Can you cook pasta with the gas turned off? This is now a pressing question for me — and millions of Italians — as the Kremlin weaponises natural gas in an effort to punish Ukraine’s allies.

With Gazprom squeezing gas supplies to Europe and fuel bills surging, Italy has urged its citizens to save energy with “virtuous actions” such as shorter showers, turning the heating down, and running washing machines and dishwashers fully loaded. What caught my eye, though, was the official advice to lower the flames on stoves once water pots are boiling — a seemingly cryptic guideline that Italians immediately understood as an instruction to use less gas while cooking pasta.

As a reluctant cook, I often rely on pasta for quick meals, making it according to the traditional Italian method in an uncovered pot of vigorously boiling water. Yet I’m acutely conscious that European energy consumers are financing Russia’s war machine. This summer, every salad I made felt like an act of solidarity with Ukraine. But with my energy bills still rising, and winter coming soon, I need to find out whether it’s possible to cook pasta in a more energy-efficient manner.

According to Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist, Giorgio Parisi, the answer is definitely yes. In a recent Facebook post, Parisi advised that pasta can be cooked on a low flame if the pot is covered to stop the heat from dissipating. Prominent architect Alessandro Busiri Vici went further still, insisting pasta can be cooked with the flame off completely — so-called “passive cooking” — further reducing gas use. The trick, Busiri Vici wrote, was to boil water, add the pasta, keep the water at full boil for two minutes, then close the flame, keeping the pot covered for the rest of the cooking time.

In fact, Dario Bressanini — a chemistry professor who also makes videos exploring the science of food — has been promoting “pasta without fire” since long before the current energy crisis. “It is not the boiling that cooks the pasta,” explained Bressanini in 2017. “We only need the thermal energy already trapped in the water.”

I’m not one to argue with prominent scientists. But I still called Vicky Bennison, producer of the cult YouTube channel, Pasta Grannies, which features videos of elderly Italian women hand-making pasta with treasured family recipes. Bennison, who has documented more than 400 pasta-makers, said her household cooks typically “weren’t that fussed” about keeping the water at a rollicking boil, and mostly just simmered their pasta. They also tend to economise by using the smallest saucepan and as little water as necessary, to save on cooking costs.

“Gas has always been expensive in Italy and the grandmothers that I film have always grown up with frugality on their minds,” she told me. She also suggested the vigorous boil wasn’t so much about cooking the pasta, but keeping the pieces from sticking together — something her Pasta Grannies avoided by regular stirring. However, she said she’d never seen any of them extinguish the flame completely, and was sceptical. “Technically it may be possible, but is it any good?” she asked.

There was only one way to find out. My 10-year-old daughter scoffed when I announced my plan to experiment with “passive cooking”. “I’m not having a yuck dinner,” she informed me. “If it fails, you can eat it.” I decided to start with what I felt would be the toughest test: Rigatoni — a thick tubular pasta with a 13 to 15-minutes cooking time. The outcome, as I’d suspected, was poor: the pasta was unpleasantly gloopy outside and uncooked inside. Into the bin it went.

But according to Bressanini, many factors can affect no-boil cooking, from the pasta type to the pot and the lid, and most critically, how fast the water cools — so he urges efficiency-seeking cooks to keep trying.

My next attempt was with spaghettoni quadrati: long and thin like spaghetti but square, with a shorter cooking time than rigatoni. I made a control batch on a low flame with simmering water, and another with the flame turned off after the initial two-minute boil.

The two were virtually indistinguishable. I tossed the cooked pasta with fresh tomatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper, and then, dear readers, I ate it. Delicious.

amy.kazmin@ft.com