This Spaghetti Spoon Hack Is Brilliant

Quick on the heels of a new study revealing that eating pasta is actually good for you, a handy spaghetti spoon hack for cooking the perfect noodles is blowing up the internet. I may have been making spaghetti since I discovered how to boil water, but it would seem like I am still learning the ropes as I had no idea this was a thing.

Pasta may not take a lot of skill to cook, but portioning out the right amount of spaghetti for a single serving is tough. Every box has eight servings per container, each about two ounces of dry noodles, but how do you eyeball that? There seems to be no clear measuring system (unless you have a cooking scale). That is — until now. Instead of painstakingly counting out each strand of spaghetti number 12, look to a trusty friend that has been there all along. That's right: your spaghetti spoon. The traditional slotted spoon, rimmed with tines to grip the slippery noodles, has long been helping us scoop and stir our dinner. Who could have guessed that it was designed with another secret superpower in mind?

I always thought that the hole at the center of the spoon was simply there to drain the hot water, but it turns out that the great pasta engineers of yore were far more imaginative than that. Revealed in a photo post by Imgur user PolarChi, this special slot in the spoon holds the recommended portion for one serving of spaghetti... I'll wait for the gasps to die down.

Some spoons come with circles, and some with the more oval shaped openings (like mine, pictured here), but either spoon should do the trick. Usually, I just make the entire box of spaghetti, with the best intentions of eating the leftovers for lunch the next day. However, that old spaghetti tends to sit in my fridge untouched, forgotten, until I finally throw it out and spend the rest of the day feeling guilty about being wasteful.

The solution is simple: Just grab a handful of spaghetti and fit it through the slot in your spoon.

When I tried the trick it didn't look like very much pasta fit through the hole. Of course, I then had to cook this "perfect portion" for, you know, research purposes.

Alright — I was hungry.

Once cooked, my portion of spaghetti looked like this:

The amount still seemed smaller than a portion I would usually eat, but then again, I have never actually seen the recommended serving size for pasta. Our portion sizes are out of whack here in North America, and most are much larger than recommended. In fact, researchers have suggested that we stick to one cup of pasta per person.

So there you have it folks, spaghetti à la the internet!

Images: pixabay, Lily Feinn, MelissaJaneSays/Twitter