Will cooked spaghetti harden?

[Alpo]

I'm watching The Apartment. It's the day after Christmas, and Bud has just cooked Fran a spaghetti dinner. He used a tennis racket to strain the spaghetti.

 

Change of scene and it is now New Year's Eve. Bud is moving and as he's packing stuff up in the apartment he picks up the tennis racket and there is a piece of spaghetti still stuck in the strings. And it's limp, like a piece of string.

 

If you had a piece of spaghetti that had been cooked 5 days ago, would it still be limp and flexible?

[Blackwater 53393]

If cooked spaghetti is allowed to dry out it will get hard again.  It won’t taste as good if cooked again because some of the starch will be cooked out the first time.

[Pat Riot]

If kept in Rubbermaid or Tupperware probably not. 

[Alpo]

That's what I thought. Every time I saw the movie - that scene - I was thinking that it shouldn't be limp.

 

Okay, next question. How would you make steam, in movie effects?

 

Not dry ice. Dry ice gets wet and it's like fog crawling up over the edge of the pan and then rolls over the side and sinks down. That doesn't look like steam. I'm thinking something that looks like you've got water in excess of 212 degrees in the container. So there's steam rising. After he strained the spaghetti using the tennis racket he picked up another pan off the stove, which has the sauce in it and there was steam rising off the pan when he picked it up.

 

I'm sure they don't actually use boiling water. That just seems too dangerous. Somebody concentrating hard on remembering their lines and misses their cup with the coffee and pours scalding coffee all over their hand.

[Alpo]

Just now, Pat Riot said:

If kept in Rubbermaid or Tupperware probably not. 

I'm guessing that they took some fresh cooked spaghetti and put it on the tennis racket just before they shot the scene. But this was supposed to have been lying on the kitchen counter in the open air for the past week.

[Pat Riot]

9 minutes ago, Alpo said:

I'm guessing that they took some fresh cooked spaghetti and put it on the tennis racket just before they shot the scene. But this was supposed to have been lying on the kitchen counter in the open air for the past week.

Yuck! Yeah, I’ll bet it was hard. 

[WOLFY]

steam on set  =. smoke machine

Edited September 25 by WOLFY

[Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619]

It's a great movie. Never thought about the old strand of spaghetti. If I can accept Winchester 92s as the main rifle of the Old West, I can handle a limp piece of dry spaghetti.....

 

I'll notice it next time, maybe. I watch it every few years; last did a couple ago.

 

"Shut up and deal!"

[Smokin Gator SASS #29736]

When I make spaghetti I put the extra pasta in a bowl and give it a spray of the canned olive oil or whatever I have. Cover the bowl and put it in the fridge.  It keeps it from getting all stuck clumped together.  

[Sgt. C.J. Sabre, SASS #46770]

20 hours ago, Smokin Gator SASS #29736 said:

When I make spaghetti I put the extra pasta in a bowl and give it a spray of the canned olive oil or whatever I have. Cover the bowl and put it in the fridge.  It keeps it from getting all stuck clumped together.  

I just add a little water to the bowl and it does the same thing. 

As another observation to Alpo's original point, that T.V. and the movies gets Stuff wrong: Whenever they find a discarded contact lense, it's still soft and formed. In real life, if a soft contact lense is removed and exposed to the air, it dries out and shrivels up into a little hard plastic bit that doesn't look like a contact at all.