One brand offers innovative pasta options if you're tired of your supermarket's standard selection.
Sfoglini, a New York pasta maker, collaborated with Dan Pashman, founder and host of The Sporkful podcast, to release two unusual pasta forms.
Pashman considered sauceability, forkability, and toothsinkability when making pasta (how satisfying it is to bite into the pasta).
Quattrotini, a variation on Sicily's Carnival pasta cinque buchi, is the first "new" pasta available. Quattrotini also has four round tubes joined by a square tube. This variety has exterior tubes with ridges to hold more sauce.
Isn't cinque buchi "five holes" in Italian? Why quattrotini when quattro means "four?" Pashman answered this in his latest podcast: "I don't think about the larger tube's five holes in the cross section. I see four, not five, in this shape." "Quattrotini" was born.
Vesuvio, named after Mount Vesuvius, is Sfoglini and Pashman's second pasta invention. According to Food and Wine, towns around the volcano serve vesuvio, a pasta shape rarely seen in the U.S. Pashman noted that Sicilians call the shape "knots" or nodini.
The short, round spiral pasta "holds a tonne of sauce" like nature. Pashman added, "It's charming. It's real. They enhance dining."
Quattrotini and vesuvio aren't Pashman's only pastas. The podcast host launched cascatelli, a new shape, in 2021. Cascatelli—Italian for waterfall—has a curved strip with ruffles on either side.