Have you ever wondered what mountaineers cook up at thousands of meters in altitude?
Why pasta is not part of the menu.
There are things that you rarely think about.
Very few of us deal with what mountaineers
cook and eat
up
on the mountain
.
One wonders what equipment they are out and about, how cold it is up there and whether their toes have frozen to death.
Cooking on the mountain: can you prepare pasta on Mount Everest?
But the question of food is also quite exciting: in fact,
mountaineers
can
not cook pasta at a certain height *.
Can you explain why?
The question came up a few years ago during a conversation with
extreme mountaineer Reinhold Messner
, as reported by nordbayern.de.
He must know, as the first person to stand on the peaks of all fourteen eight-thousanders - and that without bottled oxygen.
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Why can't you cook spaghetti on a mountain like Mount Everest?
The answer is provided by physics: water only boils
at 100 degrees
at
normal pressure at sea level
.
The lower the external pressure, the lower the boiling temperature.
According to SWR knowledge
, the
boiling point
drops
by one degree for
every 300 meters of altitude
.
The water molecules need less energy at altitude to escape into the air.
Nothing else happens when boiling water.
At a mountain height of 2,000 meters, for example, water boils at
93 degrees
.
And on Mount Everest?
At an
altitude of 8,800 meters, water boils at 70 degrees
and not just 100 degrees, which we are used to from everyday kitchen life.
And there we have the dilemma for extreme mountaineers: Noodles like spaghetti have to be cooked at 100 degrees, otherwise
they won't be
cooked
.
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Tip for a holiday at the mountain hut: cook pasta longer
For those of us who
want to cook
in a cozy
mountain hut
, this physical peculiarity shouldn't pose too much of a problem.
At 1,000 to 2,000 meters above sea level, pasta can still be cooked well.
You have to note, however, that the
water temperature is
lower and the spaghetti takes longer to become al dente.
(mad) * Merkur.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editors network.
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