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I love a good
kitchen magic trick, whether it’s using a muffin tin for mise en place or preventing brown
sugar from turning into a brick by adding a fluffy marshmallow to the bag.
So, when I found out you could place a
wooden spoon over a pot of boiling water to stop the water from cascading over the
pot, I was intrigued. Ever since, it’s been my go-to move while making
pasta dishes (which, amid the pandemic, has been quite often.
Mmm. Comfort food).
But how exactly does a wooden
spoon keep the boiling water at bay? There are a lot of competing theories on
Reddit. So, to sort this out once and for all, I asked
scientists why a wood spoon works. (Don’t try it with plastic or you’ll have a melted mess!)
When you boil starchy foods, like
pasta, some of the starch enters the
water, which makes it more viscous, or thicker, Dickinson explains. Boiling bubbles from starchy water are larger, more stable and filled with hot air and steam. The surface of a bubble is made up of thin layers of water held together by other molecules. In the case of pasta bubbles, the molecules are starch.
“If the bubbles touch the colder and dryer wood, these molecules break their chain and the bubble bursts, which releases the
steam from inside the bubble,” Dickinson says. As the surface heats up again, this cycle repeats itself and the next set of
bubbles rise up only to be burst by the spoon, preventing the pot from boiling over.
The rough surface of a wooden spoon, combined with the fact that wood is water-loving (hydrophilic) provides an ideal right environment for small bubbles to form in boiling water, explains
Jed Macosko, Ph.D., a Wake Forest University
physics professor and the president of
Academic Influence.
“Without the spoon, large bubbles of steam will form in violent bursts, causing scalding hot water to get everywhere on your
stovetop,” Macosko says.
So, what does this all boil down to? (Pun intended!)
The wooden spoon trick is a real-life example of how surface tension works.
“That makes lots of opportunities for bubbles to start absorbing and wicking into the wood,” Beaver explains. “This stretches the bubble. The stretching force to pull the bubble apart becomes greater than the force of surface tension to hold the bubble together. So the bubble collapses.” When this happens over and over, the foam goes down.
Have you tried this trick when boiling water?