Better Than Spaghetti?

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Inside a three-year search for the perfect pasta shape

May/June 2023

By Andrew Klein

From spiral swirls to long spaghetti strands, there are about 350 different shapes of pasta. All have their uses in different recipes. But does one noodle stand above the rest?

That was a question asked by Dan Pashman. He hosts a food podcast called The Sporkful. In 2018, he began thinking about how noodle shapes affect the way people enjoy different pasta dishes. Some pastas hold sauces well. Others are satisfying to bite into or easy to eat with a fork. “Most pastas do one of these things well,” says Pashman.

But could one pasta do all of these things? To find out, Pashman began a search he called “Mission: ImPASTAble.”

Food Features

COURTESY OF DAN PASHMAN/SCOTT GORDON BLEICHER

Dan Pashman

First, Pashman studied different noodles. He created , or standards, to judge the noodles by. One was “sauceability,” how well sauce sticks to the pasta. Another was “toothsinkability,” how enjoyable it is to sink your teeth into it. The last was “forkability,” how easy it is to stab a noodle with a fork.

Pashman also thought about the pastas he liked best. He loved the ruffles on lasagna edges and the tube shape of ziti. These features hold sauce and make noodles chewy. Pashman decided to create a shape that combined them.

Pashman spent weeks sketching pasta designs. He showed his ideas to experts at a company called De Mari Pasta . The company makes metal pasta dies, or molds. Pasta dough is squeezed through the molds to make different shapes.

De Mari told Pashman that his first designs were too complicated. After working for months, Pashman finally had a shape De Mari said might work: a long half-tube with two ruffled edges. De Mari got to work creating the die.

Pasta Properties

Here’s how cascatelli meet all of Pashman’s criteria for a perfect noodle.

TOOTHSINKABILITY

Ruffles create more resistance when you bite, creating a chewy texture.

SAUCEABILITY

A half-tube surrounded by ruffles helps trap sauce.

FORKABILITY

Cascatelli are large enough to stab with a fork but not so big that they fall off on the way to a person’s mouth.

Pasta Properties

Here’s how cascatelli meet all of Pashman’s criteria for a perfect noodle.

TOOTHSINKABILITY

Ruffles create more resistance when you bite, creating a chewy texture.

SAUCEABILITY

A half-tube surrounded by ruffles helps trap sauce.

FORKABILITY

Cascatelli are large enough to stab with a fork but not so big that they fall off on the way to a person’s mouth.

Perfecting the Pasta

Pashman worked with Sfoglini (sfo-LEE-nee), a pasta maker in New York. Sfoglini used De Mari’s die to produce pasta. But when Pashman boiled the noodles, they fell apart! The pasta needed to be shorter and thicker to hold up while cooking.

De Mari created a new metal die to increase the thickness, and Sfoglini cut the dough shorter. The new pasta met all of Pashman’s criteria! He named his creation cascatelli. That’s a play on cascata, the Italian word for “waterfall.”

In 2021, Sfoglini sold 3,700 boxes of cascatelli online in two hours! Today other stores sell the pasta too. “Some food fads are done just to look cool,” says Pashman. “I wanted to make something that was actually good to eat.” Mission accomplished!