By Louisa Kung Liu Chu, Chicago Tribune
Dan Pashman not only invented a new pasta shape just a few years ago, now he’s coming for your pasta sauce.
Best known as the creator and host of The Sporkful food podcast, Pashman may have sealed his culinary legacy as the inventor of cascatelli, the new pasta shape that went viral when it was released in 2021. He’s also the author of a new cookbook, “Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People” (William Morrow Cookbooks, $35), that came out in March.
So what’s up with our pasta sauce?
“When cascatelli first came out,” Pashman said, “People were sending me pictures of what they were making with this from all over the country, all over the world.” It was a nice feeling, he said, as if he’d been invited into people’s homes for dinner, but 75 percent of the pictures he saw were sauced with tomato, meat sauce or macaroni and cheese style. “A few party animals made pesto, maybe a traditional cacio e pepe or carbonara.”
The cover for “Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People” by Dan Pashman. (William Morrow/ HarperCollins/TNS)
It made him realize, in a way he hadn’t before, that the range of pasta dishes for a lot of Americans is pretty narrow. So he set out to write “a cookbook that would hopefully revolutionize pasta sauces the way cascatelli totally revolutionized pasta shapes,” Pashman said. “And show people that there’s so much more than they can and should be putting on all their pasta shapes, not just cascatelli.”
Before we go any farther, let’s have the podcast host describe what cascatelli is:
“It’s a little hard to describe in audio,” Pashman said. “But basically, it’s a short shape with kind of a flat strip that curls almost like a comma, or half a heart if you look at it from the side. And then protruding out from that flat strip are two parallel ruffles that are perpendicular, sticking up from the flat strip, almost like stegosaurus’ spine. The space between the two ruffles holds a lot of sauce. When sauce goes in there, it cannot escape.”
It is a squiggly but substantial little pasta. So why did he feel the need to invent a new shape?
“I was dissatisfied with a lot of the shapes that are out there,” Pashman said. “I have these three criteria that I came up with to judge all pasta shapes. So there’s forkability: How easy is it to get it on your fork and keep it there? Sauceability: How well the sauce adheres to the shape. And toothsinkability: How satisfying is it to sink your teeth into it? I think a lot of shapes out there are good at one or two of those things. Very few nail all three.
“Spaghetti, the most popular shape out there, barely gets one right. It’s very hard to get a good bite of spaghetti on your fork. It’s either too much or too little. It’s got danglers getting all over your face. And certainly, we’ve all had the experience of eating a whole plate of spaghetti and meat sauce, and you finished the pasta and half the sauce is still on the plate.”
Armed with cascatelli and its “sauce trough,” he set out to see what chefs with different culinary backgrounds would do with it — chefs such as Darnell Reed from Chicago’s Luella’s Southern Kitchen, who made a Cajun crawfish carbonara with cascatelli.
What’s his go-to sauce now for cascatelli?
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“One of my very personal favorites is a mapo tofu cascatelli recipe that’s in the cookbook,” Pashman said. “I collaborated with a great recipe developer and cookbook author, (Santa Cruz food writer) Andrea Nguyen, on that one. And Andrea has this cheat in a stroke of genius to take silken tofu, and instead of cubing it, like you typically would for mapo tofu, she has you puree it, which gives the sauce the thickness of a cream sauce without any dairy.”
It’s got meatiness, he added, tons of spice, an incredible depth of flavor and ground meat.
“I didn’t think the world needed any more recipes for marinara sauce or lasagna bolognese,” said Pashman. “That’s why we have kimchi carbonara. We have cacio e pepe with chile crisp and optional Sichuan peppercorns. We have shakshuka in shells.”
There’s also a recipe for roasted artichokes with preserved lemon instead of the traditional Italian pasta with fresh lemon, he added, so it gives you a Middle Eastern or North African vibe. And he took a research trip across Italy “to bring back some of the more obscure Italian pasta dishes that maybe aren’t well known in America.”
“I went to a restaurant in Bari in the far corner of Italy, where they invented a dish called Spaghetti all’Assassina, assassin’s spaghetti,” Pashman said. The pasta is cooked down in a spicy tomato sauce, then pan-fried until it turns charred, crispy and crunchy. “And it is ridiculous.”
Catch Pashman at a live Sporkful podcast taping at San Francisco’s Cafe du Nord at 7 p.m. April 28. Reserve tickets ($25-$59) and find details at https://omnivorebooks.myshopify.com/.