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Comment by jgh | Hacker News Reader

I guess I've never tried doing it one noodle at a time or something, cause breaking a bunch of them at once results in them broken in two. Maybe they prevent each other from snapping back enough to break again?

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Likely the way you are breaking them is different from what is described here. To do what is described in the article hold the spaghetti noodle by pressing either end to the index fingers of your hands and press inward to create a bowing effect, then continue to exert force until it snaps.

Probably what you're doing is just grabbing a handful closer to the center and folding the noodles.

You mean as a bundle? That makes sense, they'd dampen each others vibrations.

I've never bothered to break them - why would you want tiny bits of spaghetti? Also wouldn't noodles be something completely different - like when I think "noodles" I think of an Asian dish, not a plate of spaghetti.

I find breaking in two as a bunch convenient since it makes it slightly easier to manage lengths. I do smaller for my daughter (2yo) since she struggles with scooping up the long ones on her own but is fine with smaller bits.

My 2.5 year old has the opposite issue; she learned the twist-the-fork method, which doesn't work well for short noodles.

(Although, to be honest, half the time she just uses her hands.)

the noodles are something like 10-12" long so you don't really end up with tiny bits of spaghetti. It just makes it easier to cook in a smaller pot.

Take the bundle of spaghetti of spaghetti in one hand, place it vertically in the pot with boiling water, push down on the bundle from the top with your other hand. As the bottom part heats up and moistens the spaghetti will become immediately pliable and start going down and spreading out (in an appealingly geometric fashion), within a matter of seconds. You could cook 10" spaghetti, whole, in a 5" diameter pot with no problems.

Noodle is from a German root so not sure why you think of "noodles" as Asian.

I break spaghetti in half when I'm going to be stirring the cooked pasta into vegetables as opposed to serving a sauce on top of it.

Just looking around and this seems like it's a US-UK english difference: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2015/08/nood...

And the reason I figured this would be weird is that long pasta is easy to eat with a fork. Probably not worth dwelling on this though as it's offtopic so people are downvoting :D

It's called a "spaghetti noodle", like in the subheading of the article.

*in the US (but not necessarily in other English speaking countries)

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