The beloved Italian pasta cacio e pepe is perhaps best known for two things: being delicious and being frustratingly difficult to cook. At first glance, it looks like a simple recipe, containing only three ingredients: pasta, pecorino romano cheese, and black pepper. But as anyone who has tried to make it will know, the cheese will often clump when added to the hot pasta water, turning what is supposed to be a smooth, creamy sauce into a stringy, sticky mess.
In Physics of Fluids, researchers from the University of Barcelona, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, the University of Padova, and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria studied the physics of mixing cheese in water. They determined the mechanism that causes the cheese sauce to go from creamy to clumpy and developed a foolproof recipe for cacio e pepe based on their findings.
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