Who would think that pasta could help stop global warming.  Well, we’re being a bit sneaky here.  It’s not the pasta itself, it’s how you cook the pasta that will help slow down the process.  And more than how you cook your pasta, it’s the paradigm of cooking altogether that we are suggesting you re-shape in your life.

Ordinarily instructions on cooking pasta will suggest as much as 2 quarts or more of water be boiled in which to cook your pasta.  While purists may defend that abundance of water in the cooking process, we will challenge it.  Such instructions were created, and such opinions and habits formed, in an age when the consequences of our profligate use of fossil-fuel based energy was though to have no significant consequence. The essential need in cooking pasta is that it be bathed in water of sufficient heat over an adequate time for it to absorb an adequate amount of water and be maintained at the proper temperature. 

While we would not suggest a particular amount of water, we will suggest that you experiment with using less water in your cooking of pasta, and indeed in your cooking of anything that requires a bath of boiling water.  You see, by nature of its extraordinarily high ‘specific heat’, water requires more energy to increase 1 degree in temperature (no less to boil at 212 degrees F or 100 degrees C), than any other common substance we know.

Reducing the amount of water you use in boiling things, whether it be pasta, eggs, custards, potatoes, or whatever, will reduce significantly the amount of energy you use in the process.

It is the ability to rethink your old habits and form new, energy-wiser ones that will slow and perhaps reverse our current collision course with the limits of our world.