The Real Reason Your Spaghetti Spoon Has A Hole In It

Let us know if this predicament sounds a little too familiar: You're cooking spaghetti and meatballs for yourself and a few friends, and have to play a guessing game as to just how much pasta should go in the pot. Too much and you're left cramming the leftover noodles in the back of the fridge for later use — or worse, they go into trash. Too little and people are left with wondering why they're being served a bowl full of bolognese sauce with a few sad strands of spaghetti. Fret no more, pasta lovers, a handy solution to this query is likely hiding in plain sight every time you cook spaghetti — look no further than your spaghetti spoon.

More specifically, it's the hole in your spaghetti spoon that will help you determine just how much pasta you should cook. 

It turns out the hole in the middle of many spaghetti spoons is perfect for measuring out a single serving of pasta (via Cosmopolitan UK). Just use it to measure out how much pasta you should cook based on how many people will be dining. How's that for a pasta hack?

While this might seem like something that Italian grandmothers have probably known about for years, the pasta trick didn't catch fire until Imgur user PolarChi tipped off the Internet with a photo demonstrating the spoon's secret use. From then, it didn't take long for the masses to react with pure facepalm that they hadn't been using their spaghetti spoons correctly all along. One gobsmacked person tweeted, "How have I lived for 39 years and I always just thought that hole was to drain the water?!?!" Another confessed, "Just had my mind blown by the revelation that the hole in a spaghetti spoon is approximately equal to one serving." 

Of course, there are deniers of this seemingly perfect solution to a pasta predicament. As Metro points out, all pasta ladles are not created equally and some have small holes or slits that would be useless in measuring out portion sizes. Their argument — and one that admittedly does make a lot of sense — is that the hole is simply for draining the pasta. Perhaps the best solution is to just use a pasta spoon that does have a single hole so you can measure and drain your spaghetti.