The ‘Just Enough Liquid’ technique arose from OPOS experiments to find out the minimal amount of water needed to cook pasta. Italian cookbooks state you need 10 units of boiling water to cook 1 unit of pasta. You are then supposed to keep checking the consistency and stop cooking once the desired consistency is reached. The excess water is to be drained and the pasta is then mixed with a sauce. The same school of thought is reflected in cooking noodles and rice. These are cooked with a large quantity of water, which is drained and wasted.

These conventional methods have many drawbacks:

1. They use way too much water

2. They use way too much fuel to heat all this excess water

3. They call for way too much labour

4. They waste the stock, which is full of nutrients leached from starch.

5. They give you plain pasta/ rice/ noodles – not the ‘ready to eat versions’ with sauce

6. They rely on your judgement to stop the cooking process.

Experts like Harold McGee and celebrity chefs like Heston Blumenthal have been successfully experimenting with cooking pasta in minimal water. Their techniques solve problems 1 & 2 completely, problems 3, 4 & 5 partially, but leave problem 6 untouched. We had to crack problem 6 as OPOS promises to work the same way for anyone, anywhere, anytime. In India, we face a similar problem in cooking rice. The conventional method calls for boiling rice in a huge volume boiling water, which is drained after the rice is cooked. Instead, many families pressure cook rice with around twice the amount of water, which is all absorbed. This is called the absorption technique.

We experimented with the same technique to cook pasta by using two measures of water for one measure of pasta and cooked it for 2 whistles, just like rice. We found that the pasta was overcooked and watery.

After a series of experiments spread out over 2 years, the first tentative recipe, Pasta with Marinara sauce, was proposed, where pasta and sauce were cooked together at one shot. This recipe calls for roughly the same amount of liquid as pasta. But this technique did not catch the fancy of members for two reasons:

1. The cup measure is not accurate for different pasta shapes.

2. Members reported that the flavours were not as intense as the ones cooked by the traditional method.

In subsequent versions, recipes were fine tuned to cut out the hassle of measurement. The recipes skipped the cup measure and started calling for pasta to be just about covered with water. This technique worked for almost all dry pasta shapes, as long as they could be completely covered by a liquid. Long strands like spaghetti needed to be broken up.

The technique started catching up, and more people started cooking pasta with just enough liquid. But we still had to figure out a way to cook pasta with white sauce at one shot and make other pastas with sauce more flavourful.

After almost an year, the white sauce problem was cracked with the Mac and cheese recipe. Later, we cracked the second problem of making pasta more flavourful by taking the Just Enough Liquid technique to its logical extreme – by cutting out all added water. Pasta was briefly washed to hydrate it and was cooked at high heat, sandwiched between layers of vegetables. The results stunned us. The clean bold, well infused flavours made possible by high heat and the perfect texture made possible by cutting out water captivated many members, who would never cook pasta any other way.

Finally, we had figured out how to cook pasta and sauce at one shot, to please the toughest critics. We could now stake the claim for the fastest pasta on earth – by cooking up Pasta Alfredo and Mac & Cheese from scratch in 3 minutes. Packing a lunchbox has never been easier !

A slew of pasta recipes soon followed, by combining this technique with other OPOS techniques. Members started playing around freely with pasta recipes, cooking pastas never before seen! We started cooking pasta in curries/ pickle gravy and with many other novel additives, creating dishes to suit the Indian palate. Pasta will never be seen the same way again !

Why is JEL so important?

Maggi sells over 3 crore packs a week in India. Assume all other instant noodle brands sell another 3 crore packs. Cooking this quantity of instant noodles uses up 150 lakh liters of water (Assuming 250ml of water needed to cook each pack).

The case is worse with non-instant noodles. Assume an equal quantity of non-instant noodles are sold. The water usage would be atleast 4 times this, since each pack is to be boiled in a liter of water. The total wastage translates to 750 lakh liters of water or around 100 lakh liters of water per day. Just to boil noodles!

The fuel consumption needed to heat this huge volume of water is staggering. The water wasted by boiling rice/ millets in an open pot would be hundreds of times that of noodles. This wastage is neither justifiable nor sustainable. Using JEL, this huge water and fuel wastage can be instantly stopped.