The idea is simple but genius: Boil a pot of salted water, throw in your pasta of choice, groove to the playlist—et voilà: the perfect al dente noodles for you to enjoy!
Twitter is the best social media platform ever. And I’ll willingly die on that hill. It may be a cesspool at times, but on most days it’s a veritable trove of information, from brain rot inducing ones to those that are actually worthwhile.
Yesterday, for instance, while doom scrolling on the app, I chanced upon a rather quirky yet practical (and totally random) bit of information: popular pasta brand Barilla has a Spotify playlist! And no, they’re not compilations of the best music to listen to while eating your favorite pasta dish. Instead, the playlists have a more utilitarian purpose: ensuring that you cook your pasta right. And by that, we mean to al dente perfection.
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Yes, fellow pasta lovers, Barilla has put together several Spotify playlists for each of its most popular varieties! The purpose of which is to help you cook your noodles perfectly, while also helping you vibe amid the heat of your kitchen. I’m sure some of you have struggled with a soggy batch of linguine before, so with these playlists, my dear readers, overcooked noodles are a thing of the sad past.
Who ruins ready-to-cook, grocery-bought pasta anyway? Trust me, there are many who still struggle— boil the pasta for a minute too long and it will end up mushy; take it out a tad too early and you’re doomed to pasta that’s minutes away from al dente.
Barilla teamed up with Spotify to come up with a genius plan to ensure people get their pasta cooked to their liking. The collaboration gave birth to a set of curated and precisely timed playlists, with each pairing up with a type of pasta. The idea is simple: once your salted water is boiling, chuck the pasta in, play the corresponding playlist, and listen to it all the way through. Once it’s done, your pasta noodles are done, too!
There are a total of nine playlists, namely: Absolute Carbonara, Boom Bap Fusilli, Moody Day Linguine, Top Hits Spaghetti, Timeless Emotion Fusilli, Pleasant Melancholy Penne, Best Song Penne, Simply Classics Linguine, and the most popular, MixTape Spaghetti.
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I decided to see if it works, so for dinner last night, I opted for a simple spaghetti bolognese. I heated up a pot of salted pasta water, threw in a box of Barilla Spaghetti, and hit the play button of the MixTape Spaghetti playlist. After exactly nine minutes and three seconds, I removed the pot from the stove, strained my pasta, and tried chewing a strand. Et voilà—it was al dente, just like I want my pasta to be!
The playlists include different genres of music from pop to indie and even hip-hop, and are a mix of popular Italian songs and those that are familiar to most listeners. The Absolute Carbonara playlist, for example, has Dancing Queen from the soundtrack of the movie Mamma Mia!, while Simply Classics Linguine has God Only Knows by The Beach Boys, and Timeless Emotion Fusilli has The Beatles’ Help!
Making the playlists even more interesting, is that each of them is accompanied by unique art created by Italian artists that incorporate the 146-year-old brand’s trademark blue, yellow, and red hues and features a corresponding pasta shape.
I’ve always found joy in cooking, especially pasta dishes, which are almost a sure hit in our family. With this new discovery, I’m sure to have even more fun in the kitchen!
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