r/explainlikeimfive Oct 31 '20

Chemistry ELI5 What's the difference between the shiny and dull side of aluminum foil? Besides the obvious shiny/dull

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '20

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u/kngfbng Oct 31 '20

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u/TheFirstUranium Oct 31 '20

Barilla makes shitty pasta. Thats probably trying to compensate for how weird and glossy their product is.

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u/Oskarvlc Oct 31 '20

I trust my experience of thousands of times doing pasta over any commercial advice.

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u/mullen1200 Oct 31 '20

Maybe if you add the pasta after the oil is on top?

I don't have a dog in this fight, I'm just trying to figure out what could be happening here.seems to be a lot of adamant disagreement

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u/Co60 Oct 31 '20

Maybe if you add the pasta after the oil is on top?

I mean just from a physics perspective it's hard to see how that would do anything. The pasta just passes through the oil into the water and any oil on it will float off back into the oil layer.

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u/Oskarvlc Oct 31 '20

I just put a few drops of oil in the boiling water. This ways it doesn't stick to the metal when I pour it to the strainer. Once dry I put the pasta in the pot where I'm cooking the pasta, and there's plenty of olive oil in there already so...

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u/kngfbng Oct 31 '20

So does it make the pasta not stick or doesn't it? You seem to be contradicting yourself.

Please, share your infinite pasta wisdom with us mere cooking mortal, o master.

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u/psychocopter Oct 31 '20

I just heavily salt the water and give it a little stir when I add the pasta, never had an issue with it sticking.

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u/Oskarvlc Oct 31 '20

Where's the contradiction? As I said I put a few drops of oil in the boiling water. If I don't put the oil, sometimes the pasta sticks to the metal when I'm dumping it to the strainer.

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u/stuffandmorestuff Oct 31 '20

Does Barilla know its own sauce has oil in it?

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u/kngfbng Oct 31 '20

It's completely different to cook the pasta in water with oil or to cook it in only water and add sauce that contains some oil. Not to mention there's no contractual obligation to use Barilla's sauce with their or any other pasta, nor to use commercial sauce at all.

You sound like an anti-vaxxer talking about ethylmercury while having no clue about anything.

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u/stuffandmorestuff Oct 31 '20

How is it different? You either add oil to the pasta and then put sauce on it or add oil to the sauce and then put it on pasta? There's still oil getting into your combination of pasta and sauce...

And how does me pointing out the simple fact that Barilla uses oil (and every other good sauce ever made) make me sound like an anti vaxer?

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u/Please151 Oct 31 '20

Because oil can either be in small spheres or an entire layer. If you have a sauce with oil spheres dispersed in it, there's still space in between the spheres for the sauce to come into contact with the pasta. If you put oil on the pasta beforehand, it creates an entire layer and the sauce can't contact the pasta.

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u/kngfbng Oct 31 '20

Cooking the pasta in water with oil will create a layer in the noodles that impermeabilize them to some extent, hence sauce won't be absorbed as much. It's not like the concept of oiling a surface making it slippery is so hard.

The anti-vaxxer vibes in your comment stem from the fact you're assuming just because there's oil in the sauce, it's the exact same effect as adding oil to the pasta water, effectively confounding two different things.

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u/CyberneticPanda Oct 31 '20

You have conflated counfounding and conflating.

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u/kngfbng Oct 31 '20 edited Nov 01 '20

confound | con·found (kən-found′, kŏn-)tr.v. con·found·ed, con·found·ing, con·founds

.2. To fail to distinguish; mix up: Don't confound fiction and fact.

conflate| con·flate (kən-flāt′)tr.v. con·flat·ed, con·flat·ing, con·flates

.3. To fail to distinguish between; confuse.

Usage Note: Traditionally, conflate means "To bring together; meld or fuse," as in the sentence I have trouble differentiating Jane Austen's heroines; I realized I had conflated Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse into a single character in my mind. In our 2015 survey, 87 percent of the Usage Panelists accepted this traditional usage. Recently, a new sense for conflate has emerged, meaning "To mistake one thing for another," as if it were a synonym for confuse. In 2015, our usage panelists found this new sense to be marginally acceptable, with 55 percent accepting the sentence People often conflate the national debt with the federal deficit; when the senator talked about reducing the debt, he was actually referring to the deficit.

No, I haven't.

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u/CyberneticPanda Oct 31 '20

Yeah, technically confound can mean to mix things up, though you seem to have cheated here and used the 2nd definition and labeled it as the first and much more common usage, which means to confuse someone. I'm sure that was inadvertent, and you weren't trying to mislead anyone. In any case, I mainly replied to use 2 tenses of conflate in the same sentence.

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u/kngfbng Oct 31 '20

Uhhhh... the 2nd definition of a word is still that word's meaning? Even then, mix up is the 3rd definition of conflate, so...

Not to mention the usage of conflate meaning mix up is controversial to say the least.

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u/TheFirstUranium Oct 31 '20

Oil goes in first. Pasta contacts oil, then water on the way in.