From restaurant menus to the grocery aisle, you can find pasta in many shapes: ears, elbows, and bows. But they were all imperfect in the eyes and mouth of award-winning podcast guest Dan Pashman.
He is the creator and host of The Sporkful, a gastronomic podcast he created after being fired from his job on the radio. In the podcast, he embarked on a five-part series called “Mission Impastable,” his crusade to design a new form of pasta, hoping to set aside his less-favorite noodle.
“I mean, look. Spaghetti is fine. 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 much and I just think we can do better,” Pashman told CBS’s Nancy Chen News.
Pashman’s search began at the same source with a trip to North Dakota, where most of the country’s wheat is found for pasta. This was where he met semolina, the flour he used to make his pasta.
Throughout his journey to create the perfect shape of dough, Pashman created three metrics by which he judges all forms of dough.
“So the ease for the fork, how easy is it to get it on the fork and keep it there? Salinity. How easily does the sauce adhere? And the absorption of teeth, how satisfying it is to sink into it.” teeth? And a lot of toothpaste shapes are excellent at one or two of those three things. But very few nail them all, “Pashman said.
Even armed with her own vocabulary, Pashman’s idea quickly turned out to be harder than she ever imagined as she struggled to get a pasta dye company to take it seriously. Then, he received another hurdle: the shape of pasta he had designed turned out to be physically impossible.
“I wanted this combination of mafalda and bucatini, so it had a tube component and a steering wheel component,” he said. “But the dough only goes through the dye for a fraction of a second.”
Pasta had taken over Pashman’s life as he added nearly $ 10,000 of his own money to the project. He spent his time sketching pasta shapes on graph paper at his daughter’s football practice and woke up at night thinking about pasta.
But thousands of pastas later, those sketches became the real business when the cascatelli was finally born in the Sfoglini pasta factory in New York’s Hudson Valley. Cascatelli means waterfall in Italian.
Pashman pasta has a more extended cut than most short shapes, so it’s easier to grab it with a fork. It’s a half tube of bucatini with ruffles to create what he calls a “gravy sauce” and something rare in pasta.
“You have these steering wheels at a 90 ° angle. That means any direction you bite will get resistance. You’ll be able to sink your teeth into it,” he said.
Pashman’s new noodle got along well with Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, the team of husbands and wives at New York City’s Italian restaurant Don Angie.
“I really like its texture. I think it is … it keeps the sauce very well and it definitely adheres very well to the fork,” Tacinelli said.
His pasta form even got a different seal of approval. Maria Gialanella arrived in the United States in 1961 from Italy. He now works at the Enoten Maria in Staten Island. Most people call her Nonna Maria, nonna which means “grandmother” because she cooks for everyone as if they were apart of her family.
“They’re good, good,” he said as he chewed on Pashman’s new noodles. “No, beautiful.”
Pashman’s first batch of 3,700 boxes of Cascatelli sold out online, but he told CBS News that more have been made and will be available to order on his website.