Americans have a funny relationship with pasta. It has become such an integral part of our cooking, but we tend to fall into one of two camps: We either depend on recipes that are rooted in Italian tradition, or we’ve strayed — or perhaps galloped! — so far from tradition that we don’t even think of pasta as necessarily Italian anymore. For both groups, it’s all too easy to get into a rut.
The second group can be paralyzed by choices. The first can get stuck in red-sauce land.
Dan Pashman felt this a couple of years ago. He had just developed a new pasta shape — cascatelli — that he partnered with manufacturer Sfoglini to produce, partly as a way to explore the process from start to finish for his podcast, “The Sporkful.” He designed cascatelli to work with many different sauces, but when listeners sent him photos of the dishes they created with it, “everyone was just putting tomato sauce on it,” he told me in a Zoom interview. “I was crestfallen.”
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Get the recipe: Chili Crisp Tahini Pasta With Fried Shallots
He realized he was no different. “It’s just so easy to grab a jar of sauce or to throw together some tomato sauce,” he said. “You don’t need to look at a recipe. Everyone knows how to do it. You kind of can’t go wrong.”
End of carouselYet he also had the sense that home cooks might welcome ideas for creative, fun ways to cook with pasta — dishes whose only criteria is deliciousness. Selfishly speaking, he also wanted ideas for getting out of his own red-sauce rut. When you untether from tradition, he thought, from the cacio e pepe and the marinara and the carbonara (as wonderful as they are), isn’t the sky the limit?
His first cookbook proves his point, with a title that sums up the mission in a cheeky but accurate way: “Anything’s Pastable.”
In the book, Pashman, with the help of recipe developers he collaborated with, adds scallion oil and runny fried eggs to bucatini, Indian tadka to spaghettoni, Cajun crawfish to carbonara. He works pasta into the Middle Eastern dish shakshuka, subs manicotti for the tortillas in a riff on enchiladas and, in one of my favorite strokes of brilliance, bakes fettuccine on a sheet pan, getting it crispy on the bottom, then tops it with tomato sauce and mozzarella for, yes, “pasta pizza.”
As anyone who has listened to his podcast knows, Pashman is an obsessive; the very first episode was devoted to a debate about the best way to reheat a leftover Cubano sandwich. He takes that same approach in his cookbook, applying it to, among other things, his analysis of pasta shapes — including his assertion that penne and ziti are among the worst shapes.
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“People seem to think that tubes are the only way to hold sauce,” he told me. “It feels intuitive, like it should work, like, ‘This shape has a hollow space that things can go in.’ But the fact is, all the tossing and mixing in the world is not going to get most sauces inside most tubes.”
Share this articleShareInstead, Pashman likes some tubular pastas — particularly bucatini and rigatoni — for their chewiness and springiness, examples of one of his three standards for pasta shapes: toothsinkability (in addition to forkability and sauceability). Penne and ziti, you see, “are not wide enough to flatten into a thick and satisfying bite like rigatoni, and not narrow enough to spring back against bite force like bucatini,” he writes. “Just about the only thing they’re springy enough to do is spring off your fork as you’re trying to get them to your mouth.”
As you can tell, one of his prime obsessions is texture, so the recipes in “Anything’s Pastable” are designed for maximum textural variation (or, as Pashman puts it, “the phenomenon sensory scientists call dynamic contrast”). He includes recipes for seven takes on crunchy pangrattato — at its simplest, seasoned, toasted breadcrumbs — using such ingredients as furikake, Ritz crackers and corn nuts.
Given his love of texture, you’d expect him to also be a chili crisp fanatic, and he is, working with fellow cookbook author (and former “Sporkful” intern) James Park to develop two pasta dishes that use it. One of them combines chili crisp with tahini for the sauce and adds fried shallots on top, and it’s super simple to make.
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The recipe depends on a generous amount of pasta cooking water, whose starchiness seems to magically pull together sauces into just the right consistency. You mix some of it into a mixture of tahini, chili crisp, vinegar and soy sauce, and save more for when you toss the pasta with the sauce. The fried shallots enter the picture in two ways, too: sprinkled on top, of course, but also mixed throughout, beautifully demonstrating Pashman’s multiple-textures-in-one-bite approach.
During our interview, he mentioned that some ideas were more difficult to make “sauceable” than others. Not to focus on the negative, but I was dying to know whether any had to be outright rejected for that reason. I was imagining a clever way to twist his book’s title into a cute ending for this column.
The idea was bo ssam, one of his favorite Korean dishes. When he and Park tried to turn it into a pasta dish, he said, “we just never really could get those flavors, textures and ingredients to come together into a sauce that we were happy with.”
Does that mean, Dan, that not everything is pastable?
Apparently not. The base for their experiments ended up as a ssamjang aglio e olio, adding the spicy Korean paste to the Italian “garlic and oil” dish, with crushed peanuts as a crunchy topping. Yet again, Dan Pashman is right.
Get the recipe: Chili Crisp Tahini Pasta With Fried Shallots
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