Announcement for talk

Pasta alla Cacio e Pepe is a beloved Italian classic, known for its simple yet iconic combination of pasta, pecorino cheese, and pepper. However, despite its minimal ingredient list, achieving the perfect creamy sauce remains a culinary challenge. In this talk, we delve into the science of Cacio e Pepe, exploring the phase behavior of the sauce with varying proportions of cheese, water, and starch. Our findings highlight starch concentration as a critical factor for sauce stability. Specifically, we identify a threshold below which starch concentrations (less than 1% relative to cheese mass) result in system-wide clumping, a condition we term the “Mozzarella Phase”, characterized by an undesirable, separated texture. Additionally, we explore how cheese-to-water ratios at a fixed starch level affect stability, revealing a lower critical solution temperature that we rationalize using a simplified free-energy model. To make these insights actionable, we’ll share some practical tips drawn from our study to help consistently achieve a perfectly creamy and stable sauce.

In short: it is funny, but the science is serious. We believe this will be an engaging session for anyone interested in physics, modelling or simply craving the joy of discovering, and would certainly be more amusing than our formal lectures.