Three Years And So Many Dollars In The Making,

meet the perfectly shaped pasta, known as cascatelli,

apparently spaghetti has a number of problems with it as explained by Dan Pashman on stage at the Caveat Theatre, in front of a live audience, “I’m just gonna go ahead and say it, spaghetti sucks,” Pashman famously said, “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, fast forward 3 years,

 “Mission ImPASTAble“, is 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, “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,

and that was the easy part, trying to get 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, getting your hands on some cascatelli is still 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 at $4.99 per pound soon everybody will be able to try this much-talked-about pasta.