Physicists stirred up controversy with scientific cooking tips in 2025

Scientists’ new recipes for a classic pasta dish and hard-boiled eggs were among the most talked about science stories of 2025, provoking delight and fury in equal measure.

In January, Ivan Di Terlizzi of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and colleagues reported their analysis of how to make perfect cacio e pepe pasta sauce, a silky emulsion of black pepper, pecorino cheese and water that is famously difficult to get without lumps. The secret, according to the team, is to add a pinch of cornstarch.

This discovery was based on meticulous testing of hundreds of different sauces with minor differences in the proportions of cheese, starch and water, which helped Di Terlizzi and his team draw detailed graphs and diagrams showing when the sauce was likely to be free of lumps. But despite this scientific justification, their results have proven controversial, particularly in the researchers’ home country of Italy.

“Because we’re talking about Italian recipes, some comments on social media weren’t really enthusiastic, saying, ‘We’ve been making these recipes for years now; these scientists want to teach us how to do new things; cooking should be more about love than science,'” says Di Terlizzi.

The response from the scientific community has been more largely positive, Di Terlizzi says, with colleagues stopping him in the hallways of physics conferences to enthusiastically ask questions about their paper. In September, Di Terlizzi and his colleagues won one of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes, a tongue-in-cheek competition for scientific work that makes you laugh, then think. “It’s about finding an order in the world that looks like disorder if you don’t look at it very closely with the eyes of rigor and mathematics,” explains Di Terlizzi.

In February, Ernesto Di Maio of the University of Naples, Italy, and colleagues developed a new method for cooking perfectly boiled eggs that requires at least half an hour of careful cooking. This is because the egg must be transferred between pans of 30°C (86°F) water and boiling water every 2 minutes for eight cycles, so that the white and yolk, which set at different temperatures, cook evenly.

The recipe proved popular online, but some social media users complained that it took too long to prepare for what is usually a quick meal. The media coverage resulted in some publicity in unexpected places, including a live cooking demonstration on Japan’s main public television channel and a question referencing the egg recipe in the Italian version of the TV quiz show. Who wants to become a millionaire? “I just returned from Washington, DC, where I participated in a research management workshop and cooked eggs for 30 people at an ambassador’s home,” Di Maio says.

Some of the scientific theory the team used to perfect its egg-cooking technique is now being repurposed for more practical use, Di Maio says, which involves producing layers of plastic by hardening a single material at different sequential temperatures, similar to those of the egg.

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