Never Overcook Pasta Again With Help From Barilla's Spotify Playlists

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Both professional and home-kitchen chefs acknowledge the wisdom of setting timers for properly cooked food. Some say it's especially crucial for relatively quick-cooking soft foods requiring al dente structure, like pasta. Almost nobody likes mushy, gummy, or soggy pasta noodles, typically a result of excessively long swims in boiling-hot water. Timing is everything, and even a few seconds could cross the line from fantastic to failure. That's why a peculiar pasta-timing technique has recently gone viral on X.

This could become a favorite way to spend those nine to 11 minutes required for perfectly cooked pasta, depending on the type and brand. In this case, it's Barilla spaghetti, penne, fusilli, and linguine. Rather than waiting in bored silence while your pasta simmers and bubbles, and potentially overcooking it, there's a Spotify playlist devoted entirely to cooking those four shapes of Barilla pasta. Each song is precisely timed to start and end in the exact number of minutes it takes to reach al dente nirvana. 

If you imagine a style of music not to your liking, the Barilla company has you covered, to a certain extent. Each of the four pastas has two separate devoted playlists, each in a genre to fit a customer's mood. They include styles ranging from pop to hip hop, classic, indie, top hits, and more. Here's a peek inside that Spotify world of quirky noodle-groovin.

It's worth noting that these playlists have been perched on Spotify for a while, but they've suddenly bubbled into the X viral-sphere. Every good idea deserves its moment in the glaring spotlight, so here's a shine on the four categories of Barilla noodle-tunes. In keeping with the Italian origins of the company, many artists in the collections have roots in or connections to Italy's music scene.  

First up is the spaghetti collection, with two playlists in two genres, each lasting the exact nine minutes it takes to cook al dente Barilla spaghetti. Leaning toward hip hop and other edgy tunes is a collection called Mixtape Spaghetti, featuring artists and DJs such as Jay Z, DJ Premier, Neffa, DJ Lugi, and Ernia. The alternative choice is the Top Hits Spaghetti, showcasing music from Shawn Mendes, Mara Sattei, Cesare Cremonini, and Italian rap star Coez.  

Next on the Barilla Spotify playlist is fusilli, which apparently fares best with 11 minutes of stovetop boiling — and 11 minutes of music. One option is a hip hop playlist called Boom Bap Fusilli featuring the likes of MF Doom, known for his mysterious masked persona, and Sfera Ebbasta, an Italian rapper with almost 5 million Instagram followers and billions of streams. A separate, optional 11-minute playlist grouping falls under the title of Timeless Emotion Fusilli, bringing the nostalgia in a remastered version of "Help!" by The Beatles and songs by Cat Stevens, Mina, and Luigi Tenco.

Movin' and groovin' to the power of penne is easy with a Barilla playlist titled Pleasant Melody Penne. You'll barely notice the 11 minutes of Barilla penne pasta cooking when swaying to tunes from Fiona Apple, I Cani, and Italian artists Fulminacci, Colapesce, and Dimartino. If that's not your cooking mood of the evening, check out Best Song Penne, featuring "Treat People With Kindness" by Harry Styles. There's also some love from Elodi, Dua Lipa, and more. 

Finally, linguine gets some well-deserved attention with 10 minutes of indie songs, timed to finish your listening with a steaming plate of "to the tooth" al dente linguine. The first Spotify playlist in this collection is called Moody Day Linguine, which broadens the perspective with offerings from American multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. He's joined by other indie-style artists including Tutti Fenomeni, Birthh, and Calcutta. For a change of pace, there's the timed playlist presenting as Simply Classics Linguine. You'll likely recognize some true classics such as "God Only Knows" from The Beach Boys, plus a remaster of the 2011 gem from The Smiths, "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want." If what you want is linguine, you're in luck. 

Maybe rocking out to Spotify isn't your thing when cooking, but it's certainly worth a try — even if just to get perfectly timed, soft-yet-structured al dente pasta. As an X contributor puts it, "Press play, drop the noodles, music stops, al dente noodles."