Researchers from the University College London have done what celebrity chefs and Italian nonnas could only dream of: they’ve made the world’s thinnest spaghetti. This culinary-sounding accomplishment, in Nanoscale Advances, has yielded strands of starch nanofibers that are just 372 nanometers wide, which is invisible to the naked eye and is even smaller than some wavelengths of light.
“The world’s thinnest spaghetti” sounds silly, but starch can actually have important applications in medicine. For instance, nanofiber starches could help wounds heal when used in bandages, since they’d be able to keep out bacteria while allowing moisture through. Rather than going through the energy-intensive process of refining their own plant cell starch for nanofibering, these chemists decided store-bought was fine and made their strands directly from flour. Their version of the nanofibers were created with a process called electrospinning, where an electric charge pulls a flour and liquid mixture through extremely small metal holes into threads that are just nanometers wide. Extrusion through a die is literally the same way you’d make conventional spaghetti to accompany your bolognese or your meatballs, only at a much, much smaller scale.
There’s still a lot of study to be done before the product will be appearing in the doctor’s office, but this is a step toward more sustainable starch nanofibers. And while I would pay good money to watch chefs try to explain invisible pasta on a reality show, electrospinning almost certainly won’t become the new molecular gastronomy hotness. As co-author Professor Gareth Williams of the UCL School of Pharmacy : “I don’t think it’s useful as pasta, sadly, as it would overcook in less than a second, before you could take it out of the pan.”