying the pasta resulted in a lot of cracking (many defects). Well, cracking (and defects) turns out to be REALLY bad for fracture. By drying nice and slowly and ensuring that there are minimal cracks/defects, we can improve the fracture strength, making it less likely for the pasta to fracture at lower than expected stresses.
I'm pretty sure this is what is happening with Alex's pasta and he's doing a great job trying to figure out how to jerry-rig something that will give him a better result. Really inspirational stuff.
If anyone else has any other information to add to my materials science explanation/analysis, please feel free to add in the comments. Questions are always welcomed.
The most suspenseful RUclips series I've ever watched.
Hi Alex
I really enjoy your video.
Just dry your pasta at room temperature over several days when you have nice dry weather.
This is how it was done since hundreds of years
.the big industrial dryers are just needed if you want to dry pasta on a large scale quick.....
This advice comes from a professional chef that has made lots of pasta like you did.
I personally even prefer to just freeze the pasta as it comes out of the extruder.
Just put from frozen in the boiling water...works very well
Seeing that you are an electrical engeneer get an Arduino with an temp and humidity sensor...you can then controll your temp and fan speed via arduino. Also include an air intake and air outtake.
When you have reached a certain level of humidity you need to blow the wet air out and let dryer air go inside.
A few lines of coding will allow you to make a super accurate pasta dryer.
Try also to add some herbs and garlic into the dryer during drying of the pasta
The etherian oils from the herbs might create a very nice flavour as well.
Keep up the good work
I put the extruded pasta (30% hydro) on a tray, wrap it in plastic foil and freeze it rightaway. Then, I toss the frozen pasta directly in the cooking water and the final result is quiet good: noodles which are strong and not brittle and bonded sauce. I think that the reason could be that the low temperature decreases the moisture in the space inside the tray and at the same time decreases the mobility of water molecules. Maybe the final content of water is more than 12.5% but it doesn't matter with this procedure. I find it practical for making pasta at home.
Thank you Alex for how much passion and method you put in your work. You are outstanding!
Disclaimer: I do extrusion with a dough sheeter with cutting attachment
Alex you can just buy a static pasta dryer. You have to have temperature control, humidity control, adjustable air intake valves. I love your commitment all the same. You can make one with a constant temp PTC, raspberry pi and a couple of fans in an aluminium box, if space is an issue.
Jesus christ the unbridled terror and anticipation I felt when he said "what could go wrong" 🤣
Definetly dont need an arduino or overly complicated controller. Simply use a basic $10 wifi outlet switch to program on/off times. And you can also add a simple plug-in humidistat and/or thermostat for $40.
Hey Alex. Long time fan.
This series is everything I love about your channel. Keep it up. I can’t wait to see you Frankenstein this dehydrator.
yes Alex, it does give me a Pavlovian reaction, it makes me smile and brace myself for information I didn't know I wanted to know. I love blue fridge theory!
I believe the center portion of the fan is the intake. It is sucking air in. And it blows out of the side. Those dehydrators are supposed to have low flow air.
The Italian Master also mention to go from high temp (55°) with low humidity for dry zone to low temp with high humidity as resting zone. A cup of warm water may do the job in the resting time.
You could use an environmental test chamber to dry the pasta. They're usually programmable to control humidity and temperature. For instance you could tell the machine to be 50c & 50% relative humidity for 12, rest, then more parameters.
You'd need a bench top programmable environmental test chamber. I suggest to with the company Espec. I've used them in R&D engineering.
Most deformations have both kinds of deformation happening at the same time. But depending on the rigidity of the material it is more plastic- or elastic deformation.
If you take a look at stress diagrams, you will see that every force exerted on the material is always bouncing back at least a little.
All the music you use is very nicely produced over the enitre sound range, expecially those thicc base tracks.
And it is very well used as well, always a pleasure to experience your creations!
Tu sais quand tu te poses pas cette question et soudainement!! Tu te la poses! Merci Alex!!
That was the best outro (is that a word) I have ever seen. I have been a viewer for years, but gosh darn was that a finale
I love how he says, let's start with the easy part. And at the end of the series we find out he failed right from the beginning.
It looks like the drying process and issues with pasta are very similar to drying timber. Some of the most impressive and effective methods use a vacuum kiln with either heat through hot water plates or radio frequencies to generate heat. May be worth looking into the vacuum part and its not too expensive to try.