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Horrified by pasta shapes that do not hold onto sauce, Dan Pashman spent three years designing and testing a new pasta shape.
Unlike spaghetti, which most sauces slide right off, or tubes that do a surprisingly poor job of holding sauces inside, according to Pashman, this noodle was engineered to maximize the factors he thinks are most important in noodles: forkability, sauceability and toothsinkability.
The result: A short, curved pasta features two parallel ruffles on one side, with a small sauce-holding well between them. The first batch of 3,700 boxes of cascatelli (Italian for “waterfall”) online sold out in less than two hours. It turns out, listeners of Pashman’s podcast, “The Sporkful,” weren’t the only ones smitten with this new noodle. One publication named it one of the top 100 inventions of the year in 2021.
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As cascatelli manufacturer Sfoglini’s supply caught up with demand, more home cooks were able to get their hands on a box and start putting it to good use. Pashman soon witnessed the sad state of sauces fans used when they tagged him on Instagram.
While he was glad people were enjoying his noodles, he thought the toppings lacked creativity: tomato sauce, meat sauce, mac and cheese, pesto; lather, rinse, repeat.
Rather than simply stew about the standard sauces, Pashman gathered his own dream team of recipe developers and culinary experts to develop a cookbook. Their mission: Convince home cooks to try a wide world of options to put on their noodles, cascatelli or otherwise.
The journey started with a trip to Italy during which Pashman had a game-changing discovery. “I learned that pasta has only been the national food of Italy for about the past 100 years,” he said. “Many iconic pasta dishes like carbonara, which I would have guessed the Roman emperors were eating, were only invented since the 1940s.”
At that point, he felt much less pressure to color inside the lines of the Italian culinary canon.