Why does water only boil over after you add the pasta?
In: Chemistry
It’s the starch on the pasta foaming up! If you add oil or butter when you add the noodles it will quite nicely but not perfectly counter this.
Forgive me, but it’s been quite a while, my high school chemistry is a tad weak. There are two main reasons that the water boils over. First, adding pasta to the pot raises the water level in the pot due to the weight of the dry pasta displacing water before it cooks. Second, as the pasta cooks, some of the starch in the pasta is stripped out by the boiling water. This makes the water a little thicker as a result. Both these reasons can contribute to the pot boiling over.
Doesn’t the starch increase the surface tension?
You can instantly stop it from boiling over by blowing on it. Not even hard, you can even just fan it with the spoon or whatever.
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