|
Inspired
by the firm belief that spaghetti is far from the ideal shape for pasta,
a man set out to create a perfectly shaped pasta. The result of his hard
work is now known as cascatelli.
The story of how cascatelli came to be began in 2018, when Dan Pashman,
the host of the James Beard and Webby Award-winning “Sporkful” podcast,
made some harsh remarks about spaghetti, on the stage of the Caveat
Theater, in front of a live audience. His comments got a lot of
attention and inspired him to dedicate a lot of his time to researching
pasta shapes in a quest to create the ideal pasta design, which needed
to have an appealing texture, have the perfect bite, and, most
importantly, hold the right amount of sauce. Believe it or not, he spent
almost three years on this project.
|
 |
|
“I’m just gonna go ahead and say it, spaghetti sucks,” Pashman famously
said on the stage of New York’s Caveat Theater. “It’s round on the
outside, that means it is a low surface area in relation to the volume,
that means that sauce doesn’t adhere to it well. It means less of it
contacts your teeth when you first bite it.”
Pashman’s comments were met with laughter, but he was serious, and for
good reason, his observations made a lot of sense. Sure there was all
this romanticism associated with spaghetti, but from a functional design
perspective, they weren’t all that impressive.
|
 |
|
The reactions his comments on spaghetti received inspired Dan Pashman to
create “Mission ImPASTAble“, a five-part saga on his Sporkful podcast
that saw him take a trip to the Pasta Lab at North Dakota State
University, visit the only pasta die maker in the United States, and get
into heated debates about existing pasta shapes with a number of food
professionals. It culminated with the creation of a new pasta named
cascatelli.
“I came at this from an outsider’s perspective,” Pashman told Esquire
Magazine. “I’m not a chef, I’m not Italian-American, I’m not a pasta
expert or historian, so I tried to embrace that perspective, you know? I
just approached it from the perspective of someone who loves to eat
pasta. What’s the pasta shape that I would most want to eat that doesn’t
exist?”
The Sporkful host based the design of cascatelli on three main
principles: 1) Sauceability: how readily sauce adheres to the shape; 2)
Forkability: how easy it is to get the shape on your fork and keep it
there; 3) Toothsinkability: how satisfying it is to sink your teeth into
it.
Shaped like comma with grooved ridges and a central “sauce trough”,
cascatelli pasta is designed to hold the right amount of sauce and also
have the perfect bite. Distributed for $4.99 per pound by American pasta
maker Sfoglini, Pashman’s uniquely shaped pasta has made quite a splash,
and is currently sold out.
Although cascatelli turned out to be a hit, getting it on the market was
a tough challenge. His pitches for pasta shapes were crushed by all the
companies he approached, and even finding distributors for cascatelli
was a tall order. Luckily, artisan food company Sfoglini was sold on his
idea, so after investing a lot of his own money and time into the
project, Dan Pashman had his own ideally-shaped pasta.
Getting your hands on some cascatelli is going to be a problem in the
short term, as it’s all sold out, and orders are delayed by a period of
12 weeks until the next batch is ready, but things will get back to
normal eventually, and we’ll all be able to try this much-talked-about
pasta.
|