Cereal Chem 69:27-29   |  VIEW ARTICLE

A Colorimetric Method for Estimating Spaghetti Cooking Losses.

R. R. Matsuo, L. J. Malcolmson, N. M. Edwards, and J. E. Dexter. Copyright 1992 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. 

The amount of residue in the cooking water is widely used as an indicator of cooked spaghetti quality. Traditional methods are time-consuming and in some instances give results that are difficult to reproduce. A quicker and more precise method was developed by reacting a clarified aliquot of cooking water with iodine and measuring the absorbance at 650 nm, the absorption maximum for the amylose-iodine complex. Strong linear relationships (r2 greater than 0.80) were found between iodine absorption and cooking loss for both durum wheat and hard red spring wheat, indicating that cooking loss can be estimated reliably from iodine absorption values.