The newest pasta on Earth is also the world’s thinnest spaghetti. It was recently created, not in a Michelin-star restaurant in Paris, but by a research team in England.
The spaghetti, measuring just 372 nanometers across and about 200 times thinner than a human hair, was not made to be the next diet fad.
In a new paper published in the journal Nanoscale Advances, the research team from University College London said it was created because of the “wide-ranging uses that extremely thin strands of material, called nanofibers, have in medicine and industry.”
The team said nanofibers that are made of starch are especially promising and could be used in the future in bandages to aid wound healing, as scaffolding for bone regeneration and for drug delivery.
The nanopasta was made from a technique called electrospinning. The London researchers describe electrospinning as a process in which threads of flour and liquid are pulled through the tip of a needle by an electric charge.
This spaghetti is a pasta with one interesting origin. However, as a 2012 CBS News report told viewers, many other kinds of pasta have backstories that come with a twist, including tortellini.
According to the report, one of the most famous women of the Italian Renaissance, Lucrezia Borgia, was the inspiration behind the pasta.
The tale goes that Borgia stopped overnight at an inn. The innkeeper became smitten with her. When he went up to snoop on her room, he looked through the keyhole and saw her navel. That inspired the tortellini pasta.
Then there’s cascatelli, the pasta shape created by James Beard award-winning podcaster Dan Pashman. It took him three years, as chronicled on his podcast “The Sporkful,” to come up with his dream pasta that he considers to be the perfect shape for holding sauce, picking up with a fork and just eating.
Cascatelli, which means “waterfall” in Italian, was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 inventions of 2021. The pasta is being sold by companies including Sfoglini, Trader Joe’s and Banza (a chickpea version).
According to the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts, there are over 350 types of pasta shapes out there. And now, thanks to researchers in London, there’s one more.
But remember that nanopasta spaghetti was not created for digesting.
As Professor Gareth Williams, co-author of the university’s study, said, “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.”