Reduce energy consumption during cooking by choosing the type of food

Since I turned my attention to the cooking process, I realized that cooking actually accounts for a huge part of the energy consumption in everyday life. I began to explore the direct and indirect relationship between energy consumption and the different types of cooking equipment we use, which I discussed in my last journal. After thinking about it, I believe that the choice of ingredients indirectly generates energy consumption, so in this diary I will record my exploration of the relationship between the type of ingredients and energy consumption and how to reduce energy consumption by choosing ingredients.

As a native of northern China, I cannot eat without food made of flour in my daily diet, like noodles. However, pasta contains more complex carbohydrates than Chinese noodles. As a fitness enthusiast, I usually choose pasta as a staple food during the fat loss phase. But in China, all I could buy on a daily basis was dry pasta, and the problem that often bothered me during the cooking process was the cooking time, which usually takes at least 15 minutes to cook pasta, while fresh pasta often takes 1–2 minutes.

After I came to Milan, where I ate pasta almost every day, I realized that fresh pasta was readily available and very diverse. After I started researching the project of energy consumption, I suddenly realized that the power rating of the cookware itself was not the only thing that influenced the energy consumption during cooking, but also the time of use was an important factor.

This factor is too contingent, because everyone’s diet is different, and it is difficult to choose suitable substitutes for foods like meat and vegetables. Taste, price, and variety are all factors that need to be considered, and I can’t study other variables while controlling for one. Pasta was perfect for this study, so over the next few days I went through a series of trials and found that.

The same type of dry pasta and fresh pasta are the same price and the same volume. Dry pasta takes 12–15 minutes to cook, and even longer for complex pasta, while fresh pasta often takes only 3–5 minutes, and induction heaters, which are already huge energy consumers, mean that cooking dry pasta uses nearly three times as much energy as fresh pasta. Incidentally, I personally find the taste of fresh pasta better. So for the next while I decided to buy and eat only fresh pasta.

In conclusion, I would like to say that there are still many uncertainties in this process, such as personal preference of food, shelf life of food, cost of ingredients and so on. Back to the cooking process of similar ingredients, cooking fresh pasta is indeed more energy efficient than dry pasta.