FOOD NEWS
If You Really Want Your Pasta To Absorb More Sauce, Hit It With Some Sandpaper
By Kelly Douglas
While some pasta shapes can perfectly absorb sauce by trapping it in the crevices, others have more trouble. However, there’s an extremely unconventional way to give pasta of all types the perfect texture to hold sauce, and it requires an item that you likely won't find in your kitchen — sandpaper.
As long as you’re using nontoxic garnet sandpaper and not aluminum sandpaper, which contains toxins, texturizing pasta with sandpaper is a safe option. Cook's Illustrated tested this method with a rotary sander, and the results were surprising.
Their choice of pasta was fettuccine because its flat shape and lack of grooves make it easy to sand, and there was a marked difference in the pasta's texture once the sandpaper was applied to it. Fettuccine doesn't always hold sauce easily, but the smooth-to-rough texture change can efficiently help it hold more sauce.