Overview

• The Ig Nobel Prize in Physics was presented on September 18 in Boston to Fabrizio Olmeda and collaborators for their study of the classic Roman sauce.
• The Italian-led team from ISTA, the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, the University of Padua and the University of Barcelona combined experiments with a theoretical model to explain when the sauce turns creamy or clumps.
• The researchers advise targeting roughly two to three percent starch relative to the cheese mass, noting that too little risks clumping and too much yields a stiff sauce.
• A practical example cited in coverage is dissolving about 5 grams of potato or corn starch in 50 milliliters of water for roughly 200 grams of cheese, with cooled pasta water used to mix and temperatures kept below about 65°C to avoid the 'Mozzarella-phase' of protein clumping.
• The team also reports that dissolving around 5 grams of sodium citrate in 150 milliliters of water provides strong stabilization of the emulsion, though this departs from strict traditional practice.