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Matt Katz: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Matt Katz, in for Alison Stewart. Many great inventions come out because someone is dissatisfied with the choices at hand or because they look at something and think, "I can do better." That was exactly the case a couple years ago when Sporkful podcast host Dan Pashman looked at spaghetti and found it wanting, or to quote him, "It sucks." In his opinion, spaghetti is difficult to get onto a fork. It's not satisfying to bite into, and sauce doesn't adhere to it. Dan said about creating his own pasta shape, and almost exactly three years ago, he unveiled the results. It's called Cascatelli, Italian for waterfalls, and it has become incredibly popular.

Sporkful listeners all over the country began sending him photos of how they were cooking with it, but the photos he felt were tragic because three-quarters of the photos involved tomato sauce, meat sauce, or mac and cheese. Once again, Dan thought, "I can do better." Today, he is here to unveil the result. A cookbook that he feels is the equal of Cascatelli. It's called Anything's Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People. He joins me now to discuss and take your calls. Dan, welcome back to WNYC.

Dan Pashman: Hey, Matt. Thanks. Great to be here.

Matt Katz: I'm excited to talk pasta. You write, "Many people seem unaware of all of the glorious ingredients they can and should be putting on their pasta shapes." Why do you think many people just default to the tried and true when it comes to pasta, throw that tomato sauce on.

Dan Pashman: I think it's for some portion of the population is just what folks grew up with. Obviously, this Italian-American red sauce joint influence in American food culture still looms large. I feel like we're still all trapped as the descendants of Chef Boyardee. The truth is that as our palate become more diverse and our country becomes more diverse, Americans all over the country are using different ingredients on their pasta, and I just wanted everyone to know about it.

Matt Katz: What's wrong with the marinara or meat sauce, mac and cheese thing? Is it just boring or doesn't offer the opportunities for nutritional value that you get with other ingredients?

Dan Pashman: Nothing to do with nutrition. I'm not against it. It's fine. It's just that there's an awful lot out of it, and it's a little bit tiresome, and I certainly felt like the world didn't need another cookbook with a recipe for marinara sauce in it, especially when there's so many great jarred sauces, really high quality jarred sauces available today. In my book, I just encourage people to buy a jarred sauce, and then I give you a jarred tomato sauce decision tree to walk you through different options of what you can add to the jarred sauce to doctor it. There's no recipe in here from marinara sauce. I decided early on if it's going to be tomato sauce, it's got to be really different from something I've had before.

Matt Katz: Listeners, if you have a question about how to pair pasta shapes with sauces, give us a call, 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. You can also text us at that number. What's your favorite pasta shape? Have you tried Cascatelli? Do you have a favorite sauce you want to shout out? 212-433-9692. Tell us about Cascatelli, Dan. What makes it a perfect shape to experiment with for sauces?

Dan Pashman: Well, perfect is a strong word, Matt, but I think it's a very, very good shape, and it's because first of all, early on, I decided I wanted my shape to have ruffles. I went out and I ate all different kinds of obscure shapes, isolated variables. What do I like in a shape? Tubes, flat, long, short. I decided that I love ruffles. Number one, they create a playful texture in your mouth. Number two, they're very good at holding sauce. Everyone just wants to use tubes to hold sauce. Tubes do that pretty well, but it's not the only way. Nooks and crannies and folds are in many cases, I think, a better way to hold sauce. I wanted to have ruffles.

Where I got lucky is that there these two parallel spines of ruffles in Cascatelli that create this space between them. I didn't originally intend for that. It was more because we couldn't manufacture it the way I originally had it in my head. The manufacturer I was working with was like, "Well, maybe we move the ruffles here." I was like, "All right. We'll try that." Ended up making it better, which is often the case with inventions. It's a combination of a great idea and some hard work and some luck. The space between those ruffles, which I call the sauce trough, when sauce gets in there, it cannot get out.

Matt Katz: Wow. That's unlike spaghetti where it just rolls right off.

Dan Pashman: Look, I'm sure, Matt, you've had the experience of eating a plate of spaghetti. You finish all the pasta and you look down, and half the sauce is still in the plate. That is not a feature, that's a bug.

Matt Katz: Then you have to take-- You hope no one's looking, and you use your fork and you try to scoop the sauce [crosstalk]--

Dan Pashman: That's a sad place to be.

[laughter]

We don't know. Nobody wants to be in that situation. My point is, you just get a better shape at the beginning and you can save yourself that pain and agony.

Matt Katz: By the way, on your podcast Sporkful, you did Mission Impossible about how you came up with this shape. It chronicles the whole journey. Actually on your podcast now, you have a new series drop today about the creation of the cookbook. Also, your kids are in both of these series, which is great. They try out the recipes that you're using in this cookbook. All right. Let's get to the basics when it comes to pasta. You have some mistakes people make that you're advising people to do better on when it comes to pasta. Give us a couple, first, I think is just buy good quality pasta.

Dan Pashman: Yes, it's an affordable luxury, just buying a little bit better quality pasta, ideally extruded through a bronze die. It doesn't have to be, but slow-dried pasta, the drying makes a big difference. One thing you'll notice with the especially less expensive and less lower quality pasta is that when you cook it, even if you cook it just the right amount of time, it's kind of rubbery. The texture is a little bit rubbery. That's because it has been dried as quickly as possible to be able to produce as much of it as fast as possible.

When you slow dry pasta, you will get a more of what I call toothsinkability. You will get meatiness, chewiness, springiness. It's almost like biting into a steak. That is really how good pasta should taste. Beyond that, salt your water. I recommend for a pound of pasta, four quarts of water, two tablespoons of kosher salt. Because most of it you don't end up eating, but you need salty water to season that pasta. Really good pasta should taste great plain. Right out of the pot, it should have a delicious, nutty flavor with the aroma toasted bread.

Matt Katz: You say to cover the water when you're boiling it?

Dan Pashman: Well, before you put the pasta in, yes, because it boils faster.

Matt Katz: That's the only reason. There's not any other myth. Got it.

Dan Pashman: It boils faster, but to debunk a myth, I will tell you, Matt, adding the salt is important because it seasons the water. It will not appreciably make the water boil faster. This is a dispute. People write into me on The Sporkful all the time about. In order to change the amount of time it takes for water to boil, you would have to add more salt than you would ever add for you to notice the difference.

Matt Katz: I always thought it had some of the two things were connected.

Dan Pashman: No.

Matt Katz: By the way, we got a text already in from a listener, "Tom Colicchio's Jersey tomato sauce is a maze." I guess recommendation for the store-bought tomato sauces.

Dan Pashman: It could be. Again, but that's why-- I'm sure his tomato sauce is excellent. There are a lot of excellent tomato sauces out there. I didn't feel like I had anything to add to that. In my cookbook, I'm focusing on things like kimchi carbonara, keema bolognese, Cacio e Pepe with chili crisp, and optional Sichuan peppercorns. Instead of Italian wedding soup, we're doing Mexican wedding soup with Turkey albondigas and chilies. There's a range of different flavors that go way beyond Italian cuisine.

Matt Katz: Can we talk about the Cacio e Pepe with chili crisp?

Dan Pashman: Let's do it.

Matt Katz: We have the recipe. It's from Anything’s Pastable, your new cookbook, but it's also on the All Of It show page at wnyc.org. I love that dish in general. It seems so simple, but I have so much flavor. I'm never disappointed. Tell us about the combination of flavors, why it works, and if it's easy to cook at home,

Dan Pashman: It's incredibly easy. This whole dish will come together in probably less than a half an hour. It's as easy as Cacio e Pepe, frankly. Chili crisp is an ingredient that I think many people grew up with. If not, people are becoming more and more familiar with it. There's now a chili crisp pasta dish on the menu at Olive Garden. People are becoming more aware-- I'm sorry, Cheesecake Factory. Correction, Cheesecake Factory.

With this dish, I collaborated with a range of incredibly talented recipe developers for the recipes in this cookbook. This one I did with James Park, who wrote an entire cookbook on chili crisp. He's an old friend of mine. I knew I wanted chili crisp in this cookbook. I knew I had to bring James on board because he's the expert. It's a common thing to add chili crisp to dairy. In fact, it's even a common thing to drizzle chili crisp over vanilla soft serve. The combination of chili crisp and anything creamy and cheesy is a natural.

Cacio e Pepe with chili crisp, phenomenal. When I tasted it, I said It's very good, but I feel like there's another level, a deeper spice, that I find myself craving, so we added an optional Sichuan peppercorns, toasted Sichuan peppercorns if you want to take the spice to the next level.

Matt Katz: Got it. The result is medium spicy?

Dan Pashman: It's always hard to define spicy. That's so personal. I went to great pains in the book to write the spicy recipes in a way that would allow you to adjust to your liking. I would say that if you leave out the Sichuan peppercorns, it's a light-medium to a proper medium, depending on your tolerance. If you add in the Sichuan peppercorns, it's more medium to hot.

Matt Katz: Got it. We have a bunch of texts coming in about Cascatelli.

Dan Pashman: All right.

Matt Katz: One listener ask, what's your second favorite pasta shape is after the one you created?

Dan Pashman: Well, I'm a little biased because there's two other shapes that are obscure Italian pasta shapes that I released with the pasta company Sfoglini. They're called Vesuvio and Quattrotini. Those are also my babies. I can't ignore them. I would say, of the ones that I have nothing to do with, I love Mafalda, which is like fettuccine long flat noodle, but with ruffles down the edges.

I love Casarecce. It's like a matchstick length, short shape, but it's got folds and twists. Another example of how folds and twists, I think, often hold sauce better than tubes do. Then one that's very similar to Casarecce is Strozzapreti, which is the best name, my favorite name.

Matt Katz: Yes, beautiful name.

Dan Pashman: It means the "priest strangler."

Matt Katz: [laughs] The priest--

Dan Pashman: Yes, because as legend has it, it corrupt priests used to eat it so quickly that they would choke, so Strozzapreti and Casarecce.

Matt Katz: A listener already said, "Did you say Mafaldi?"

Dan Pashman: Mafalda or Mafaldina. It's basically the same. There's different names. There's 300 or 400 pasta shapes in existence, but they go by about 1,200 names. Oftentimes there's a single shape that's called different things in different regions of Italy or depending on the dialect.

Matt Katz: Got it.

Dan Pashman: Mafalda and Mafaldina are roughly the same.

Matt Katz: A listener wrote, "My favorite pasta shape is Mafaldina, but so the emergence of Cascatelli was a true pasta enhancement in my life." The text ended with, "Pasta is incredible."

Dan Pashman: Thank you.

Matt Katz: [laughs] Oh, and one other question about your Cascatelli. Are there gluten-free options available?

Dan Pashman: Yes, there's a gluten-free Cascatelli made by Banza. I believe it's available in Whole Foods nationwide and often through Banza's website.

Matt Katz: Very good. If you're just joining us, I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Alison Stewart today on All Of It. Dan Pashman is the host of The Sporkful podcast and the author of Anything's Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People. What is pangrattato?

Dan Pashman: Pangrattato, yes. This is part of this cookbook that I'm so excited about because I'm a big texture eater. I am fascinated with the concept that sensory scientists call dynamic contrast. It's the idea of multiple textures together in the same bite. For instance, if you think of any of your favorite candy bars, you have a hard chocolate shell and your teeth break through that, and then you sink into something that's more chewy or gooey, like a caramel.

Matt Katz: Like a Mallomar, there are three different kinds of things that go in there.

Dan Pashman: Yes. You got crunch, you got crisp, you got chewy, you got gooey. All those things together provide dynamic contrast, which even if you didn't know that term, you love it. Everyone loves it.

A lot of pasta dishes in Italy use dynamic contrast and have a variety of textures. Of course, certainly, throughout the world of Asian noodle and rice dishes, there's a lot of different textures coming together. Most people in America eating pasta, the American pasta dishes just did not get the memo about texture. I have a whole chapter in the book all about pasta dishes with novel textures. There's another section with pangrattatos which are, that is the plural, but I'm anglicizing it, seasoned toasted breadcrumbs. It takes 5 or 10 minutes to make them. One of my favorites in the book is toasted corn nuts with lime zest.

Matt Katz: Wow.

Dan Pashman: You crush them up and you sprinkle those. Traditionally, they do pangrattato. In Italy, it'll be breadcrumbs with maybe garlic, oregano. I got a Furikake pangrattato. You make those and you put it on the table with a spoon. First of all, you're going to struggle to get it to the table, because I usually eat half of it before I even serve the meal. It's so good. Then you sprinkle it on and it just coats the top of the pasta, and you get this light, crisp, and extra flavor in every bite. That way, when you're sinking your teeth into this chewy pasta, first, you hit the crispy exterior, then you hit the chewy pasta center and you get dynamic contrast. You get all those textures, and it just takes the whole experience to another level.

Matt Katz: That's fantastic. I literally remember the first time I had that on mac and cheese, where I had that crusty top on the mac and cheese.

Dan Pashman: That's the one place where a lot of Americans are familiar with.

Matt Katz: Sure.

Dan Pashman: It's like a baked mac and cheese or Ritz cracker-type topping. If you like it like that, wouldn't you like it like that in a million other pasta dishes?

Matt Katz: Absolutely.

Dan Pashman: Yes.

Matt Katz: The other thing I love, which you get into a bunch of variations on, is pesto. What makes pesto so versatile? Give us a recipe.

Dan Pashman: Look, most of us are mostly familiar with the Genovese pesto, the basil and pine nuts, and that's delicious. Again, I didn't feel like I needed to tell people how to make that. Instead, I have a presto pesto formula in the book, which basically tells you-- Pesto just means pounded. It's really meant to be something that you take, "Oh, I have these extra greens. I have these extra herbs. I got some nuts. I got some hard cheeses. I'm going to pound it all together." That's what pesto is really for.

I give you this formula and you can take-- I had this the other day. I had a bunch of extra arugula in my fridge that had been there for a couple of days. I didn't want it to go bad. Blended that up with some asiago and some toasted almonds, and olive oil, garlic. That's a pesto. I give you this formula, and you can turn almost any sort of combination of greens and herbs and cheese and nuts into a pesto. I even have options for if you have nut allergies, you can use sunflower seeds. There's other possibilities.

Matt Katz: You did that in a blender?

Dan Pashman: Food processor.

Matt Katz: Food processor.

Dan Pashman: Yes.

Matt Katz: Got it.

Dan Pashman: My food processor is not even really a full-fledged food processor because I hate extraneous kitchen equipment. I managed to get all the way through this cookbook without buying a standalone food processor.

Matt Katz: Nice.

[laughter]

What's a way to zhuzh up your normal pasta and marinara dinner just with the stuff you might already have in your kitchen?

Dan Pashman: This is where the jarred tomato sauce decision tree comes in that I mentioned. You start off and it asks you, "Do you want your tomato sauce to be heartier? Do you want it to be spicier? Do you want it to have more texture?" One of those three and you follow those questions into different outcomes. Let's say you say, "I want it to be heartier, but I'm vegetarian," you follow that path and I'll show you.

Take an eggplant, roast it for 45 minutes, scoop out the insides, mix it with a tomato sauce. You made it heartier, more filling, and you added the flavor of the eggplant. Then it could be as simple as add a tablespoon of fish sauce or Sriracha or Cholula, whatever. You want peppery spice, I've got you. You want sweet, savory spice, I've got you. Add a fistful of Parmesan cheese. Add MSG, which I'm all for, and which is a great way to enhance the savoriness of a jarred tomato sauce. There's a million different ways to take a jar of high-quality sauce and transform it into something that feels a little more special in a matter of minutes.

Matt Katz: That's cool. Dan, you're one of the top food podcasters in the country. You invented your own pasta, and now you're a cookbook author. Is there one thing that's nearest and dearest to your heart that when, I don't know, your kids are at school and some other kid says, 'What does your dad do for a living?" What do you want them to tell the other kids?

Dan Pashman: The Sporkful podcast will always be number one because that was the first thing in the things you listed. I was a guy who worked in radio before I worked in podcasting. I fell in love with audio in college and always wanted to work in that. I always have a soft spot for that. I'll probably be more known for Cascatelli, which is also okay. I mean, when it was first going viral, when it launched a couple of weeks in, I think Sarah Jessica Parker put it on her Instagram and I was like, "Oh, my God, this is next level now."

I had just gone to the liquor store to grab a six-pack of beer, and I came home. My wife comes running out of the front door of the house. I thought something was wrong. I said, "What's wrong?" She said, "SJP put it on her Instagram." That night, we're sitting on the couch. The kids were asleep and I turned to her and I said, "You know, this is going to be my obituary," and that's okay. It's a little weird to be in your 40s and realize you're probably never going to top something you just accomplished, but at the same time inventing your own pasta shape. If that's what I'm going to go down in history for, I'll take it.

Matt Katz: It's extremely cool. There are a million podcasters out there, and there's not a lot of people who have invented pasta shapes, particularly in the 21st century.

Dan Pashman: Yes.

Matt Katz: Dan Pashman is the host of The Sporkful podcast and the author of Anything's Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People. Comes out two weeks, March 19th. There are two events in our area with Dan coming up that you should check out. He'll be in conversation with Claire Saffitz at the Gramercy Theatre on March 18th. The next day, March 19th, he'll be at the Suffolk County JCC. For more information on those events, head to sporkful.com/tour. Dan, thanks so much for being here. Great to see you.

Dan Pashman: Thanks so much. People can preorder the book right now. Thanks to see you, Matt.

Matt Katz: Excellent.