You have lots of strong opinions about how different foods should be eaten or served. Was there a tipping point that led you to remaster pasta, aside from not liking the shapes that currently existed?
Part of it was just that I wanted to tell a big epic story on my podcast. I thought trying to invent a food would be full of ups and downs, and I didn’t know where it would lead, and I didn’t know whether it would work. But I figured if it’s a big success or a total failure, it’ll make for a good story.
Once I decided I wanted to try to invent a new food, I was thinking a lot about my frustrations with a lot of the traditional pasta shapes. But also some of the factors were that I wanted it to be something that was shelf stable, that was inexpensive, something that could easily be shared with people all over the country, all over North America, if not all over the world. I didn’t want it to just be some sort of precious boutique-y thing that was in three markets in trendy neighborhoods. And so pasta is something that everybody knows, everybody mostly loves and has opinions about. It just felt like it fit with my personality and the kind of storytelling that I like to do.
Well it was very successful! What were the various iterations of cascatelli?
I started eating every obscure pasta shape I could get my hands on and just sort of get my teeth on, I should say, and just isolating variables. Do I like ruffles or ridges? Do I like long or short? Do I like tubes? Do I like curls? And just kind of isolating the different properties of shapes and trying to focus on what I like the best.
Mafalde was a big one for me because I always loved that shape, but eating that one in my research really made me realize how great ruffles are in a pasta shape. They’re not that common, there aren’t that many shapes that have ruffles. There’s a lot more tubes and ridges, but ruffles hold sauce just as well as tubes and ridges, if not better, depending on the sauce. Plus they just create a playful texture in your mouth … And they’re just kind of fun to look at. I feel like any pasta with ruffles just feels festive. And so that was my first thing: My shape will have ruffles. Come hell or high water, there will be ruffles.
And then I used to kind of be more opposed to bucatini because everybody’s always saying, bucatini is so great because sauce gets into the tube, but it really doesn’t get into the tube, it’s too narrow. I always felt like bucatini was like a broken promise because it didn’t do the thing people said it was supposed to do. But then in my research, I gave it another shot. And so I ate some and I realized what makes it great is not that it holds sauce so well, but it’s got a fantastic springiness.
Dining and Cooking