From restaurant menus to grocery aisles, you can find pasta in various shapes – ears, elbows and bow ties. But they were all imperfect in the eyes and mouth of award-winning podcast host Dan Pashman.
He is the creator and host of The Sporkful, a food podcast he created after being fired from his radio job. On the podcast, he started a five-part series called “Mission Impastable” – his quest to create a new pasta format, hoping to put aside his least favorite pasta.
“I mean, look. Spaghetti is fine. I’ll eat whatever 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 News ‘Nancy Chen.
Pashman’s search started at the very source, with a trip to North Dakota, home to most of the country’s noodle wheat. It was there that he discovered semolina, the flour with which he made his pasta.
Throughout his journey to create the perfect form of dough, Pashman has created three metrics by which he judges all forms of dough.
“So, forks, how easy is it to put it on the fork and keep it there? Sausage capacity. How easily does the sauce stick? And the ability to stick your teeth, which is how satisfying it is to stick your teeth and a lot of pasta the shapes are great in one or two of these three things. But very few get all three right, “said Pashman.
Even armed with his own vocabulary, Pashman’s idea quickly proved more difficult than he ever imagined, as he struggled to get a pasta dye company to take him seriously. Then he was hit by another obstacle – the mass shape he had designed proved to be physically impossible.
“I wanted this combination of mafalda and bucatini, so that it had a tubular component and a ruffled component”, he said. “But the dough only goes through the dye for a fraction of a second.”
Pasta took control of Pashman’s life when he invested nearly $ 10,000 of his own money in the project. He spent his time drawing dough shapes on graph paper at his daughter’s soccer practice and would stay up at night thinking in droves.
But thousands of pieces of dough later, these sketches became the real deal when the cascatelli was finally born inside the Sfoglini Pasta Factory in the Hudson Valley in New York. Cascatelli means waterfall in Italian.
Pashman pasta comes with a longer cut than most short shapes, so it’s easier to grab with a fork. It is a half tube of bucatini with ruffles to create what he calls “sauce trough” and something rare in the dough.
“You have these ruffles at a 90 ° angle. That means that in any direction from which you bite, you will have resistance. You will be able to sink your teeth into it,” he said.
Pashman’s new noodles got on well with Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, the husband and wife team behind New York City’s esteemed Italian restaurant, Don Angie.
“I like the texture very much. I think it is … it holds the sauce very well and it definitely sticks to the fork very well,” said Tacinelli.
Its noodle shape still received a seal of approval from nonna. Maria Gialanella came from Italy to the United States in 1961. She now works at Enoteca Maria on Staten Island. Most people call her Nonna Maria, nonna which means “grandma” because she cooks for everyone as if they were part of their family.
“They’re good, good,” she said as she chewed on Pashman’s new noodles. “It’s not pretty.”
Pashman’s first batch of 3,700 boxes of Cascatelli sold out online, but he told CBS News that more have been done and will be available to order on his website.