Strange spaghetti-cooking device? Or was I dreaming?

Last night I fell asleep in front of the tv. As some point, I woke up (I think) in the middle of an informercial for a device to cook spaghetti. It was a clear cylinder, tall enough to take unbroken strands of spaghetti. It looked you like just dumped dry spaghetti in, filled the cylinder with boiling water, and waited a while. Then strain and dump out perfectly cooked spaghetti. I fuzzed back asleep in a few minutes without thinking to write down name or phone number. :frowning:

Well, I’m skeptical, but it would be nice to be able to cook up just one or two servings of pasta without using a pot and a colander. But I’ve just spent a halfhour trying to find the device with no luck. I’ve scanned several infomercial lists without finding anything that sounds even remotely like what I saw, and googling on spaghetti and cooking and such just keep turning up those pans with build in sieve tops.

So:

  1. Has anyone else seen this commercial? Or was I really still asleep?

  2. If so, do you know the true name of the device so I can track it down?

  3. Has anyone actually used/seen one of these things being used? Does it really work, iow?

Thanks!

And just having to use a cynlinder & lid, making it so much more simple? :dubious:

  1. I have not seen the commercial, but I’ve heard mention of these devices before.

  2. Pasta Pronto!

  3. I’ve heard they work very well.

That’s it! That’s exactly it!

I guess I should have searched on ‘pasta’ instead of ‘spaghetti.’

Off to order myself one…

Well, it looks like a lot easier clean up to me. Groovy!

I can’t see that it’d save any time. You still have to boil the water, and let the water and pasta sit to cook - and I expect it’d take longer to cook the pasta since the water isn’t being kept boiling hot.

To each his/her own. Myself, I know I’d rather pour boiling water out of a pot into a nice big colander rather than try to get it into a narrow cylinder. Were I to try the latter I would do one or more of the following:

Spill boiling water all over the place
Burn myself
Drop the cylinder

Seems to me it would take at least as long in the cylinder as in the pot – the time-consuming part is boiling the water.

OK, I cannot figure this out at all. How on earth can a narrow tube stay hot enough for long enough to remotely cook the pasta? Let alone the matter of the pasta not moving and therefore the potential for it not cooking evenly.

And “Great for sasuages”?!

What’s wrong with using a kettle to boil the water? Well, for the smaller version at least…

I know there was a thread about this not too long ago, but I can’t seem to find it. General consensus was that it was a pretty silly idea and unlikely to work better than the standard method of cooking spaghetti.

I’d be prepared to give it a try, but they don’t ship to Australia. :rolleyes: That always happens.

Someone on another message board said that (s)he used to cook spaghetti in a thermos for hiking, and it always came out well-cooked and not sticky. So if that’s true, I suppose this thing could work. Not that I’d want to use it, still, but it could work.

Sounds just like the asparagus cooker Mrs. Gnu wants so much.

I’ve seen that commercial, and it looks like complete crap. Their own elapsed time video shows the spaghetti expanding and sticking out of the water, and therefore becoming undercooked. With no heat source generating a strong convection current in the water, the spaghetti will not get moved around, and is very likely to stick together and become undercooked in that way as well. And with such a small volume of water, the excess starch remains on the spaghetti and makes it too sticky.

It’s one thing to pour boiling water in a Cup-'O-Soup polystyrene cup and wait a couple of minutes for the ramen noodles to soften (and another thing to eat it), but to cook real pasta in that thing? I’m dubious, too. It might work with angel-hair spaghetti, but I doubt it would with anything thicker, like linguini. Ziti? Fuhgeddaboudit!

There was a GQ thread a few months ago.

I can’t imagine trying to get it clean.

I came to the same conclusion as soon as I realized you had to add boiling water. It cooks in “just eight minutes!” Yeah, um, that’s how long it takes in a pan too, once the water boils. How do you even eat full size strands of spagetti anyway? wrap it around the fork then shove the 3" mass into your mouth and attempt to chew?

Errrrrm…I wrap strands around my fork and put the perfectly sensible size mass into my mouth. Isn’t this the way everyone does it, beyond the age of about 10? :stuck_out_tongue:

I have one of those fancy stainless steel pasta cookers with the inner container acting as the colander. What I actually use is my wok - it uses less water, boils faster and because of the huge surface area the pasta just spreads out over the surface. I don’t have to take it off the stove to get the pasta out - just scoop it out with a strainer. Great for cooking for one.