From restaurant menus to the food aisle, you can find pasta in many shapes – ears, elbows, even bow ties. But they were all imperfect in the eyes and mouth of the podcast host Dan Pashman.
He is the creator and host of The Sporkful, a food podcast he created after being fired from his radio station. On the podcast, he began a five-part series called “Impastable Mission” – his crusade to create a new form of pasta, hoping to drive away his least favorite noodle.
“I mean, look. Spaghetti is okay. I’ll eat any pasta you put in front of me if I’m hungry. But it’s just a tube. It doesn’t do too much and I think we can do better,” he said. Pashman for Nancy Chen of CBS News.
Pashman’s search began right from the source with a trip to North Dakota, where most of the country’s wheat for pasta is located. There he learned about semolina, the flour he used to make his pasta.
Throughout his journey to create the perfect shape of pasta, Pashman created three values by which he judges all forms of pasta.
“So the ability to fork, how easy is it to take the fork and keep it there? Sauceability. How easily does the sauce stick? The shapes are great for one or two of these three things. But very few nails all three, “Pashman said.
Even armed with his own vocabulary, Pashman’s idea quickly proved more difficult than he had ever imagined, as he struggled to get a company of pasta dyes to take seriously. Then he was hit with another obstacle – the shape of the pasta he designed proved to be physically impossible.
“I wanted this combination of mafalda and bucatini, so that it has a tube component and a steering wheel component,” he said. “But the dough goes through the paint in just a fraction of a second.”
Pasta took over Pashman’s life, while taking out nearly $ 10,000 of his own money in the project. He spent his time sketching pasta shapes on graph paper at his daughter’s football training and stayed awake at night thinking about pasta.
But thousands of pieces of pasta later, those sketches became the real deal when Cascatelli was finally born inside the Sfoglini pasta factory in New York’s Hudson Valley. Cascatelli means waterfall in Italian.
Pashman pasta has a wider cut than most short shapes, so it’s easier to catch with a fork. It’s a half-tube kitchen with ruffles to create what he calls a “sauce gutter” and something that’s rare in pasta.
“You have these steering wheels at a 90 ° angle. That means that no matter which direction you bite, you will get resistance. You will be able to sink your teeth into it,” he said.
Pashman’s new noodle correlated well with Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, the husband and wife team behind New York’s Italian restaurant, Don Angie.
“I really like its texture. I think it is … it keeps the sauce very well and it certainly sticks very well to the fork,” Tacinelli said.
Its pasta form even received a nonna approval seal. Maria Gialanella came to the United States in 1961 from Italy. He now works at Enoteca Maria in Staten Island. Most people call her Nonna Maria, nonna meaning “grandmother” because she cooks for everyone as if she were apart from her family.
“Well, well,” she said as she chewed on Pashman’s new noodle. – No, beautiful.
Pashman’s first batch of 3,700 boxes of Cascatelli was sold online, but he told CBS News that more have been made and will be available for order on his website.