Bucatini gets its name from the Italian for hole, buco. It's basically spaghetti with a hole drilled through it. (That's not actually how it's made, I realize. It's extruded with the hole built in, but I am enjoying the image of special drill bits hollowing out thick spaghetti and given the pandemic, I'm letting my imagination run rampant, since I can't.) Anyway, Handler suggests the appeal of bucatini is how much sauce each strand can take up, about 200% more she asserts than its thinner, topological genus zero counterpart, "due to math."
I wondered about that math, so I did it. The surface area of a cylinder is π x d x h. Where π is π (3.1415928....) and d is the diameter of the cylinder and h the height (not Planck's constant, the first thing. I think of when I see h in an equation). For a 260 mm length of bucatini with an outer diameter of 2.9 mm and an inner diameter of 0,8 mm, the surface area of the outside is 2370 mm2 and inside is 650 mm2. For the same length of spaghetti, it's 1570 mm2. So assuming the sauce penetrates to the center of the tube, the bucatini has 192% of the spaghetti's surface for sauce. Or about only about 100% more. Math!
Now, of course, I want to know how much the sauce does penetrate down the center shaft. Will there be bucatini at the grocery store tomorrow? Stay tuned for further pandemic pasta proofs.
Photo is from Wikimedia by Popo le Chien and is used under a Creative Commons license.
Objects with a topological genus of zero have no holes in them, e.g. a solid sphere. Objects with one hole — bucatini, donuts and coffee mugs — are genus one. This is the source of the mathematical joke that to a topologist, a donut and a coffee mug are the same.
Home schooling at its best!
ReplyDeleteThere was bucatini at the store, so I’m set to experiment!
ReplyDelete