COVID Transmissions for 4-21-2021
India is surging
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment. Welcome to COVID Transmissions.
It has been 520 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. In 520, Vitalian, who we’ve talked about before, was murdered, probably by a guy named Justinian who later became the Emperor of Rome. Killing Vitalian probably secured Justinian’s ascension.
We can never be sure what variants are setting up their own succession as the most dangerous SARS-CoV-2 variant, which is why it’s important that we get the pandemic under control. Today, we’ll take a look at what’s going on in India.
And then, I’ll talk about pasta for a bit.
Today I also get the second dose of my vaccine! I will try to update everyone on the effects, but please be aware that I can’t predict if the second dose will knock me out. If it does, there may not be a newsletter for 1-3 days. Should that happen, please rest assured that I am OK and am just resting up to come back strong—and immune to COVID-19.
As usual, bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.
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Now, let’s talk COVID.
The COVID-19 situation in India is very bad
CIDRAP reports on the worsening COVID-19 situation in India: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/04/indias-covid-19-surge-intensifies
I am very concerned about this. 300,000 cases in a single day is a huge absolute number! Yes, India is the second most populated country in the world, but that total is very nearly larger than the US’s peak daily new cases at the very worst moment of the pandemic so far—except in India, things are expected to get worse, and there’s some likelihood that with many remote rural areas, we don’t have a complete picture of just how bad things there already are.
An effective and high-uptake vaccine rollout in India cannot come soon enough. Thankfully, the article also reports that vaccination is now open to all adults ages 18 and up there. On the other hand, eligibility is one thing—actual vaccine uptake is another. I hope it goes quickly; there are many lives at risk.
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Pasta cooking
I’ve written about this before (I think), but I’m a big adherent of Chef Scott Conant’s methodology for cooking pasta in sauce. Specifically, Conant really understands the chemistry of pasta and sauce ingredients, and has integrated this into his cooking process, as shown in this video:
Now, in the video, Chef Conant makes his own sauce (and we learn a little bit about how pectin biochemistry can impact the thickness of sauces), but you can do the same methodology with premade sauces as well. Specifically, the technique relies on cooking the pasta in salty water (but of course this needs to be moderated), because of the way the process is designed. The intent here is to undercook the pasta when it is boiling, and then finish its cooking process in the sauce. By choosing salty water, you create an osmotic gradient in the final sauce. The pasta takes up salt water while boiling, making it potentially “hypertonic” (overly salty) compared to the sauce you will finish cooking it in. When it is added to that sauce in the last minute or so of cooking, the high salt concentration encourages the pasta to exchange molecules with the sauce—delicious molecules. The pasta thus absorbs flavorful things from the sauce, and the salt in the water slightly flavors the sauce as well.
The other major chemical thing going on here is that Conant encourages you to use pasta cooking water as a sauce ingredient. During cooking, pasta lets off a lot of starch into the surrounding water. Starches are complex sugars that like to form conglomerated chains; this means they can add structure to things. This is the reason a starched shirt is stiff, corn starch can thicken gravy, and that tapioca starch can be made into boba for bubble tea. Here, we use the starch in the pasta water to thicken the sauce as the water cooks off—this helps you moderate how well your sauce clings to the pasta as well.
The end result is that you can take some dried pasta, perhaps that you bought a year ago while stocking up to ride out the pandemic, a jar of sauce, and maybe some fresh things from your fridge, and end up with something that looks like this:
There is no sauce pooling on the bottom of this plate; it is all clinging to the pasta. The spaghetti here has taken on some of the color of the sauce, because it has absorbed the sauce. In a way, the ingredients have been combined as more than a mixture, and are almost suspended within one another, ensuring that you get the full flavor of the dish in each bite.
I did the above using Scott Conant’s recommended methods, and it was as easy as boiling water, then moving some pasta to and from that boiling water, and then finally moving some of the water into a mixture of pasta and sauce. It’s easy, simple, and the results really pay off.
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See you all next time.
Always,
JS
Hey, just wondering what your hot take is on the Schengen area allowing any American who's had both doses to travel for vacation this summer. Reasonable to open up or not very prudent?
Hi, John. Congrats on the vaccine. You presumably know this, but: most people don't feel any side effects for a day or two after the shot, if we get any. I basically had a sore shoulder (both shots) and a headache (once), and I can't be sure the headache had anything to do with the vaccine--it isn't as if I'm otherwise immune to headaches. Good luck on that.