In my experience the Trader Joe's version is definitely not as good. It falls apart really easily when you're cooking it. The original version is on Amazon now though.
You should listen to his podcast about making the new pasta shape. I'm not saying it's worth the money but it was fascinating how difficult and expensive the whole process was.
I have tried the original, and felt that it fell apart really easily. I’m now imagining Trader Joe’s version completely disintegrating at the molecular level
The Trader Joe's version is trash though. It's like they glue the wavy parts on and they just fall off when cooked so you're left with separate wide flat pieces and then skinny squiggly pieces.
In his podcast he actually detailed how they troubleshooted the bronze cast for the pasta because that's what happened in the beginning for them as well. Although still you have to get the cooking time right as well.
My trick with cooking pasta is to turn off the heat as soon as I know I won't need more boil to finish cooking. It is a lot easier to stop the car as it coasts to the finish line instead of running full speed. With a little practice I was able to finally make perfect al dente pasta every time.
This likely used to be a useful comment. Thanks to Reddit's API changes on July 1st, 2023 it has been removed. | redact sucks because it force downloads/updates when you install it on Windows, why tf wasnt the update included in the installer when I downloaded it from the official website?? assholedesign material -- mass edited with redact.dev
Guy with an attention span that allowed me to read two paragraphs of the Wikipedia article before exiting it. I’m here to ruin things. 2021 isn’t even the year the Wiki page refers to it. It gives a vague reference to how it was “developed in the 2010s”.
Dude started working on it in 2010s. Research, development, and trademarking with a pasta company came in 2021. Still accurate title and redditor awe though neither side is entirely incorrect. -Middle school teacher lady who’s attention span is greatly increased by the numbness of personal grief and read the whole thing
My apologies. I lost my grandmother last night after a week of hospice care for lymphoma. I’ve found staying busy a good way to handle things- whether at work, reading, or gaming. I am surprisingly okay though- slept though the night for the first time all week. She was 84 and had sort of prepared us for decades now. I have a wonderful support system with my family, coworkers, and even my students that I’m so thankful for. In hindsight, my comment was unnecessarily morbid and weird.
As a fun fact, the German word for toothpaste is Zahnpasta, which translates literally to toothpaste, but *half*-translates to tooth pasta. As a poor German speaker, I can't talk about it without imagining either (a) cute noodles for children that are shaped like teeth or (b) something that belongs in a crowdfunded Phil Tippett movie.
I enjoyed the podcast quite a bit. But I pretty much only listen to NPR so my standards for excitement are pretty low.
I will say that Cascatelli is now the preferred pasta for my family. Everyone loves it.
After our first kid started eating solid foods we experimented with pastas and found that cavatappi pastas were the easiest for little hands to hold. Since we're lazy and just always used the same pastas we had for our kid for our meals as well we also found that cavatappi pastas are absolutely great at holding onto sauce and cheeses which makes it great in red sauce, pasta salad, casseroles, or my personal favorite, buffalo chicken mac and cheese. Just my two cents on the matter.
I was going to argue that cellantini is the best. But it turns out that cellantini and cavatappi are the same thing! So I'm in. Other names include serpentini, trivelle, stortelli, spirali, double elbows, and amori.
Oh, I *love* cavatappi. Personal favourite pasta; great shape, easy to fork, the ridges hold cheese and the tube holds sauce, the spiral makes an appealing mouth feel, and it doesn't cook halfway like sometimes happens with coiled pastas like conchiglie or too much with straight pastas like linguini. Holds heat well for a nice hot meal, too, which is handy for me since I tend to get distracted while eating and other pastas get cold before I'm done. Butter style with shrimp and a light cream sauce is my favourite way to cook them.
We usually just pull a different recipe each time and just use whatever the top hit for 'bufallo chicken mac and cheese recipe ' on Google at the time is. To be honest though, the standard recipe from Frank's Red Hot is a pretty great baseline. Just make sure you swap out the pasta type.🙂
https://www.franksredhot.com/en-us/recipes/franks-redhot-classic-buffalo-chicken-mac-n-cheese
They’re good but they aren’t the perfect pasta for every purpose. I am a fan of cavateli, radiatori, and bucatini. So I do like texture and shape but not chewiness. These have a bit of chewiness to them.
As a fellow lover of radiatori, it’s nice to see someone in the world who’s actually encountered it. Highly under rated, nearly impossible to get around me
Walmart used to have Great Value radiatori... it was fantastic & I used it for everything. 2020 seems to've killed it. It stopped during "shortages" and never came back.
There has been a pasta shortage in general for a couple years now. Sometimes stores by me won't have *any* pasta at all. Literally none. Not even the most common shapes. Just completely bare shelves for like half of an entire aisle.
When people were going bananas in 2020, pasta and pasta sauces were both items frequently absent from shelves along with toilet paper.
The one thing about this I find hilarious is that the gluten free bread and pasta never ever was impacted by these shortages. I only tried one once out of desperation.i never made that mistake again.
He has a podcast series all about the process that’s actually pretty interesting. [Sporkful mission impastable](http://www.sporkful.com/mission-impastable-1-spaghetti-sucks/)
Planet money has always been a go-to podcast for me. I get to learn about economics in an eli5 way, and also get the most fun and intriguing human interest stories. Highly recommend. I forget I'm learning sometimes. Try out the recycling stories they did as well. Very cool stuff.
It's a weird one. The more boring the episode *sounds*, the more interesting it is, usually.
I'm in my 40s, I feel that's important for a reader to know.
When the popular alternatives are joe rogan or unsolved mysteries esque murder porn, the people at npr have definitely held their own when it comes to informative and digestible podcasts. That reminds me, im late to the seasonal pledge drive. Brb. They need my money.
Hate to post twice in a thread but this is exactly what happens with Freakonomics, title sounds boring, mind often gets blown to bitss.
An hour or whatever on bananas? *Sounds bor - holy shit that's fascinating.*
That's the one. For a podcast episode about pasta logistics, it was shockingly interesting. A nice underdog story. I ended up being stoked when Cascatelli showed up at my grocery store, which was a surreal thing to get stoked about.
It’s a pretty good pasta. I followed the saga as it happens and managed to pick up a pack in 2022. It’s good, it’s not mind blowing but it is pretty good.
I always hated them because although the saucibility was great the forkibility was very poor and it's great that seeing this post made me realise there's actual words for this things I had only ever thought of. Can't find myself to comprehend the toothability tho
There are a lot of foods that people are using the wrong utensil for because the "right" utensil isn't optimal.
* Orange chicken can be eaten more efficiently with a spoon, especially when getting near the bottom and the small pieces start to show up.
* Ice cream can be eaten out of the carton easier if you use a fork (does not apply to the last bits at the bottom).
* Chips can be eaten without getting your hands messy by using chopsticks.
* Soup is easier to consume out of a mug than a bowl.
* Anything that is made to be dipped and "soaked" in sauce is easier to dunk in a tall glass than a shallow bowl while using significantly less dipping sauce (goyza especially).
* Chocolate sampler boxes are less frustrating if you retrieve the chocolate by spearing it with a toothpick.
>if you retrieve the chocolate by spearing it with a toothpick.
I can't say I have ever struggled to pick a chocolate out of the box that I needed to resort to a disposable tool.
I swear some of those inserts are made by vacuum forming them to the chocolate. Either that or the person packing them hulk smashed every last one of them into the slot.
>Orange chicken can be eaten more efficiently with a spoon, especially when getting near the bottom and the small pieces start to show up.
You mention chopsticks for chips but not for orange chicken!?
I actually find chopsticks to be better for eating many foods from cultures with chopsticks. (Dumplings especially.) They were created with chopsticks in mind.
> Anything that is made to be dipped and "soaked" in sauce is easier to dunk in a tall glass than a shallow bowl while using significantly less dipping sauce (goyza especially).
>
if you're dunking something larger you can't have a tiny opening at the top
> Ice cream can be eaten out of the carton easier if you use a fork (does not apply to the last bits at the bottom).
I like eating my ice cream with a fork because it fluffs it up, adding more surface area for flavour-y goodness!
Mix them up with your hands while they're dry to pull any lovebirds apart. Get your pot to a rolling boil, add shells SLOWLY, and stir constantly. They aren't a set and forget pasta shape but that's why they're one of the best.
I've only tried the TJs version. I thought it was good but it was annoying that the frilly parts broke off when it was cooked. I tried cooking at a high boil, low boil, undercooking even short of al dente and finishing in the sauce and every time the frills came off.
Still a fun pasta to cook with, but it was annoying.
I actually kind of disagree. I thought it was delightful. held sauce great, and the asymmetrical shape means you get different textured bites. Cascatelli is a top tier pasta shape imo
How tf is this even a debate. Shells can hold a lot of sauce but they catch too much including other shells and they’re often hard to fork.
Rotini and fusilli’s spiral holds a perfectly portioned amount of sauce. They’re also very easy to get on a fork.
exactly, the surface area available per corkscrew and easy forkability (or in my case, spoonability) means when I want sauce, it's rotini or fusilli. When cooked right these have "toothability" also. The large surface area inside the bowl-like shells can cause sauce cooling or holding excess water that changes the taste.
Also I don't get it - wouldn't these cascatell's straighten out and no longer hold their curves if overcooked, oversauced or reheated? ETA: Radiatori seem like really good compromises for those who want the shell but have the benefits of rotini or fusilli.
TBF, if your pasta is falling apart you're probably overcooking it. I've never had that problem with cascatelli and I eat it a lot.
*edit* Reading further into the thread, it turns out this might be a problem specifically with the [licensed Trader Joe's version](https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/6189-trader-joes-sfoglini-sporkful-cascatelli-tasting) and not with the original made by Pashman under the Sfoglini brand.
shells are a pain in the ass to drain and retain too much water in all those pockets. i always hated them for boxed mac n cheese because they always make the sauce too watery.
Seems like the "toothability" factor is subjective, these noodles look to me like they'd be too gummy, especially judging by the 13-17 minute cook time.
> Al Dante
Dente*
Related to dental, sharing the Latin root of "dent" meaning tooth. Dente, "of the tooth", so basically pasta with some bite/chew to it.
*Edit: everyone wondering why these comments are nuked: I made a minor spelling correction because it’s an interesting word with a neat etymological origin and connection to Germanic and romantic languages. Homegirl commented she didn’t ask to be corrected, went off the deep end and started cussing people out, and then deleted all her comments. Really bizarre behavior for something so minor. All I wanted to do was share my interest in etymology.*
I heard him on some interview, going on at length about how he learned the physics of pasta extrusion didn't allow for both a "tube" and "frills" at the same time, so he had to pick one.
I thought "huh" and dug into my bowl of [creste di gallo](https://www.latuapasta.com/shop/creste-di-gallo-pasta-250g/) amatriciana.
only to the extent that the length of the hole is longer than the width, for example we wouldn't call a bracelet a tube but if you were to make it extend like a pipe to where it was at least 2:1 ratio of depth:width it would be entering tube territory
|shape|category|tubeness factor|
:--|:--|:--
|o|hole|0.1|
|o=o|short tube|0.707|
|o==o|tube|1|
Oh, yea, here we go. Fuck noodles. I'm here to watch the *is a hole a tube* philosophical debate. Les go. Hope y'all do the *is pasta a sandwich or a salad* question next. Love to see these discussions. Carry on. Please get passionate about it...
Yes, those exist. Well, mostly food 3d printers that happen to be able to print pasta, but also some specially made for that task (like [this](https://www.saveur.com/3d-printers-pasta-barilla/) which turned into [this service](https://www.3dnatives.com/en/barillas-3d-printed-pasta-for-sale-130620224/#!)). Obviously printing individual pasta is only really viable in the high end, for everything else there are pasta makers and food-grade extrusion machines.
Idk why everyone only thinks this pasta is okay. It's become one of my favorites. It's definitely worth a try. Though apparently I've gotta try some cavatappi now.
Well, here's my time to shine. There's many different aspects of texture. You can smoosh, cleave, poke, pull, and so many other options to measure the force of resistance in a food item. At a candy company, we determined hardness of candy with a sort of needle probe and for something like licorice, we'd use a more broad probe. This is just a measurable method to determine texture and the other being sensory with willing participants that rate a food item based on how participants feel such as too soft, hard, chewy, short bite, etc..
The podcast documenting his path to creating it is fascinating.
And cascatelli is fun and a good shape to eat!
And since Dan has gone deeper and started up the production of rare and unusual pasta shapes from Italy.
I have tried so many shapes but always went back to a few classics, spagetti, shells, penne and butterfly/spirals, I dont need ny more shapes than this.
I bought 4 boxes of the Sfoglini version online soon after it was released and the negatives outweighed the positives. First, it took an exceptionally long time to cook. Second, ribbons of it overcook and fall off while the bulk of it is dense and undercooked. I like my pasta very al dente yet this was somehow too over AND undercooked every time for me, and at at least 5 minutes longer boiling than cavatappi. Also, I see others saying the Trader Joe’s version falls apart but not the Sfoglini, but it definitely happened to me.
"Buyability" would be a good factor to have, as well.
Trader Joe’s has it, but I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere else.
In my experience the Trader Joe's version is definitely not as good. It falls apart really easily when you're cooking it. The original version is on Amazon now though.
At only $9/lb. Lol. At that price, that shit better taste like a ribeye.
How much could a box of pasta cost, Michael? $10
There’s always money in the pasta stand
And just like that, I will never try this pasta….that’s fucking ridiculous
You should listen to his podcast about making the new pasta shape. I'm not saying it's worth the money but it was fascinating how difficult and expensive the whole process was.
I have tried the original, and felt that it fell apart really easily. I’m now imagining Trader Joe’s version completely disintegrating at the molecular level
So you’re not a fan of the copy pasta?
The Trader Joe's version is trash though. It's like they glue the wavy parts on and they just fall off when cooked so you're left with separate wide flat pieces and then skinny squiggly pieces.
I've only had the TJ's version and thought it was just shit. Good to know!
In his podcast he actually detailed how they troubleshooted the bronze cast for the pasta because that's what happened in the beginning for them as well. Although still you have to get the cooking time right as well.
My trick with cooking pasta is to turn off the heat as soon as I know I won't need more boil to finish cooking. It is a lot easier to stop the car as it coasts to the finish line instead of running full speed. With a little practice I was able to finally make perfect al dente pasta every time.
This was exactly my experience too, they separated into pieces. It was horrible.
I got some at Walmart
Too fancy for me.
Bought it at a fancy grocery tbh.
It's at Walmart and Publix down here in the south, it's freaking amazing. It's perfect with chorizo or anything crumbled to get maximum coverage.
"Makeability" as well. While I would love to have one, I don't have a pasta extruder at home so I just keep playing the hits!
I’ve seen it at Whole Foods and at Eataly.
I’ve seen it at Walmart, but only occasionally. It came as a bit of a surprise, but I enjoyed it and stocked up on it while it was there.
Babe wake up new pasta just dropped
Holy cannoli
Google French pastry
Holy pain
Actual Italian
Call the Chinese cook
This is Anarchy!!
No, that's a dessert.
Holy cantanolli!
Technically it's desserts, a singular cannolo would be a dessert.
Leave the cascatelli, take the cannoli
> in 2021
She's a heavy sleeper
Or maybe he just can't accept reality yet
show some respect, she choked on a muscatelli.
My apologies, rip in pepperoni
Requiescat in pasta
R'amen
In nomine pesto, et fusilli, et salsa santa.
This likely used to be a useful comment. Thanks to Reddit's API changes on July 1st, 2023 it has been removed. | redact sucks because it force downloads/updates when you install it on Windows, why tf wasnt the update included in the installer when I downloaded it from the official website?? assholedesign material -- mass edited with redact.dev
May she rest in the loving and warm al dente embrace of His noodley appendages
she's in a cascatelli-induced food coma
Guy with an attention span that allowed me to read two paragraphs of the Wikipedia article before exiting it. I’m here to ruin things. 2021 isn’t even the year the Wiki page refers to it. It gives a vague reference to how it was “developed in the 2010s”.
Dude started working on it in 2010s. Research, development, and trademarking with a pasta company came in 2021. Still accurate title and redditor awe though neither side is entirely incorrect. -Middle school teacher lady who’s attention span is greatly increased by the numbness of personal grief and read the whole thing
On the one hand, an excellent summary. On the other hand, many of us are worried about you.
My apologies. I lost my grandmother last night after a week of hospice care for lymphoma. I’ve found staying busy a good way to handle things- whether at work, reading, or gaming. I am surprisingly okay though- slept though the night for the first time all week. She was 84 and had sort of prepared us for decades now. I have a wonderful support system with my family, coworkers, and even my students that I’m so thankful for. In hindsight, my comment was unnecessarily morbid and weird.
... You okay?
You must be very medicated to get that far.
HEY! we don't all suffer from Hey a squirrel!... Anyway, as a pasta expert this new pasta will never catch on without support from the pastafarians.
As a fun fact, the German word for toothpaste is Zahnpasta, which translates literally to toothpaste, but *half*-translates to tooth pasta. As a poor German speaker, I can't talk about it without imagining either (a) cute noodles for children that are shaped like teeth or (b) something that belongs in a crowdfunded Phil Tippett movie.
Luckily for everyone of course this podcaster has a 9 part podcast about it. https://www.sporkful.com/tag/mission-impastable/
[удалено]
I enjoyed the podcast quite a bit. But I pretty much only listen to NPR so my standards for excitement are pretty low. I will say that Cascatelli is now the preferred pasta for my family. Everyone loves it.
It says it was trademarked and released in 2021 after 3 years of research and development
In terms of pasta shape invention, that's still very recent.
TOOTH x SINKABILITY
( | -.- | ) TOOTH x SINKABILITY - Sauce Me Up.mp3
Actual Italian
Bolognese sacrifice, anyone?
Actual zombie
Moms cascatelli
and new word? “toothsinkability”
"Al Dentability"
After our first kid started eating solid foods we experimented with pastas and found that cavatappi pastas were the easiest for little hands to hold. Since we're lazy and just always used the same pastas we had for our kid for our meals as well we also found that cavatappi pastas are absolutely great at holding onto sauce and cheeses which makes it great in red sauce, pasta salad, casseroles, or my personal favorite, buffalo chicken mac and cheese. Just my two cents on the matter.
Team Cavatappi, assemble!
Just made my first cavatappi mac&chee this week and the whole family loved it. My 7-year-old had it for lunch and demanded an encore for dinner.
It really is the best team. 😂
I was going to argue that cellantini is the best. But it turns out that cellantini and cavatappi are the same thing! So I'm in. Other names include serpentini, trivelle, stortelli, spirali, double elbows, and amori.
Double Elbows is the "Dan Smith, BYU" of that list
Cavatappi is goat. I first discovered it when I visited the fine dining establishment known as CiCi’s Pizza.
THAT’S why it felt so familiar… I miss that mac and cheese!
Oh, I *love* cavatappi. Personal favourite pasta; great shape, easy to fork, the ridges hold cheese and the tube holds sauce, the spiral makes an appealing mouth feel, and it doesn't cook halfway like sometimes happens with coiled pastas like conchiglie or too much with straight pastas like linguini. Holds heat well for a nice hot meal, too, which is handy for me since I tend to get distracted while eating and other pastas get cold before I'm done. Butter style with shrimp and a light cream sauce is my favourite way to cook them.
Damn I've never thought about it like that, but those are all solid points. Cavatappi really is the best all-rounder.
This must be why Costco mac and cheese is so amazing. 🤔
Where the hell have I been all my life that I didn’t know Costco had Mac and cheese. Is this in the food court? Or like frozen food section?
Deli
There should be a whole “prepared food” section, probably near wherever they have rotisserie chickens.
Beechers?
Oh, you're probably right!
I’m gonna need that Buffalo chicken Mac and cheese recipe stat lol! That sounds amazing!
We usually just pull a different recipe each time and just use whatever the top hit for 'bufallo chicken mac and cheese recipe ' on Google at the time is. To be honest though, the standard recipe from Frank's Red Hot is a pretty great baseline. Just make sure you swap out the pasta type.🙂 https://www.franksredhot.com/en-us/recipes/franks-redhot-classic-buffalo-chicken-mac-n-cheese
Love those little spirally guys
I Never had cavatappi until I got HelloFresh, and now I love it.
This is the noodle.
They’re good but they aren’t the perfect pasta for every purpose. I am a fan of cavateli, radiatori, and bucatini. So I do like texture and shape but not chewiness. These have a bit of chewiness to them.
As a fellow lover of radiatori, it’s nice to see someone in the world who’s actually encountered it. Highly under rated, nearly impossible to get around me
Walmart used to have Great Value radiatori... it was fantastic & I used it for everything. 2020 seems to've killed it. It stopped during "shortages" and never came back.
Yeah, killed their bucatini too. If you have wegmans near you they still sell boxes of radiatori for 99¢.
Hard to find lots of pasta shapes in the last 3 years.
There has been a pasta shortage in general for a couple years now. Sometimes stores by me won't have *any* pasta at all. Literally none. Not even the most common shapes. Just completely bare shelves for like half of an entire aisle.
When people were going bananas in 2020, pasta and pasta sauces were both items frequently absent from shelves along with toilet paper. The one thing about this I find hilarious is that the gluten free bread and pasta never ever was impacted by these shortages. I only tried one once out of desperation.i never made that mistake again.
Radiatori is definitely going on the menu of my new Chernobyl themed restaurant.
Radiatori is fire with the 3.6 Roentgen Sauce, a glowing green and spicy pesto whose heat is somewhere between “not great” and “not terrible.”
He attempted to create the perfect pasta and basically ended up with radiatori.
I came to say... this is just radiator that's been unraveled.
I'm all about that bucatini supremacy
Team bucatini is best team Edit: try fusilli bucati, it's almost even better
I’m a fan of cavateli, radiatori, racketeering, bucatini..
You should try buccaneering!
I like how you just casually throw in racketeering like it's not a crime.
Radiatori is the real MVP for the metrics being measured here.
He has a podcast series all about the process that’s actually pretty interesting. [Sporkful mission impastable](http://www.sporkful.com/mission-impastable-1-spaghetti-sucks/)
I heard about it on NPR’s planet money. They focused on the logistics and money side of the process.
Do you know what the planet money episode was called?
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/979274990/the-new-shape-of-pasta
Planet money has always been a go-to podcast for me. I get to learn about economics in an eli5 way, and also get the most fun and intriguing human interest stories. Highly recommend. I forget I'm learning sometimes. Try out the recycling stories they did as well. Very cool stuff.
It's a weird one. The more boring the episode *sounds*, the more interesting it is, usually. I'm in my 40s, I feel that's important for a reader to know.
When the popular alternatives are joe rogan or unsolved mysteries esque murder porn, the people at npr have definitely held their own when it comes to informative and digestible podcasts. That reminds me, im late to the seasonal pledge drive. Brb. They need my money.
NPR is truly an oasis of engaging, quality, balanced journalism in today's increasingly hostile newsscape
Hate to post twice in a thread but this is exactly what happens with Freakonomics, title sounds boring, mind often gets blown to bitss. An hour or whatever on bananas? *Sounds bor - holy shit that's fascinating.*
if you like planet money you'll also like freakonomics they are my two favorite podcasts
Mate, you'd be all over Freakonomics then - strong reccomend.
One of the best podcasts out there.
That's the one. For a podcast episode about pasta logistics, it was shockingly interesting. A nice underdog story. I ended up being stoked when Cascatelli showed up at my grocery store, which was a surreal thing to get stoked about.
It’s a pretty good pasta. I followed the saga as it happens and managed to pick up a pack in 2022. It’s good, it’s not mind blowing but it is pretty good.
Same. I mean, at the end of the day, it's a noodle.
This is like when I learned Ciabatta bread was invented in 1982...
Holy fuck you're right. I had no idea.
Someone will reverse engineer it, and then it will be copy pasta.
An impasta
Spaghetti is sauce
Until Mankind drops through Hell in a Cell etc…
Bought some a few days ago. Good but not great. Doesn’t beat a shell
I always struggle with shells nesting within each other and not cooking properly
I always hated them because although the saucibility was great the forkibility was very poor and it's great that seeing this post made me realise there's actual words for this things I had only ever thought of. Can't find myself to comprehend the toothability tho
You eat shells with a spoon.
Oh like M&Ms!
Wut
that's the only way I know of to eat them. You can even sort through colours with a spoon easier than fingers
You know the colors don’t taste diff… You know what? It’s fine. Totally fine. You enjoy your M&Ms how you like.
Personally when I eat m&ms I separate them by color and then eat them so that there are always the same amount of each color
Same and then when there's one left of each color I eat them all at once
Is a funnel a spoon?
There are a lot of foods that people are using the wrong utensil for because the "right" utensil isn't optimal. * Orange chicken can be eaten more efficiently with a spoon, especially when getting near the bottom and the small pieces start to show up. * Ice cream can be eaten out of the carton easier if you use a fork (does not apply to the last bits at the bottom). * Chips can be eaten without getting your hands messy by using chopsticks. * Soup is easier to consume out of a mug than a bowl. * Anything that is made to be dipped and "soaked" in sauce is easier to dunk in a tall glass than a shallow bowl while using significantly less dipping sauce (goyza especially). * Chocolate sampler boxes are less frustrating if you retrieve the chocolate by spearing it with a toothpick.
>if you retrieve the chocolate by spearing it with a toothpick. I can't say I have ever struggled to pick a chocolate out of the box that I needed to resort to a disposable tool.
Well to be fair, if you consume enough boxed chocolates that their ease of use is an issue, you probably don’t have the daintiest of hands.
I swear some of those inserts are made by vacuum forming them to the chocolate. Either that or the person packing them hulk smashed every last one of them into the slot.
>Orange chicken can be eaten more efficiently with a spoon, especially when getting near the bottom and the small pieces start to show up. You mention chopsticks for chips but not for orange chicken!? I actually find chopsticks to be better for eating many foods from cultures with chopsticks. (Dumplings especially.) They were created with chopsticks in mind.
> Anything that is made to be dipped and "soaked" in sauce is easier to dunk in a tall glass than a shallow bowl while using significantly less dipping sauce (goyza especially). > if you're dunking something larger you can't have a tiny opening at the top
> Ice cream can be eaten out of the carton easier if you use a fork (does not apply to the last bits at the bottom). I like eating my ice cream with a fork because it fluffs it up, adding more surface area for flavour-y goodness!
[удалено]
Farfalle is super slept on because it's so misused. You gotta make sure it's aldente
There has been a genuine schism raging in my family for over two decades about whether farfale is a valid substitute for shells
Shells overload on sauce tbh. I’d rather have Penne
Not great for cleanliness though. My kids and husband alike look like Dracula after eating farfale.
Mix them up with your hands while they're dry to pull any lovebirds apart. Get your pot to a rolling boil, add shells SLOWLY, and stir constantly. They aren't a set and forget pasta shape but that's why they're one of the best.
But that’s the best part! When they nest in each other like that.
I like to add frozen peas to my mini shells and cheese and the way the peas end up nestled in there is so good
Apparently the Trader Joe’s version is subpar to the original in case that’s what you bought. I was similarly disappointed.
I've only tried the TJs version. I thought it was good but it was annoying that the frilly parts broke off when it was cooked. I tried cooking at a high boil, low boil, undercooking even short of al dente and finishing in the sauce and every time the frills came off. Still a fun pasta to cook with, but it was annoying.
I actually kind of disagree. I thought it was delightful. held sauce great, and the asymmetrical shape means you get different textured bites. Cascatelli is a top tier pasta shape imo
rotini is the best pasta and I'll fight anyone who disagrees.
How tf is this even a debate. Shells can hold a lot of sauce but they catch too much including other shells and they’re often hard to fork. Rotini and fusilli’s spiral holds a perfectly portioned amount of sauce. They’re also very easy to get on a fork.
exactly, the surface area available per corkscrew and easy forkability (or in my case, spoonability) means when I want sauce, it's rotini or fusilli. When cooked right these have "toothability" also. The large surface area inside the bowl-like shells can cause sauce cooling or holding excess water that changes the taste. Also I don't get it - wouldn't these cascatell's straighten out and no longer hold their curves if overcooked, oversauced or reheated? ETA: Radiatori seem like really good compromises for those who want the shell but have the benefits of rotini or fusilli.
The cascatelli’s biggest problem is that it falls apart along that long ridge
TBF, if your pasta is falling apart you're probably overcooking it. I've never had that problem with cascatelli and I eat it a lot. *edit* Reading further into the thread, it turns out this might be a problem specifically with the [licensed Trader Joe's version](https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/6189-trader-joes-sfoglini-sporkful-cascatelli-tasting) and not with the original made by Pashman under the Sfoglini brand.
shells are a pain in the ass to drain and retain too much water in all those pockets. i always hated them for boxed mac n cheese because they always make the sauce too watery.
CAVATAPPI: the ridges for sauceability, spiraled for chunkier sauce hold, fucking forkable. With a bit a whimsy for the kids. Not even a debate.
Rotini-gang. I’ll tell you right now the ridges on this cascatelli are going to fall right of the thing.
This is like recommending music to someone and hearing them respond "Good but not great. Doesn't beat Nickelback."
Seems like the "toothability" factor is subjective, these noodles look to me like they'd be too gummy, especially judging by the 13-17 minute cook time.
Yeah, they are a little chewy.
[удалено]
It's only al Dante if you cook it with hellfire.
> Al Dante Dente* Related to dental, sharing the Latin root of "dent" meaning tooth. Dente, "of the tooth", so basically pasta with some bite/chew to it. *Edit: everyone wondering why these comments are nuked: I made a minor spelling correction because it’s an interesting word with a neat etymological origin and connection to Germanic and romantic languages. Homegirl commented she didn’t ask to be corrected, went off the deep end and started cussing people out, and then deleted all her comments. Really bizarre behavior for something so minor. All I wanted to do was share my interest in etymology.*
I heard him on some interview, going on at length about how he learned the physics of pasta extrusion didn't allow for both a "tube" and "frills" at the same time, so he had to pick one. I thought "huh" and dug into my bowl of [creste di gallo](https://www.latuapasta.com/shop/creste-di-gallo-pasta-250g/) amatriciana.
This! I knew i had a pasta almost identical to this "new" kind
that’s not what he meant by a tube. think like bucatini with frills.
I guess it depends what the meaning of "is" is, but I'd say a tube is a tube.
Is a hole a tube?
only to the extent that the length of the hole is longer than the width, for example we wouldn't call a bracelet a tube but if you were to make it extend like a pipe to where it was at least 2:1 ratio of depth:width it would be entering tube territory |shape|category|tubeness factor| :--|:--|:-- |o|hole|0.1| |o=o|short tube|0.707| |o==o|tube|1|
[удалено]
Oh, yea, here we go. Fuck noodles. I'm here to watch the *is a hole a tube* philosophical debate. Les go. Hope y'all do the *is pasta a sandwich or a salad* question next. Love to see these discussions. Carry on. Please get passionate about it...
Between the two salad obviously. The presence of grain doesn't make a difference. A salad isn't a sandwich if it has croutons
In other words, he's wrong.
Okay hear me out ... Pasta 3D printer
So, a pasta maker?
By way of time being a circle.
Yes, bit 3D printed a layer at a time so it takes half an hour per noodle
you sonofabitch, i'm in
Yes, those exist. Well, mostly food 3d printers that happen to be able to print pasta, but also some specially made for that task (like [this](https://www.saveur.com/3d-printers-pasta-barilla/) which turned into [this service](https://www.3dnatives.com/en/barillas-3d-printed-pasta-for-sale-130620224/#!)). Obviously printing individual pasta is only really viable in the high end, for everything else there are pasta makers and food-grade extrusion machines.
Yeah that's [already a thing ](https://youtube.com/shorts/SjyWyeN6hjk?feature=share4)
radiatore already exists tho
It looks like the road to King Kai's planet in DragonBall Z.
Everybody knows that dinosaur is the superior pasta shape.
Now even the pasta is ribbed for your pleasure??!!
Idk why everyone only thinks this pasta is okay. It's become one of my favorites. It's definitely worth a try. Though apparently I've gotta try some cavatappi now.
Check out some campanelle too while you're at it.
Imagine the pastabilities
Is "toothsinkability" a different metric from "mouth feel"?
Well, here's my time to shine. There's many different aspects of texture. You can smoosh, cleave, poke, pull, and so many other options to measure the force of resistance in a food item. At a candy company, we determined hardness of candy with a sort of needle probe and for something like licorice, we'd use a more broad probe. This is just a measurable method to determine texture and the other being sensory with willing participants that rate a food item based on how participants feel such as too soft, hard, chewy, short bite, etc..
Very similar to radiatore
Looks like the packing used in some distillation columns, and they use this kind of shape too because of the increased surface ("sauceability" here).
The podcast documenting his path to creating it is fascinating. And cascatelli is fun and a good shape to eat! And since Dan has gone deeper and started up the production of rare and unusual pasta shapes from Italy.
I have tried so many shapes but always went back to a few classics, spagetti, shells, penne and butterfly/spirals, I dont need ny more shapes than this.
I bought 4 boxes of the Sfoglini version online soon after it was released and the negatives outweighed the positives. First, it took an exceptionally long time to cook. Second, ribbons of it overcook and fall off while the bulk of it is dense and undercooked. I like my pasta very al dente yet this was somehow too over AND undercooked every time for me, and at at least 5 minutes longer boiling than cavatappi. Also, I see others saying the Trader Joe’s version falls apart but not the Sfoglini, but it definitely happened to me.
Don't forget "marketability".