Guest Episode: Mission: ImPASTAble from The Sporkful

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This is Gastropod as usual, but today we are sharing a bonus guest episode with you.

It's from our friends at the Sporkful, hosted by Dan Pashman.

The Sporkful isn't for foodies, it's for eaters.

Each week on the show, Dan and his guests obsess about food to learn more about people.

The episode you're about to hear is the first in a five-part series called Mission Impastable.

Yes, Dan makes even more dad jokes than we do.

The series follows Dan as he embarks on the most ambitious project in Sporkful history to invent a new pasta shape, actually get it made, and actually sell it.

You might have thought after listening to our pasta shapes episode that there are enough shapes in the world already, but Dan disagrees, so can he pull it off?

Hello!

Hi!

Welcome to Caviat!

Today we're kicking off something really big.

We've been working on it for three years, and we'll begin at the beginning.

It's June 2018, and we're at Caviat.

It's a performance space and bar on New York's Lower East Side.

We organize this event there called the Buccatini Dialogues, a debate about pasta shapes.

After a brief intro, I get right to the point.

And I'm just going to go ahead and say it.

Spaghetti sucks.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

I said it.

It's round.

On the outside, that means it has 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.

It's like, you know, there's all this romanticism around spaghetti, but spaghetti and meatballs isn't even an Italian thing.

The lady and the tramp did a great disservice to American culinary history by romanticizing spaghetti.

What we really should have taken from that movie is that it's a pasta shape that's only fit for dogs.

Oh, it's going to get real tonight.

Don't you worry.

At this debate about pasta shapes, I take a stand.

We can do better, is the point that I'm trying to make.

We can do better than spaghetti.

But not everyone agrees.

Get comfortable.

Okay.

I'm joined by two friends and fellow food podcasters, Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW's Good Food, and Francis Lamb, host of The Splendid Table.

Unlike me, they're also both trained chefs.

Evan owned one of LA's top Italian restaurants for more than 25 years.

And this is where I should warn you, this podcast has some explicit language.

That's just what happens when people debate the merits of spaghetti.

All right, Evan, go on.

Defend spaghetti.

Okay, first of all, spaghetti is the UR pasta.

It is the beginning of all pasta.

And it's the beginning of handmade pasta and the beginning of industrialized pasta.

But more than that, it's how every child becomes indoctrinated into the beauty of eating.

When they suck up that first little strand when they're a little kid and they realize that they can do that by pursing their lips and sucking in, that's it.

They're like gone for the rest of their lives.

Francis?

I'm with Evan on this one.

I mean, saying spaghetti sucks because it doesn't have the right surface area and the right like amount of contact with your teeth is a very foodie approach, Dan.

I feel like for eaters,

for eaters, you say exactly what Evan said, which is, what is the first pasta you ever ate?

What is the thing that made you fall in love with pasta?

If it's not spaghetti, I don't know where you grew up.

Yeah, and like spaghetti night.

Spaghetti is that thing that crossed over and became American.

I will grant you that spaghetti is significant.

It is important in pasta history, and it has a lot of,

you know, romanticism, and it has a lot of sentimental attachments to it.

But I'm just saying right now, here and now, as we sit here as adults who have so many pasta shapes to choose from, tell me one thing that spaghetti does better than any other pasta shape.

Any top echelon pasta shape.

Top echelon?

Yeah.

Does they have status?

Sure.

If it's going to be in the top echelon, there must be at least one thing that it can do that no other pasta shape can do as well.

Well, what spaghetti can do that no other pasta shape can do as well is be affordable.

Ooh.

I don't know why she said that, but I like it.

Aren't they all the same price now in the supermarket?

And accessible.

Now we are here tonight at an event called the Buccatini Dialogues.

Now, Buccatini, for folks who are not familiar, is essentially spaghetti with a hole down the center of it.

It looks like a drinking straw when it's uncooked, okay?

Trash pasta.

And

Francis once tweeted, literally all pasta shapes are wonderful except Buccatini.

Buccatini can go get effed.

All right, Francis, bring the pain.

I know what your problem is, and it's a very effete problem.

Here's the problem with Buccatini.

It's very simple.

Ready?

I've never actually practiced this, so I don't know if it's going to work.

This is the sound when you eat spaghetti, the ER pasta.

This is the sound when you try to eat buccatini.

What kind of pasta doesn't come into your goddamn mouth when you want it to?

It's not a noodle.

Have you ever tried to use a drinking straw?

You can't.

Have you ever tried to suck the drinking straw into your mouth?

It is physically impossible

because it's not solid.

Eat it.

And there's a goddamn hole in the middle, which everyone says, that's the beauty of buccatini.

You get sauce in the middle.

Fuck bucotini and the sauce in the middle.

You can't get the thing in your mouth.

I don't care how much sauce is in the middle.

I think Francis' point about slurping bucotini is valid.

And I want to emphasize his other point.

Buccatini lovers claim it gets a lot of sauce in the middle, that it's a better spaghetti that holds more sauce because of the tube.

But that's a lie.

The hollow center of most buccatini is too narrow to gather much sauce.

I'm with Francis here.

The shape doesn't live up to the hype.

And I put a lot of thought into these kinds of issues, into what I'm eating and how to make it better.

That's why I fold my pizza inside out and eat my cheeseburgers upside down.

My method for turning an omelette into a breakfast sandwich is so convoluted, we don't have time to get into it right now.

And I love pasta.

So over my many years and like the thousands of pounds of pasta consumed, I've put a lot of thought into what makes some pasta shapes better than others.

In fact, I've actually come up with three criteria by which I believe all pasta shapes should be judged.

Ready?

Number one, forkability.

Forkability.

Forkability.

Yeah, that's right.

We got sound effects.

That's how important this part is.

Forkability.

How easy is it to get the pasta on your fork and keep it there?

Number two, sauce ability.

Sauce ability.

Sauciability.

How readily does sauce adhere to the shape?

Number three, the most important of all, tooth tooth sinkability.

Tooth sinkability.

Tooth sinkability.

How satisfying is it to sink your teeth into it?

Even the most iconic pasta shapes in the world have flaws in at least one of these areas.

Angel hair.

It turns to mush 30 seconds after you put it in the water.

No tooth sinkability.

Fettuccine, linguine, too smooth on the outside.

You need surface area, texture to pick up sauce for saucibility.

Rigatoni, the ridges on the outside do make it more saucible, but the tube is often too wide, so it springs off the fork.

That's a forkability issue.

And you got wagon wheels and bow ties.

Those are gimmicks.

They don't cook evenly.

They're mushy on the perimeter and hard in the center.

You see, spaghetti is not the only shape that sucks.

I could go on.

But where am I going with all this?

Well, as I said, we can do better.

That's why I gathered everyone together at Caveat.

It's why we're all gathered together here today on this podcast.

And that is why I am excited to tell you here tonight, for the first time that we are embarking on one of the most ambitious.

You know, I'm going to retract that.

We are embarking on the most ambitious

project in sporkful history.

We are going to set out to invent a new pasta shape.

That

awkward groan that you just expressed is not an unfamiliar reaction to me,

I must say.

I went to my boss, Chris Bannon.

I said, Chris, we're going to invent a new pasta shape.

He said, Dan, nobody cares about pasta shapes.

Do you think that's true?

I don't think that's true.

This is the spork full.

It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.

I'm Dan Pashman.

Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.

Now, I want to be very clear, this is not just a theoretical exercise.

We are setting out to invent a new pasta shape and actually get it made and actually sell it.

I'm talking thousands of boxes of pasta on an industrial scale so people everywhere, people just like you, can try it.

We're going to tell the story of this quest over five episodes of our podcast.

And hopefully, at the end, the world will have a new pasta shape.

One that maximizes forkability, sauce ability, and toothsinkability like no shape that's come before.

This is Mission Impossible.

Weeks after that debate about pasta shapes, I check in with my wife Janie.

She was at the event.

She thought it was a lot of fun.

But when we get to talking about making my dream a reality, she admits she has some doubts.

I can't even think of a shape that doesn't already exist.

So, what are your thoughts on my idea of trying to create a new one?

I think you're like a really smart person, and maybe

you utilize that energy to think of something else other than a pasta shape.

A new flavor?

Ice cream?

Janie will come around.

I checked back in with Evan Kleiman.

You heard her at the start in the live event.

I asked her for her take on my mission.

One part of my brain thinks that it's a fool's errand because

there's been like centuries of culture laying down all these shapes before you.

But then there's also the other part of my brain that's insanely curious to see what you would come up with.

Curious is good.

I'll take that.

But then Evan starts bombarding me with questions.

Have you met with a pasta engineer yet?

What do you like eating?

Are you thinking of a long shape or a short shape?

I haven't gotten that far.

As I tell Evan, I do not already have a shape in mind.

I got lots of opinions about existing shapes, but I don't have the new shape.

She's not impressed with my lack of answers.

And like so many others, she has her doubts about this whole idea.

I mean, how often do you see a new pasta shape?

It's hard.

And those businesses, they're pumping it out.

They already have all the capital investment.

They have the machines.

They have the engineers.

Are you there?

Yeah, no, yeah.

He's thinking.

Yeah, I'm thinking, you're just making me nervous now.

I'm like, maybe I've...

Can I say I've bitten off more than I can chew, or is that an annoying

turn of phrase on a food podcast?

It's inevitable.

So, yeah,

this is going to be a lot.

Which actually brings me to my next question, Evan, because clearly I could use some help here.

So I would like to ask you if you would act as my pasta fairy godmother on this journey, my spiritual advisor.

I would love that.

I think this is a fascinating project and I can't wait to start tasting it.

And I think it's going to be so much harder than you imagine it to be.

If there's anybody who was meant to do this, I think it's you.

All right.

Well, thank you, Evan.

You're giving me a good pep talk.

You're making me feel nervous, but you're also making me feel like maybe we can pull it off.

Oh, I think you'll pull it off.

Because if you don't,

I will be relentless.

Evan sends me off with some instructions.

She says, before I can even start to design a shape, I got to understand what materials I'm working with.

I have to learn about the ingredients and how they'll affect the final pasta.

So to start, there's one obvious place I have to go.

The place where all of the Durham wheat is grown.

Coming up, we're going to North Dakota.

Stick around.

Watch it,

say goodbye.

And now, a delicious word from our sponsors.

It's very good.

Welcome back to the Sporkful.

I'm Dan Pashman.

Hey, I hope you'll check out the episode we did a couple weeks ago.

We put the call out for single sporkful listeners looking for love.

We sent two couples on Zoom blind dates, and we recorded the whole thing.

This is a thing you share with my mom.

It's like a great pro tip that you should compare your date to your mom on a first date, right?

Especially as like a gay man.

Right, right, exactly.

Yeah.

So, will I be officiating a wedding anytime soon?

Brian, this has been really fun.

Yeah.

You're making it sound like there's a timestamp on this.

I feel like eventually I'm going to need to hang up because my computer's going to die.

Because you can't plug it in?

Oh, I need to go get the charter and stuff.

I can wait.

Check out that episode wherever you got this one.

And please connect with the Sporkful in your podcasting app.

In Spotify, hit follow.

In Apple Podcasts, subscribe.

In Stitcher, favorite.

You can do it right now while you're listening.

Thanks.

All right, let's get back into it.

Look, I can argue about pasta shapes all day, but being an expert in eating them is only going to get me so far.

If I'm going to invent and sell a new shape, I've got to start by learning what pasta is made from and what shapes are already out there.

Now, I do know that pasta dough is a simple mixture of semolino flour and water, but I don't know what semolino flour really is or what kind will be right for my shape.

Hi.

What?

Hi.

Hi.

Sorry I'm sticking a microphone in your face.

Yeah, I was like, I don't know what you're doing.

You're separating the wheat from the chaff.

Yeah, yeah.

I've heard about this.

In April 2019, I arrive at North Dakota State University in Fargo.

It's home to the Durham Wheat Quality and Pasta Processing Laboratory, better known as the Pasta Lab.

I meet some of the grad students working there, including Sally Mann.

What was your title again, Sally?

I'm a research specialist.

Research specialist, got it.

I am setting out on a mission to invent a new pasta shape.

Okay, good luck.

There's pretty much everything you could think of.

But I didn't come all this way just so another person could tell me this is a mistake.

I'm here to meet two of the world's leading Durham wheat experts, Frank Manthe, a professor of cereal science, and Ilias Ilias, a professor of Durham wheat breeding and genetics.

North Dakota grows most of the Durham wheat used in pasta in the U.S.

Frank and Ilias have been developing new varieties of that wheat for decades.

In other words, if you've ever eaten pasta in America, you've almost definitely eaten pasta they had a hand in.

I meet Frank first.

He starts by showing me this giant storeroom where they keep wheat seeds from years and years of research.

So you got

all the way down aisles and aisles.

I don't know how high that is, 10 feet high or so.

Just rows and rows.

Rows and rows.

It feels like being in the stacks of a giant library, except instead of books, it's metal containers, each the size of a shoebox, each filled with dozens of seed packets.

Frank pulls out some grains to show me.

So Durham is a lot bigger seed than bread wheat.

It's got a nice amber appearance.

It's kind of vitrous.

This seed library contains thousands of wheat varieties developed over the years at the pasta lab, including some in the works for the future.

Now, Frank takes me to meet the other half of the pasta lab's buddy comedy, Dr.

Ilias Ilias.

If Frank is the laid-back Midwesterner, Ilias, who's originally from Syria, gets right to the point.

We got some emails, we got some phone calls, and we don't know who you are, so what do you want?

Well, I tell them, I'm here for a little pasta 101.

So, what is Durham wheat, as opposed to any other other kind of wheat?

Oh, you know, there are different types of wheat.

To begin with, you have what we call the hexaploid wheat.

Hexaploid wheat is composed of three genomes: A, B.

It takes Ilias about three seconds to lose me.

But the gist is that there's spring wheat, which we use to make bread, and durum wheat, which we use to make pasta.

Ilias' job is to keep coming up with new and better varieties of Durham wheat, improving the flavor, durability, and yield so growers can produce more wheat per acre.

When Ilias develops a variety that he thinks is a real winner, Frank tests it to see if it grows well and if it'll make pasta that looks taste good.

Frank is my policeman.

You know, he keeps me in check.

He will not let me release anything that does not have a high quality for the industry.

That whole development process for a new variety, the growing and testing and tweaking over and over, takes 10 to 12 years.

But then there's one more step.

Ilias and Frank have to present it to a board made up of farmers, growers' associations, industry people.

The board only meets once every two or three years to vote.

Ilias says he thinks of each wheat variety as one of his kids that he's nurtured from infancy.

If the board rejects his wheat, then there you are sad.

You send your kid all the way to college, he can't find a job.

But after doing this for more than 30 years, Ilias has a pretty high success rate.

If his wheat is approved, the new variety ends up among the amber waves of grain across North Dakota.

When I drive on the highway, and both sides of me on the highway, I planted by our varieties.

That's when we know we are successful and brings us happiness.

But in order for that Durham wheat to bring the rest of us happiness in the form of pasta, it has to be milled into flour.

When you mill spring wheat, it becomes fine, like the powder you see in a bag of flour.

But when you mill Durham wheat, it fractures into coarse particles.

That's semolina, and it's got very specific qualities.

It's that whole organoleptic experience.

It's the flavor, it's the aroma of that spaghetti.

And just to translate organoleptic, as you're saying that word, your eyes are closing, your head is rocking back, and your hands are wafting imaginary pasta air up into your face.

That's right.

As I say those words, I can smell

the taste, its old nutty, kind of a soft flavor, very characteristic flavor.

If that's important to you or your customer, you know, then you're deaf, you're going to go with 100%

semolina.

It's what makes pasta pasta.

In other words, this isn't really a decision.

Traditionally, all pasta is made with semolina.

So we're using semolina, but we do have to decide what kind.

Frank says semolina can be ground so it's especially coarse or more powdery and fine.

More powdery is easier to work with on a mass scale.

Plus, it's cheaper.

So that's what most big companies use.

But that can compromise the flavor.

The finer you grind, the more surface areas exposed.

You start getting oxidation on the surface.

You start losing the volatiles.

Volatiles are the natural compounds that produce aroma.

If you grind your semolina very fine, more volatiles are exposed to the air, leaving your pasta with less flavor.

A coarse grind keeps more of that natural flavor in.

If I was going to make the highest quality pasta, I would use a coarser ground.

Frank also says some pasta makers, especially in Italy, claim that a coarser semolina makes the pasta hold up better when cooked.

It produces a firmer, more tooth-sinkable pasta.

But he's never seen that backed up with data.

Still, I make a note of all this.

Before we wrap up, there's one final stop on the pasta lab tour.

This is a cool room.

This room really reminds me like a chemistry class.

Right?

There's a lot of test tubes and what's the proper name for these?

These aren't test tubes, are they?

Beakers.

Beakers, thank you, yes.

And there's pasta boiling on a heater.

So set the scene here, Frank.

Where are we?

What's going on in here?

This is the pasta cooking lab.

And in this room is where

We do the pasta quality testing.

Definitely one of the most important is how it cooks.

And so they're doing a cooking test.

And what are they testing for?

Specifically, just generally cooking or like something specific?

Well,

it's a texture analyzer.

A texture analyzer.

Oh my God.

Can I go over and look at that?

Oh, definitely.

Definitely.

You have a device that's called a texture analyzer.

How much does this cost, Frank?

I need one of these in my house.

Not only that,

but it measures the amount of work it takes to bite through five strands of spaghetti.

Oh my god, I've heard about this machine.

It's right, it measures bite force.

Yeah, the required bite force.

Oh my god, I've always wanted to see what it's doing it right now.

It's got this little thing that's pressing down on five strands of spaghetti very, very slowly and gently to measure.

If I send you my like a sample of my pasta shape once I get it going, would you run it through the texture analyzer?

We would definitely run through on the texture analyzer.

Oh my God, this is

getting better and better.

If nothing else comes from this series, if not a single person buys my pasta shape, at least I can say I have been to North Dakota and I have seen a texture analyzer.

I ask Frank and Ilias for parting advice.

Frank, the polite Midwesterner, goes first.

It's a worthy endeavor.

Oh, thank you.

Ilias, who, like me, has a Semitic directness, has this to say.

So I mean, you can make any shape that you want.

It's how it's going to hold and how it's going to look after you cook it for your consumer.

So it has to look good before and after.

It has to.

So when you're looking at a shape, it sounds like you're thinking of a short good.

I'm not sure.

That I have not decided yet.

He hasn't decided anything, but

he wants to know what radians are.

Now I know what factors to consider when I pick my semolina.

Plus, Frank's going to run my samples through the texture analyzer.

Overall, a success.

A few months after my trip to North Dakota, middle of 2019, I embark on the next leg of my journey.

This time, we are going to Italy via Skype to talk to one of the world's leading experts on pasta shapes.

If I'm going to make my mark on the pasta canon, I got to know what's already out there.

Maureen, how many pasta shapes are there?

Oh, nobody knows.

I made the index of pasta names, and I think I got up to 1,200, something like that, 1,100, 1,200 names for somewhere over 300 different shapes.

And that's not all of them.

This is Maureen Fant.

She's an American who moved to Rome in 1979.

She studied archaeology, fell in love with Italy during a semester abroad, and has been there ever since.

Maureen translated a book called The Encyclopedia of Pasta, which for our purposes is basically the Bible.

It's the closest thing there is to a complete list of all the pasta shapes.

Maureen's friend, Aretta Zanini DeVita, wrote it.

Aretta spent 20 years scouring every corner of Italy to find local pasta shapes and traditions.

And one thing she learned is that often different regions have different names for the same shape.

That's why there are about 300 shapes with 1,200 names.

One example, the long flat pastas fettuccine and tagliatelle.

Tagliatelle and fettuccine are very close and practically interchangeable.

It's just that fettuccine is the term used more in the center south and tagliatelle more in the north where the noodles are likely to be thinner and more delicate.

But Italians get very into these small differences.

In fact, they care so much about what is and is not the right width and thickness to be called tagliatelle.

At the Chamber of Commerce in Bologna, there is a golden tagliatella where if you are really into it, you can go and measure your noodle.

In other words, if there's a disagreement over whether your pasta fits the official definition of tagliatelle, you can bring one strand to the Chamber of Commerce and compare it to the golden tagliatella to see.

First off, that's amazing.

But my main takeaway from all this is only 300 shapes?

There's got to be opportunity for something new.

I mean, that's fewer than I would have guessed.

And in the Encyclopedia of Pasta, they break down all those shapes into six basic categories: long shapes, short shapes,

filled shapes, pastina, little shapes for broth, teeny tinies for broth.

Then gnocchi or gnocchetti, which are the dumpling-like forms.

And then the sixth shape is stracinati.

Stracinati are shapes that are dragged over a textured wooden board, which imprints that texture on the pasta.

Oracchette are an example of stracinati.

So, Maureen, I am setting out to invent a new pasta shape.

Why?

This response is becoming increasingly familiar to me.

So, I walk Maureen through my rationale.

I explain my three criteria for evaluating pasta shapes.

I tell her about forkability, sauceability, and toothsinkability.

So there's a lot of shapes that like, they look beautiful, they have a history, they're really good at one of these things, but there are very few shapes that have the total package.

I think that spaghetti has the total package.

Oh, man.

Oh, Maureen, come on.

If you eat it right.

Spaghetti is fine for the oily or liquid sauces.

For my pasta shape, I'm aspiring to something a little better than fine.

And I'm skeptical of anyone who thinks spaghetti is sauceable, let alone tooth-sinkable.

Still, I want Maureen's guidance.

What's missing?

In the entire canon of pasta shapes, what do you feel like might be out there that people aren't focusing enough attention on?

What shape, what concept,

what does the world of pasta need?

I think pasta is just fine.

I'm not going to encourage anybody to invent a new pasta.

Shape.

If you want to hear the rest of Mission Impastable, parts two and three, head over to The Sporkful or wherever you listen to podcasts.

It's available wherever you're listening right now.

Go ahead and subscribe to The Sporkful.

This episode of The Sporkful was produced by the Sporkful team, Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, and Sandy, Andres O'Hara, Gofen Mumputu Bule, Tracy Samuelson, Jared O'Connell, Daisy Rosario, and Peter Clowney.

The theme music was written by Andy Christens, with additional music by Black Label Music.

The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher, and we are Gastropod, and we'll be back next week with a regular Gastropod episode.

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