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Several years ago, Dan Pashman, host of the James Beard and Webby Award winning podcast “Sporkful”, set out to create a new form of pasta. And not just any form of pasta. Pashman wanted to do the ideal pasta shape. It had to have the perfect bite, an appealing texture, and contain the right amount of sauce. Sounds simple enough, right?
Well, Pashman’s new “Sporkful” five-episode series called “Mission: ImPASTAble” tells a different story, very funny and very informative. Throughout the series, Pashman takes a trip to the Pasta Lab at North Dakota State University; had a number of heated debates with food professionals, including Francis Lam of “The Splendid Table”, on existing pasta shapes; and has a conversation with Giovanni Cannata, the only pasta mold maker working in America today.
“There have been so many emotional ups and downs,” he told Salon in a recent interview. “You will hear my wife running out of patience with this whole mission. My kids are a part of it. I literally am brought to tears on more than one occasion. You will learn a lot about pasta making, why this project took almost three years. years old and you’re going to laugh hysterically because a lot of things go wrong in a very, very funny way. ”
In the end, it looks like the trip was worth it. Pashman’s new form is called ‘cascatelli’, which means ‘waterfalls’ in Italian, and it’s been causing a stir in the food world since its release earlier this month. Distributed for $ 4.99 a pound by cult American pasta maker Sfoglini, it’s currently out of stock.
“We are very grateful for the incredible response to our new form of pasta!” Sfoglini’s website said. “Due to high demand, orders placed now for Cascatelli will ship in approximately 10 weeks. We really appreciate your patience. We promise it will be worth the wait!”
In the meantime, Pashman spoke with Salon about the process of making a better pasta shape, the three qualities by which he judges existing noodles, and his trip to the Pasta Lab.
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity and length.
I guess we should start from the beginning. When did you wake up and say, “OK, do we need a better form of pasta?”
Well, I’ve listened to some of the flagship podcast series from the mid-2010s, especially Alex Blumberg’s “Planet Money” t-shirt series and “StartUp” series. That sort of multi-episode stuff that was so big back then like “Serial”. And I thought, “Someday I want to do my version of this.”
You know, as a creative person, you hear other people doing cool things in your field, and you know you want to try and do it someday. The obvious thought was, “I should create food,” but then what should food be? I had a few criteria: I wanted it to be a simple, basic food that everyone knows, loves and has opinions about. I didn’t want to do something that looked like a fancy specialty ingredient. Next thing: I wanted this to be an inexpensive, stable food that could ship nationwide, if not the world, because I wanted as many “Sporkful” listeners as possible to participate in the final product and make it happen. -in part.
So pasta – even slightly expensive pasta – is an affordable luxury for a lot of people, and it met those criteria. And the pasta shapes looked like something a lot of people don’t think about and I felt like it was ripe for innovation. And one of my favorite parts of hosting the “Sporkful” podcast is that when I’m kind of a nerd into ridiculous details about the intricacies of a specific food, one of the reactions I love, is that I I knew I had such strong opinions about it. ”
I love this reaction, because it’s like you have an awareness of yourself and an awareness of food. Like, “Oh, this food that I’ve been eating all this time, I care a lot about it.” And I felt like the pasta shapes would be that sort of thing.
I think a big part of that, too, is developing a language to talk about what we like or don’t like about something. For example, you use three qualities to talk about pasta shapes. Could you talk about that a bit?
Yes. So there’s the “fork,” which is how easy it is to get a pasta shape on your fork and keep it there. There’s “sausability,” which is how well a sauce sticks to it. And then there’s the “dental plethora,” which is how satisfying it is to sink your teeth in. I mean, I basically made up these pseudoscientific words, but I think they capture a lot of what makes some pasta shapes better than others.
I think there are a lot of shapes that are really good for some of these things, but very few do all three. I think one of the hilarious parts of this series – if you listen to all five podcast episodes you have these recurring characters starting to use those words more and more without me having to tell them. It goes into the vocabulary of people around me, and it’s very hilarious to me.
Can you tell us about your trip to the Pasta Lab at North Dakota State University?
I mean, it was a lot of fun. I knew very early on that I wanted to go. I loved the idea of starting the trip in North Dakota because that doesn’t seem like the most obvious place to start a pasta story. But this place is a journey. I mean, they know all about durum wheat. They could talk about durum for years before they run out of things to say.
So North Dakota is where most of the durum wheat that goes into pasta is grown. And they said they’re always developing new varieties of durum wheat at North Dakota State University’s Pasta Lab. So I have to meet the whole research team working there and see what they’re up to in the lab.
They literally cook pasta in beakers – you know, there are test tubes and they wear lab coats. If you were to write a sketch called “Pasta Lab” this is what it would look like, but it’s actually real. The most amazing thing they have is what’s called a texture analyzer, which measures the bite force, or the exact amount of pressure it takes to bite, say, five strands of spaghetti and the pasta you have in it. put.
I was just super excited to see him in person. And I was like, “Oh, my God, are you going to test my pasta in this machine when I get it?” And they were very happy to – they’re like pasta nerds.
So this is a two part question. Getting back to those three qualities – ‘fork’, ‘sausage’ and ‘tooth crowding’ – what was an existing pasta shape that you thought was close to being ideal for these? And what was the process to build on that?
So, very early on, I began to eat all forms of pasta to put my teeth into it. I’ve been around the New York metro area in specialty stores, and have had as many obscure shapes as I can get. I ate and ate and ate all different shapes. I had a few before, but wanted to get them all in some sort of quick succession and really catalog the attributes. Do I like the ruffles? Do I like straight edges? Do I like ridges? Tubes? Long? Short? Curls? Twirls? All of these different things.
Across all the shapes, the one I landed on that I really, really loved was the one called mafaldine. If you imagine a fettuccine noodle with ruffles around the edges, or like a lasagna but narrow enough to wrap around a fork. So, we liked that as a base canvas. Then another form I like was bucatini – and I was a bit anti-bucatini, but people are going crazy about it. Then I realized it was really awesome, so my initial idea was to combine the best of mafaldine with bucatini and a few other frills – so ruffles and a tube component and a few other things. This is how I moved forward.
Okay, so the resulting pasta – what does it look like?
The shape is called cascatelli, which means waterfalls. I want to acknowledge to Italian speakers that I know the correct plural would be “cascatelle”, ending in an “e”, but I decided to take a little poetic license, because the “I” sounded more like a form noun classic pasta.
I would describe the shape as a whole as a curved comma or half a heart. On the one hand, there are shuttlecocks, and in the space between the two, you have a canoe, a kind of half-tube that just traps the sauce. It’s incredible.
So a potentially controversial question, but what form of pasta do you think is overrated?
Well, like I say in the podcast, spaghetti right off the bat. I know it’s iconic. I know this is historically significant, and this is the original form of pasta. But that also means it’s a bit primitive. It’s just a tube that doesn’t do anything, so it doesn’t hold the sauce particularly well. It has a very small surface compared to the volume. It’s not very tactile and you can’t really get your teeth into it. You can spin it on your fork, and that’s fine. But you’ll get some splash, and it’s just not great. I feel a bit the same about linguini.
For example, if I want to have long shapes, fettuccine is so much better than spaghetti or linguine. The best-known shapes are often those that have been around the longest and have been mass-produced the longest. So I think there is room for new ideas and new perspectives. That being said, I’m not here to destroy classic pasta shapes. I love pasta. I will eat any pasta you give me, and there is room in the world for many forms of pasta to coexist.
If people are curious about the full story of “Mission: ImPASTAble” and want to dig deeper into this process, where can they find it?
Wherever you find your podcasts! The “Sporkful” series is out now, and I really hope people will check it out. Because while it is obviously exciting to see this enormous response to our form, the story behind the creation of the form is even more incredible. There were so many emotional ups and downs. You will hear my wife running out of patience with this whole mission. My children are part of it. I have literally been brought to tears on more than one occasion. You’ll learn a lot about making pasta, why this project lasted almost three years, and you’ll laugh hysterically because a lot of things go wrong in a very, very funny way.
You can listen to all five episodes of “Mission: ImPASTAble” here.
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