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Experiment: Why are cooked spaghettis soft?
In Germany there is a very famous and long-running TV show for kids called "Die Sendung mit der Maus" (the show with the mouse ... and not to forget: the elephant). I must admit that I still watch it frequently because you learn a lot, e. g. how a stuff is produced in factories, how walnut oil is made, and much, much more. I have even got a "Maus"-style tear-off calendar with a question and an answer on the flipside for every day of the year!
One of these questions (from 19th of June 2014) was: Why do noodles become soft during cooking?
My first guess was that cooking breaks up the starch chains to some extent and that’s why the noodles are softer afterwards. The tear-off page’s flipside however taught me a different answer: They consist of milled durum and come dry out of the package. Thus, they are hard but also last for a long time. They get soaked with water during cooking and that’s why they are soft.
I immediately had a ball-and-stick model in my head of starch chains with and without water and thought of how cool it would be to make a molecular dynamics simulation to check whether the answer could be validated this way. So this is me performing this virtual experiment. And the best thing of all: As there is no bond breaking involved, I can use the BOSSANOVA scheme, detailed in my thesis, and, of course, implemented in MoleCuilder (v1.4.9 required).
Actually, I had intended to give the experiment here in full but adding it in markup is impossible and as html still very hard. Attaching files is however easy. Hence, find the PDF to the experiment in the attachments, along with the amylose molecule if you want to try it out for yourself.
