A Twisted Hack for That Annoying Spaghetti Problem!

It's pasta night and you're trying to get dinner on the table. Spaghetti is relatively quick and easy to make, so you grab your pot and pull the noodles out of the pantry. You start to boil the water and decide it would be easier to cook the noodles if you broke them in half first. You bend a handful of noodles to snap in half and as they break, they send tiny broken noodle bits flying all over your kitchen.

Sounds about right? It certainly does for me, since I've lived through it a dozen times!

And if you're wondering, no, the solution is not to simply keep your spaghetti noodles whole. There are some pretty valid reasons to prefer shorter noodles, they are easier to eat and fit better in pots! So how do you break your spaghetti in half - minus the mess of tiny noodle bits? It's all in the twist!

Apparently, this spaghetti problem was staggering enough to attract the attention of researchers at MIT. They conducted a study on the matter and concluded that the most effective way to get a clean spaghetti noodle break was to twist and THEN bend it.

"They found that by first twisting the spaghetti at almost 360 degrees, then slowly bringing the two ends together to bend it, the stick snapped exactly in two." - via an article from MIT News.

So there you have it and it takes only about a second to do. So even if you were cooking spaghetti for a large crowd, it would still take under a minute to divide the uncooked noodles up into smaller batches and use the twist-and-bend method to break them!

The fact that I no longer have to sweep the whole kitchen after cooking makes it worthwhile.😁