Throwing Spagetti on the Wall

If there’s one extraordinary cooking tip that I learned from my Malaysian colleagues MinYee and JayWyn, it’s cooking spagetti noodles.

I’ve been cooking decent dishes for about 10 years now, able to duplicate most of my mom’s dishes. I tried to learn how to cook by being so geeky about it --- making mental models of the heat input, convection, precise measurements, monitoring time and color/smell changes which marked chemical reactions in the pot. I attempted to cook with a scientific approach.

But science experiments are meant to be trial-and-error activities. Food being an expensive commodity nowadays, I realized that making mistakes when cooking can prove to be a very wasteful activity.

Most cooks have it to an art.

And then I figured out that the art of cooking is just a scientific activity wherein the scientist can exploit the tolerance bands of smell, flavor and palatability as a function of time and heat.

But some things, like spagetti noodles, do not have indicators for smell or flavor. Aside from checking the noodle consistency for al dente, I mostly end up with spagetti noodles not to my exact liking whenever I cook it. Al dente is pretty subjective – how do you exactly specify it to the scientific cook?

And then, a couple of smart kids came along and told me to just throw the spagetti noodles on the wall.

If it’s cooked, it’ll stick to the wall. If it’s undercooked, it’ll slide off.

I was skeptic about the theory, but when they demonstrated it to me I was just amazed.

Last night, I cooked a tomato-and-basil sauce and some spagetti noodles for dinner. And yup, I threw a couple of noodles on the wall.

They stuck to the wall looking like albino earthworms.

The noodles turned out to be great, exactly just how I like it.

Next time, I’ll try throwing chicken wings on the wall. Hahaha. Just kidding.