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A Standardized Method for the Instrumental Determination of Cooked Spaghetti Firmness

¹ NSW Department of Primary Industries, Tamworth Agricultural Institute 4 Marsden Park Road, Tamworth, NSW 2340, Australia. ² Corresponding author. E-mail: mike.sissons@agric.nsw.gov.au ³ Grain Research Laboratory, Canadian Grain Commission, 1404-303 Main Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3C 3G8 Canada.

A standardized method to determine cooked spaghetti firmness was developed. The effects of process and instrument variables were investigated and optimized to provide reproducible results between laboratories and to enable discrimination among samples with similar firmness characteristics. Commercial spaghetti samples of varying thickness were chosen to artificially create a range in firmness, and used to investigate the effect of a wide range of variables on cooked spaghetti firmness including sample preparation, cooking procedure, postcooking treatment, sample presentation, and instrument settings. Cooked spaghetti firmness determined using a TA-XT2i texture analyzer was significantly affected by optimum cook time, postcook cooling, rest time, and crosshead speed (P < 0.001), as well as strand length, spaghetti to cooking water ratio, number of strands cut, and strand position (P < 0.05). Although previous work showed a reasonable correlation between laboratories when using in-house methods (r = 0.85), the correlation improved to r = 0.96 when using the standardized method to analyze 29 commercially produced spaghetti samples. The Spearman rank correlation increased from r_s = 0.81 to r_s = 0.95, prestandardization and poststandardization, indicating greater agreement between laboratories in sample ranking.