In honor of National Pasta Month, Dan shares the story of how his pasta shape, cascatelli, ended up in a design museum in Germany. When he travels with his family to see the exhibition, al dente: Pasta & Design at the HfG Archiv-Ulm, he finds it’s more incredible, and powerful, than he ever expected. Listen to find out why. Then, later in the episode, Dan talks with the founders of a highly selective club called “The Glutamates”: cookbook author Andrea Nguyen and bread nerd extraordinaire Andrew Janjigian. They each contributed one very special recipe to Dan’s cookbook, Anything’s Pastable — and fundamentally changed the way Dan thinks about pasta in the process. Hear the stories behind these recipes, and how they helped set Dan’s cookbook on a different course.
A few links:
- Sfoglini’s Sporkful Pasta & Anything’s Pastable Gift Set (20% off through Oct. 17, 2024)
- Sichuan Magic Dust Popcorn recipe
Starting in the next few weeks, in most NYC and New Jersey ShopRites, and all Gourmet Garages and Fairways, they'll be selling three different pre-made cascatelli mac and cheese dishes — regular mac, chicken mac, and vegan mac — and vesuvio with a spicy vodka sauce. They'll be in the packaged food areas and/or at the deli counter, sold under the Gourmet Garage brand and labeled “made with Sfoglini.”
Here are the stores that just recently started carrying or will soon carry cascatelli (or other Sporkful shapes, as noted):
- Raley's (121) - Northern California and Nevada as of August (cascatelli, vesuvio, and quattrotini)
- Lowes (75) - North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia starting in October/November
- Fresh Thyme (70) - Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin starting in October/November
- Lazy Acres (6) - Southern California starting in October/November
Cascatelli is in select Kroger and Kroger-owned stores:
- Fred Meyer (90)
- Fry's (21)
- Ralph's (30)
- Dillon's (23)
- Smith's (13)
- QFC (Quality Food Center) (1)
- Kroger (113)
- King Soopers (23)
- Roundy's (39)
While it's not a new one, we want to be sure everyone in Texas knows that all three of Dan's pastas are in all Central Market locations.
As always, if your local store doesn’t carry Dan's Sfoglini pastas, ask them to start!
The Sporkful production team includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Nora Ritchie, Jared O'Connell, and Giulia Leo. Transcription by Emily Nguyen.
Original theme music by Andrea Kristinsdottir. Interstitial music in this episode by Black Label Music:
- “Feeling Yourself” by Erick Anderson
- “Sunlight” by Hayley Briasco
- “Brain Wreck” by Bijou Basil
- “Intrepid Stratagem” by Stephen Sullivan
- “Small Talk” by Hayley Briasco
- “Lowtown” by Jack Ventimiglia
- “Cortado” by Erick Anderson
- “Up in the Air” by Aibai Tarrant
Photo courtesy of HfG-Archiv/Nadja Wollinsky.
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View Transcript
Dan Pashman: You had to translate ...
Martin Maentele: Yep.
Dan Pashman: Martin, sauceability, forkability, and toothsinkability.
Martin Maentele: Exactly.
Dan Pashman: Since those aren't English words, I'm assuming they're also not German words ...
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: But the German language knows how to fuse a few words ... to mash a few words together.
Martin Maentele: Absolutely.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Martin Maentele: So I will give you the German translation. So forkability would translate into Gabelgerechtigkeit. So, fork is Gabel. Gerechtigkeit, in this case means, sort of ... It applies in a good way to what it is supposed to do. And sauceability would translate into Soßentauglichkeit. Soß meaning sauce, and Tauglichkeit, it's, like, the ability. And toothsinkability, we translate it into Bissfestigkeit. And I'm not quite happy with this translation, I must say, because, [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] Bissfest means more or less al dente. And of course, toothsinkability does not mean al dente.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Martin Maentele: I mean, we talked several times now how the chew feels. And I would now maybe try to translate it with kaufahaiten. So chew behavior would be the literal translation.
Dan Pashman: Okay.
Martin Maentele: But probably it's not a very elegant word.
Dan Pashman: Right.
[LAUGHING]
Martin Maentele: So, Bissfestigkeit I think is okay, but not precise enough.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, 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. And Happy National Pasta Month! I'm sure you've all got it marked in your calendars just like I do. Right? Well, we got a lot of fun stuff lined up for this special occasion, including a bunch of events in the next few weeks related to pasta and my cookbook Anything's Pastable. There’s a dinner in Brooklyn tomorrow night, a virtual cooking class this Wednesday that you can join from anywhere, and if you aren’t free Wednesday you can still sign up and watch it later. Plus, I’m doing events in Las Vegas, Toronto, and Canandaigua, New York near Rochester! And hey, that Toronto event includes a rare opportunity to get cascatelli in Canada, add on a box when you buy your ticket and one will be reserved for you. Get details and tickets on all these happenings at Sporkful.com/events.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Now, this episode is going to be our National Pasta Month spectacular. So I have some exciting updates on the pasta shape I invented, cascatelli, including a story about a museum in Germany that decided to feature the shape in one of its exhibitions. I went to see it and it was so much more incredible and more powerful than I expected, and I'm gonna tell you why. Then later in the show, I’ll share the stories behind two recipes in my cookbook that I haven’t told you before.
Dan Pashman: Now, if you have no idea what I’m talking about — maybe you're a newcomer, welcome. So, look, three and a half years ago, I invented a pasta shape called cascatelli, and it went completely viral. It was named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year. It’s now in stores across the country. And then earlier this year, I put out a cookbook of nontraditional pasta sauces, not just for cascatelli but for a whole variety of shapes with a wide range of influences beyond Italian cuisine. If you want to know more you can check out our two podcast series on the subjects, Mission: ImPASTAble from 2021, and Anything’s Pastable, from earlier this year — or just google cascatelli and you'll get the gist of it.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: All right, let's start with that museum story. One of the questions I often get about cascatelli is: What did you think was going to happen when it came out? Like, it ended up going nuts, but what did you expect?
Dan Pashman: The truth is that I expected it to be a modest success. But depending on the day, I also considered the possibility of more extreme outcomes. On one end, the idea that I’d have to get a storage space to hold 3,000 pounds of pasta that no one wanted. On the other end, the idea that it would be a huge viral success, end up in stores around the country, and get added to the list of all the pasta shapes in the world for eternity. I didn’t expect that to happen, but I did daydream about it once or twice.
Dan Pashman: But in all my expectations and daydreams, it never once crossed my mind for a second that in early 2024, I would get an email from someone named Dr. Stefanie Dathe from the HFG Archive and Museum in Ulm, Germany. She says, "We're putting on an exhibit about pasta shapes and we want, like, to feature cascatelli in a design museum in Germany."
Dan Pashman: As it happens, when I get that email, my family and I are already planning a trip to Europe in summer 2024. My wife Janie and I take one look at each other and say, “Looks like we’re going to Germany.”
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Before the trip, though, the museum has asked me to send them my original cascatelli sketches, which I drew on graph paper that I bought at CVS. They want these sketches to be displayed — did I say it already — in a design museum in Germany.
Dan Pashman: Best part is, they send me a contract, which appears to be, like, a standard agreement that museums send people who loan them precious artifacts. [LAUGHS] It has all this stuff in it about how my artifacts will be insured. Once they’re installed in the exhibit they won’t be moved without my permission. And the artifacts will always be held between 51 and 55 percent humidity. I wanted to write back and say, “How dare you store my sketches above 53 percent humidity! Do you know how delicate CVS graph paper is?!”
Dan Pashman: Of course, I don’t do that. I sign the contract and send them the sketches, and a few boxes of cascatelli. The exhibit opens in June, and we visit in July. Now, I've never heard of Ulm before. I look it up, and I learn that it's a small city in the south, about halfway between Munich and Stuttgart. Janie, the kids and I are staying a couple of hours away, so we drive a hundred miles an hour on the autobahn and make our way to Ulm to see the exhibit, and that's when I meet this guy:
Martin Maentele: Hello, my name is Martin Maentele. I'm the head of the HFG Archive, the archive of the former Ulm School of Design, in Germany.
Dan Pashman: Martin has a Ph. D. in art history, but I have more important things to talk to him about.
Dan Pashman: What is your favorite shape of pasta?
Martin Maentele: [LAUGHS] I think I'm totally boring when I'm asked, when I say it's spaghetti. But it’s um …
Dan Pashman: Oh, Martin ..
Martin Maentele: It's too boring. I can't say that now.
Dan Pashman: Especially, for a design person. I mean, like, really? Like that's the most primitive shape there is.
Martin Maentele: And the most simple shape, too and it ...
Dan Pashman: I guess.
Martin Maentele: And it adapts to all the sauces and if I start cooking, I am always hungry.
[LAUGHING]
Martin Maentele: And there are so ... And they are very thin spaghetti, which cook quickly. You know?
Dan Pashman: So, at the end of the day, you throw all your love of design out the window and you just want the pasta cooked as fast as possible?
Martin Maentele: Exactly.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: This museum and archive celebrates the history of the Ulm School of Design, which was an internationally recognized hub for industrial design in the ‘50s and ‘60s. It was only around for 15 years, but it made a big impact in that short time.
Dan Pashman: And it’s only once I’m there that I learn the surprising story of this school. I thought I was just going to see my pasta in a museum. But the history of this place makes their inclusion of my pasta so much more meaningful. So allow me to pause the pasta talk for a bit, and take you on a little detour …
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: The Ulm School of Design has its roots in the White Rose Movement, a resistance group that opposed the Nazis. In 1943, two of its members, who were siblings, were caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at Munich University.
Martin Maentele: After only three days after a show trial, they were executed or we should say murdered by the Nazi regime.
Dan Pashman: Their sister, Inge Scholl, was also part of the resistance, but she survived the war. Through her family, she met Otl Aicher and they would go on to be two of the founders of the Ulm School of Design. Otl had been drafted into the German Army, but he ended up deserting in 1945, and he was from Ulm.
Martin Maentele: Of course, you all know Germany lay in ruins after the Second World War. Ulm, the inner city, was bombed in the last winter of the war in 1944. This taken together, it was really a traumatic experience for both Inge Scholl and also Otl Aicher.
Dan Pashman: Now keep in mind, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the idea that Germany would transition from fascism to democracy was not a foregone conclusion. There were still Nazi sympathizers in the country, the situation was tenuous. Inge and Otl felt spurred to action.
Martin Maentele: They said, we need to do something in order to educate, especially the young generation, about the democratic system. And so first, they started out organizing lectures. Even in ‘45, they organized lectures which were usually successful. There were about 600 people sometimes coming to hear these very specific topics.
Dan Pashman: These lectures turned into an adult education center, founded by Inge and Otl. While Inge led the center, Otl briefly went to Munich to study sculpture.
Martin Maentele: But he was not really satisfied. Later, he says also there were too many former Nazi professors still at the schools and he didn't like that. So he returns to Ulm and then starts from scratch and learns by just doing what he does.
Dan Pashman: Back in Ulm, Otl continued to study design and sculpture on his own. He and Inge decided they wanted to turn their education center into a full-fledged university. A couple years later, they met a man named Max Bill. He’d been trained at the Bauhaus, a famous German art and design school that had been a Nazi target because of the school’s progressive bent. Max suggested starting a design school in a similar vein, so that’s what they did: The three of them founded the Ulm School of Design. And as they were working on all of this, Inge and Otl became a couple. They married in 1952.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Now at this point, in the early ‘50s, the U.S. Army was still occupying Ulm, and the U.S. government was eager to support any initiative that might foster democracy. So the U.S. provided half the funding for the school. It opened in 1953.
Dan Pashman: The school focused on industrial design, meaning design of objects, and it quickly became an international juggernaut, turning out influential designers and products. Like the SK4 record player from 1956, designed by Dieter Rams. There’s one on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and one here in Ulm. The SK4 is sleek and modern, made mostly of white and light gray metal. And notably, some of its elements have rounded corners, which Martin says influenced legendary Apple designer Jony Ive. Ever notice how all the app icons on an iPhone have rounded corners? There you go.
Dan Pashman: Although Otl Aicher was mostly self-trained, he became a very famous designer in his own right. He redesigned the branding for the German airline Lufthansa in 1962. Then he got hired to do design for the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Martin Maentele: These very famous games, which were famous because they were the first Olympic games in Germany after the games during the Nazi regime in 1936 in Berlin, and his goal was to achieve a completely different impression. So that's why he forbade the colors black, white, and even gold. So in order not to have any kind of visual similarities to the games in 1936 and also Nazi imagery involved. He also devised the famous pictograms for the different disciplines, like running, like hurdle jumping, and what have you, and they are still in use today.
Dan Pashman: So the school was hugely influential. But in 1968, it fell on hard times. A combination of politics and a lack of funding forced them to close. Today, the museum and archive that Martin oversees exists to tell the school’s story. So how do we get from that story to pasta? Well, after Otl’s death, a documentary film about him came out.
Martin Maentele: Within the course of this documentary, Otl Aicher talks about pasta dough. And he says it's very interesting that you have one dough. It's the same dough, but it tastes differently if it's spaghetti or spätzle or whatever kind of shape you have.
[CLIP OF OTL AICHER SPEAKING ABOUT PASTA IN GERMAN]
Martin Maentele: And then he goes on saying that the relationship between form and material is nowhere more evident than in food, especially in the pasta dough.
[CLIP OF OTL AICHER CONTINUING TO SPEAK ABOUT PASTA IN GERMAN]
Dan Pashman: In other words, when Otl looked at pasta, he saw a valuable lesson about design. From the same material, you can create so many different forms, with radically different eating experiences.
Martin Maentele: This quote was for me, sort of the impulse to think about an exhibition about pasta and design.
Dan Pashman: Martin and his colleagues Dr. Stefanie Dathe and Linus Rapp started digging more into pasta design. They learned that in 1984, Otl had come up with a concept for a pasta machine, but it never went into production. And Otl wasn't the only one from the school who had pasta on the brain. Martin found a contract from the early '60s for a designer and lecturer at Ulm named Walter Zeischegg. A pasta company had hired him to come up with, wait for it … a new shape of pasta.
Martin Maentele: But we don't have any results because he worked and worked and worked. After four months, he sort of gave up. And we only know about this because the company wanted its money back. And during the court hearings, he said, I have made about 2000 pages of notes and drawings and so on and so on. But I gave up frustrated and I destroyed them because I was so frustrated. And so he was quite inventive with forms. And that's why I'm so frustrated, myself, that he sort of gave up with the project.
Dan Pashman: Starting from these little semolina crumbs about pasta throughout the school's history, Martin and the team built an entire exhibition called Al Dente: Pasta and Design. It explores the graphic design of pasta packaging, the utensils and dishes used with pasta, and the production and design of pasta itself.
Dan Pashman: That last part of the exhibit includes designers who’ve created special pasta shapes over the last few decades. Now I’m going to describe a few of these shapes, but don’t worry if you can't picture it. I’ll put photos on Instagram @thesporkful, if you want to see what they look like.
Dan Pashman: First up in this line of designers is Giorgetto Giugiaro, a car designer for Ferrari and Volkswagen, most famously he designed the VW Golf. In the '80s, he went on a brief detour into pasta shape creation.
Martin Maentele: His inspiration came from automotive design because the rubber going around a car door was the inspiration.
Dan Pashman: The rubber that seals the door.
Martin Maentele: Exactly, yeah.
Dan Pashman: This shape is called marille, it looks like two rigatonis stuck together side by side. And then there's this extra flap coming off one side, sort of like a big flat tail. But unlike rigatoni, which had ridges on the outside, the marille has ridges on the inside of the tubes.
Martin Maentele: In the exhibition, we have his technical drawing, which is really exact with all the measurements he needs for the ellipse and all the different geometrical parts, which form the whole shape. And this is also an aspect I always like about design. You have to be very precise in order to have them produced. A painter or a sculptor can be much more sort of open and free. But a designer, he has eventually to have a technical drawing.
Dan Pashman: Next up in the exhibit, I see two pasta shapes from the French designer Philippe Starck. You may recall we touched on one of Starck’s pastas in our original Mission: ImPASTAble series when I spoke with architect George Legendre, who wrote a book on pasta design:
CLIP (GEORGE LEGENDRE): Have you ever seen the pasta by Phillipe Starck?
CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Phillippe Starck, he's like a famous designer ... very famous designer? I mean, is that right?
CLIP (GEORGE LEGENDRE): Philippe Starck is the most famous designer in the world.
CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): [LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: Now I know who the guy is, okay? And there’s one Starck shape here at the museum that I learned of back then, it’s called mandala. Again, I’ll post a photo — but it’s a variation on rigatoni with a wavy piece running across the inside of the tube, so if you look into the tube with the cross-section, it looks kinda like a yin-yang. I had seen photos of the shape, but now I’m looking at Starck’s actual original drawings. And then, here at the museum they have another shape of his, one I’ve never heard of, called quartella.
Martin Maentele: And it fused four different shapes, the circle, the triangle, the square, and the diamond. This actually still exists, but only in two specimens, and we got them on loan from the Philip Starck archive in Paris.
Dan Pashman: Martin tells me the museum sent someone to Paris to pick up the last two remaining pieces of quartella known to humankind for this exhibit. And now I am looking at them in a tiny jar. It's very small. These four tiny shapes fused together side by side. I gotta say the quartella looks intriguing to me. My cookbook process made me more of a fan of small shapes that have a lot of walls packed in tightly, like ditalini, a.k.a. tubetti, which is almost like diced bucatini. It’s got a ton of tensile strength, it really pushes back against the bite. I think the quartella would do the same thing.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Now, I get to the final shape in this part of the exhibit, and this is where I have to pause, because here, alongside Walter Zeischegg's notes, and sketches by Giorgetto Giugiaro and Philippe Starck, in an archive of a school co-founded by Otl Aicher inspired by the Nazi resistance, is a box of cascatelli and my original sketches, a design for a pasta shape by a Jewish-American with no professional design or culinary training. Janie shoots a video of this moment in the museum…
Dan Pashman: Dr. Maentele, I just need to pause here for a second because like ... I mean, this is crazy. [LAUGHS] We just walked down this path here. We started ... Like, these are some of the most famous designers over the past half-century.
Martin Maentele: Yes, you can say that.
Dan Pashman: And at the end of this whole chain ... [LAUGHING]
Martin Maentele: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: Is my pasta and my sketches on CVS graph paper.
Janie Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] I mean, when I started this, I did not expect this is where it would end up ...
Dan Pashman: I can see Janie tearing up as she shoots the video …
Martin Maentele: Well, I hope you’re content.
Dan Pashman: I mean, more than content. I mean, how can I — I can’t even — yeah, it's amazing. It's, like, it's ... I can't even really wrap my brain around it, honestly. It’s emotional. It’s amazing to think that, like, how did I end up in the same row as some of the most famous designers in the world?
Janie Pashman: No, it is amazing …
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: That’s Dr. Martin Maentele from the Ulm School of Design Museum and Archive in Germany. You too can visit the al dente exhibition in Ulm until January 2025. And get this, in 2026 the exhibit will be traveling to another German design museum, the Grassi Museum of Applied Arts in Leipzig. It’s a 150-year-old institution featuring pieces from antiquity to the present day. And cascatelli’s gonna be there!
Dan Pashman: Coming up for our National Pasta Month episode, we’ll discuss two pasta sauce recipes, including one for my very favorite way to have cascatelli. Stick around.
MUSIC
+++ BREAK +++
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman, and let’s get right back into our National Pasta Month Spectacular. Before we get to those two recipes I want to share with you from my cookbook, I know a lot of you are curious about what’s been going on with the cascatelli business. So here are a few updates:
[STING]
Dan Pashman: I got my patent! For the first couple of years cascatelli was patent pending, which is common, the process takes a while. But now I got an actual patent, I shared it on Instagram a little while back. It’s actually really nice, it’s, like, an 8-page booklet on thick cardstock paper. On the front, there’s a gold embossed United States of America seal, and all the diagrams of the shape are inside. So I’m now officially a pasta patent holder!
[STING]
Dan Pashman: Sales are going strong. You can still find cascatelli at all Trader Joe’s, and the Banza version that’s made from chickpeas is in Whole Foods nationwide. The Banza one just got a snazzy new box and we’re hoping to get it into more stores soon.
Dan Pashman: And of course, I’m continuing to work with my friends at Sfoglini, who make the original cascatelli, and the two other shapes we teamed up to produce, quattrotini and vesuvio. So here are updates on the Sfoglini front:
[STING]
Dan Pashman: My Sfoglini pastas are in a bunch more stores across the country! From California and Nevada to North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia, from Michigan and Minnesota to Kansas to Texas, it is getting a lot easier to find my pastas near you. We’ll post a full list of all the new stores in the blog post for this episode on Sporkful.com. Now, if your store doesn’t carry the pastas, please ask them to start! And of course, you can always order from Sfoglini’s website. Speaking of which …
[STING]
Dan Pashman: Sfoglini is offering 20 percent off on a special gift set of my cookbook, plus one box each of my three pastas — but only for a limited time, now through next Thursday, October 17, which is National Pasta Day! You can get it at Sfoglini.com, that’s S-F-O-G-L-I-N-I dot com.
[STING]
Dan Pashman: Cascatelli and vesuvio are coming to the prepared foods section — in New York City and New Jersey Shoprites, plus all Gourmet Garages and Fairways, you can get a few different pre-made cascatelli mac and cheese dishes, and a vesuvio with a spicy vodka sauce. These’ll be launching any day, they’re packaged under the Gourmet Garage brand and labeled “made with Sfoglini,” so look for them in the prepared food section and/or the deli counter.
Dan Pashman: All right, that’s all the updates for now. Whew!
[MUSIC]
Dan Pashman: Now we’re going to turn from the latest on cascatelli, to more about my cookbook, Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People. Because there are a few recipes in the book that I really love that have great backstories, but that I just didn’t get a chance to talk about in our original podcast series about the making of the book.
Dan Pashman: In that series, I talked about the main recipe developers I worked with, but there were a few folks who each contributed special one-off recipes.
Dan Pashman: So you two are friends, colleagues, occasional collaborators ...
Andrew Janjigian: Yes.
Dan Pashman: And you have formed a little club.
Andrew Janjigian: Well, you're a member of the club.
Andrea Nguyen: Yes.
Dan Pashman: I wasn't sure if I had been inducted. I hadn't received any official paperwork. I was imagining I was going to get a letter with, like, a wax seal on it.
Andrew Janjigian: [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: This is Andrea Nguyen, who we talked with last spring about her latest cookbook Ever-Green Vietnamese, and Andrew Janjigian, a writer, recipe developer, and one of America’s foremost bread nerds. He actually writes a newsletter called Wordloaf, which he describes as “breaducational.”
Dan Pashman: Andrea and Andrew each contributed one recipe to my book. Those are the two recipes we’re talking about today. But long before that, they formed a club.
Dan Pashman: So what's the club and am I in it?
Andrew Janjigian: Andrea, do you want to ... Do you want to explain?
Andrea Nguyen: Welcome ...
[LAUGHING]
Andrea Nguyen: Dan! We're the official welcome wagon to The Glutamates.
Dan Pashman: The Glutamates. Yes!
Andrea Nguyen: Yes, the Glutamates. And I'm gonna sprinkle a little bit of the crystalline magic dust on you right now.
Dan Pashman: Oh, I can feel it raining down on me. So there's three of us now.
Andrea Nguyen: Yeah.
Andrew Janjigian: Right. And this is our official ... our first official meeting, in fact.
Dan Pashman: Wow, I'm so honored to be included in this esteemed group.
Andrew Janjigian: [LAUGHS]
Dan Pashman: What would you describe as the purpose of The Glutamates, Andrea?
Andrea Nguyen: To maximize your eating pleasure on the savory side.
Dan Pashman: And in particular to not skimp on the MSG.
Andrea Nguyen: You know, to use it judiciously.
Dan Pashman: The Glutamates trace their roots back to when Andrew was working at America’s Test Kitchen about ten years ago. There was a friendly competition among the test cooks to come up with the best popcorn seasoning.
Andrew Janjigian: It started out this idea that I wanted to make — basically, make a Dorito dust for popcorn. And so, I started out by grinding up nacho cheese Doritos and just putting on the popcorn and it kind of — it was good, but it didn't quite capture it.
Dan Pashman: Like so many test cooks do, Andrew became consumed with trying to improve his creation, even after he lost the competition. He tinkered with it for years. Eventually, Andrea got wind of the project and offered her own input. By the time they were done, they had abandoned the Doritos concept and ended up with something more inspired by the famous Chinese snack Sichuan Spicy Peanuts, using paprika, cayenne, Sichuan peppercorns, nutritional yeast, a.k.a. nooch, which is a savory umami booster, and of course, MSG. Andrea has the final recipe for Sichuan Magic Dust Popcorn on her website, we’ll link to it in the show notes. But the point is that along the way, The Glutamates were formed.
Dan Pashman: And because I too have long advocated for the use of MSG, kept it in my pantry, and called for it in a few recipes in my cookbook, I’ve finally been granted entry into this sacred society.
Andrew Janjigian: I think there are millions of people that are unofficial members of this club, so maybe it is time to make it official and start ID cards and things.
Andrea Nguyen: Merch.
Andrew Janjigian: Yeah.
Andrea Nguyen: We gotta merch.
Andrew Janjigian: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: Right. Yeah. Look, I think we could sell these things like hot cakes.
Andrea Nguyen: We'll put it in hotcakes.
[LAUGHING]
Andrew Janjigian: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: There you go.
MUSIC
Dan Pashman: I want to spend a little time and just sort of talk about each of your respective recipes that are in Anything's Pastable, cause I love them both so much. Andrea, let's start with you. You did a recipe for The New York Times quite a number of years ago, that was Mapo Tofu Spaghetti.
Andrea Nguyen: Right.
Dan Pashman: It's a meat sauce that uses the flavors of mapo tofu. And that was the initial recipe that inspired what we did. Just tell me, like, how did you come up with it?
Andrea Nguyen: So mapo is a Sichuan dish. And I was just like, well, this is such a good dish and how can we distill it down and make it, like, friendly and just like make it kind of crazy fun. And so I was like, well hide the tofu because that people are always like, "Hide the tofu," you know?
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Andrea Nguyen: So I thought of silken tofu.
Dan Pashman: Right, which is sort of, like, the loosest, creamiest tofu.
Andrea Nguyen: Yeah.
Dan Pashman: The opposite of extra firm.
Andrea Nguyen: Exactly.
Dan Pashman: Usually mapo tofu is cubes of tofu in a meat sauce. But Andrea’s stroke of genius was to puree the silken tofu, giving the sauce a rich, creamy texture, without the addition of any dairy. And that sauce packs a real punch.
Andrea Nguyen: The umami for mapo comes from a lot of different angles. So you have the meat, you have — tofu has umami as it's naturally rich in glutamates, and then you've got the fermented bean sauce, you've got soy sauce ... And it's just layering umami, umami, umami on top of one another. And then you got the hit of the chili kick, right? And then you sauce it up over pasta and it's just like ... It's a beautiful thing. But I have to tell you because pasta is, like, not my thing. I don't even really like most of the shapes that are mentioned, like, I've never understood bowties, wagon wheels?
Dan Pashman: Yeah. Well, cause they’re terrible. There’s nothing to understand, right?
[LAUGHING]
Andrea Nguyen: I’m just like ... I just ... You know, and I grew up in a very suburban Southern California town where people were, like, making so much pasta salads in the ‘80s where they just dump the Italian dressing [Dan Pashman: Ugh ...] over the penne and called it a day.
Dan Pashman: Yeah.
Andrea Nguyen: And I was like, all right, I'll make that if that's what Americans want to eat.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]
Andrea Nguyen: But that's all I knew.
Dan Pashman: So for her mapo tofu recipe, Andrea stuck with the familiar.
Andrea Nguyen: I just, like, went to spaghetti because it's so accessible to people. But for years, I hated that pile of sauce that would always be on my plate afterwards.
Dan Pashman: You and me both, Andrea.
Andrea Nguyen: I know that now.
Dan Pashman: Andrea’s recipe for Mapo Tofu Spaghetti came out about six months before I launched cascatelli. It’s thick and saucy, with small chunks, so it seemed like it would be a perfect match for my shape. I tried it with cascatelli and it was incredible. I shipped some cascatelli to Andrea so she could try the combo.
Andrea Nguyen: And lo and behold, it just captures the sauce beautifully. And it made me, I have to tell you, so happy to know that there was, like, a better pasta.
Dan Pashman: So Andrea, when I knew I was doing a cookbook, we teamed up and I said, "Let's take the Mapo Tofu Spaghetti recipe, let's make a few tweaks, let's adapt it to go with cascatelli," which partly just meant increasing the volume of sauce because cascatelli holds so much more sauce than spaghetti. And I made a few other tweaks, and people say to me, they're always asking me what's my favorite way to have cascatelli, and this is it. All right? It gets into all the ruffles and the ridges and the nooks and crannies. It has so much flavor. And on top of all that, your recipe stuck with me for another reason. It played a really important in how I perceive pasta, even before cascatelli came out. Because it was like ... It was the first time that I'd really seen, like, a cuisine outside of Italian or sort of pan Mediterranean applied to pasta and it made me think like, "Huh? If you can make a Mapo tofu pasta dish, what else can you do?", and so it got my wheels churning. So I give you a lot of credit for that because I think that that was kind of a lot of the early inspiration of Anything's Pastable, which is sort of getting myself to think beyond the sort of, like, these artificial boundaries. That was a huge inspiration to me.
Andrea Nguyen: Well, I had no clue until you told me now and I am ... I have to tell you, I'm, like, super duper touched and honored to hear that, Dan, because I always, like, feel very self-conscious when I'm like going outside of my lane. So hearing this from you really just makes me feel like, okay, I can just, like, keep doing some of this stuff. I think that that makes for just a really more interesting kitchen and table for everyone on this planet.
Dan Pashman: I tell Andrea and Andrew that as I’ve cooked this recipe many times over the last few years, I’ve developed a system that makes it work for my whole family.
Dan Pashman: I love the spice. I love the recipe exactly as you've written it. Not everyone in my family has my spice tolerance. And so, but the recipe calls for a half pound of ground meat, which is perfect because you buy a one-pound package. I take half the ground meat and make your recipe. The other half of the ground meat, I will just brown in a pan and add some jarred tomato sauce. And that's just basic meat sauce. So, Emily, my youngest one will have the meat sauce. My older one, Becky, and my wife, Janie, they will actually mix the mapo tofu and meat sauce to get the level of spice that is right to them. And then I just have the straight mapo tofu. So it's great family concept. I just love it. I love all of it. And the whole thing comes together in a half an hour.
Andrea Nguyen: Yeah, I love what you have in the recipe headnote, cause I was like, you're right. It's brilliant for families of diverse eaters and you're getting low meat, and you’re getting soy in there, which is so good for people. And you can tone down the heat level as much as you want, you know?
Dan Pashman: Right.
Andrea Nguyen: But you know, maybe your family over time will then, you know, like up the mapo tofu sauce.
Dan Pashman: That’s right. So, as part of this chat, we asked each of you to cook the other's recipe. So, Andrew, was this — so you cooked the Mapo Tofu Cascatelli, is that right?
Andrew Janjigian: I did. I did.
Dan Pashman: What were your thoughts?
Andrew Janjigian: I love mapo tofu. I think it's delicious. Just as you said, it's like ... It's got that sauciness that few pasta sauces without cream have that kind of silky texture.
Dan Pashman: Yes!
Andrew Janjigian: And it feels so healthful. You're eating a whole pound of tofu ...
Dan Pashman: Right!
Andrea Nguyen: [LAUGHING]
Andrew Janjigian: Like what could be wrong with that?
Dan Pashman: Yeah! I would imagine that the two of you, as cookbook authors and recipe developers, anytime you're cooking someone else's recipe, no matter how incredible that recipe is, you're always going to be thinking, here's something that I'd like to tweak, or if I'm going to play with this, maybe I would do this a little bit differently. Andrew, I'll ask you, did you tweak the recipe at all? Or how would you tweak it if you were going to make it again?
Andrew Janjigian: I made one tweak to it, which is that I like to salt my ground meat before I ...
Dan Pashman: Okay.
Andrea Nguyen: Oh!
Andrew Janjigian: Cook with it, just to keep it from shedding lots of water when it goes into the pot.
Dan Pashman: Andrew also recommends adding baking soda to ground meat — a quarter teaspoon per pound of meat. It’s a common move in many cuisines. He says gently mix in the salt and baking soda, let the meat sit for 10 or 15 minutes and in the end, it’ll retain more moisture and come out more tender.
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Dan Pashman: Now let’s move on to Andrew’s recipe in the book. He was actually one of the first people I reached out to when I was looking for recipe developers, but he was too busy to be a full-fledged collaborator. Still, he said, he did have one pasta sauce recipe that he’d been sitting on for years, just waiting for the right place to share it.
Andrew Janjigian: The recipe is based on something called sini manti, which is — it's got a Turkish name, but it's an Armenian dish, or it's a dish that Turks and Armenians share. It's been something we have eaten in my family since before I was born, and they're small canoe-shaped dumplings with a meatball in the center and, like a wonton wrapper style dough that you pinch around it and you leave the top of the dumpling open, so you can see the meatball inside it. And they're about an inch long. And after they're shaped, they're baked until they're crisp. And then they're served with a broth made of lamb bones and tomato and spices and things. And the traditional accouterments for it are — in my family — it'd be garlic powder, which you just put on the side and you would sprinkle it over the dish, and then yogurt. It's kind of a pasta dish, but they're crisp and it's kind of a soup with dumplings in it.
Dan Pashman: Andrew grew up with sini manti. It’s a staple of Armenian Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, as well as church picnics. He says it’s incredibly delicious, but it has one drawback:
Andrew Janjigian: It's super labor intensive. If you're good at it, you can probably make one in 20 seconds or 10 seconds, but like …
Dan Pashman: That adds up because these things are tiny. I mean, you [Andrew Janjigian: Yeah.] could be eating two or you could be eating two or three of them in a single mouthful.
Andrew Janjigian: Oh, yeah. And you can house a bowl of these in a matter of minutes.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]
Andrew Janjigian: So like the sort of ratio of, like, the cook time to the eat time is way off.
Dan Pashman: Andrew says that aunties will get together weeks before the holidays and make the dumplings, partially bake them, and then freeze them so they’re ready to go when the time comes. So yes, labor intensive.
Dan Pashman: A few years ago, Andrew was developing a sini manti recipe for Serious Eats. So he did his due diligence, reading every recipe he could find that was already out there.
Andrew Janjigian: The best research for Armenian recipes and probably for other cultures too is church cookbooks. They're recipes contributed by all of the members of the church over many years. And I kept coming across this recipe for a mock manti, which was basically like grandma makes dinner for the kids and she's not going to make the real thing, but she puts the sauce and all the other accouterments of the dish on shell pasta. And like, I was like, "Oh, that sounds, sounds delicious," and so when I proposed it to you, I don't think I'd actually tried it ...
Dan Pashman: Right.
Andrea Nguyen: [LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: So you had read about this mock manti, you had never tried it before. You decided to develop it for the cookbook. You did it once or twice, what did you think of it?
Andrew Janjigian: It was kind of exactly what I had hoped. The main difference between the two, aside from the kind of crispy shells of the manti, is the brothiness. This is more saucy than brothy.
Dan Pashman: Andrew also had the brilliant stroke of naming the recipe "The Faux Manti". Get it? Faux Manti! It’s ground lamb, or beef, kept tender with some baking soda, cooked in tomato paste and chicken broth with sumac, Aleppo pepper, paprika, and more.
Dan Pashman: Andrea, so as assigned, I'm sure you cooked up Andrew's dish. What were your thoughts on it?
Andrea Nguyen: It’s brilliant because I have seen photos of the full manti.
Dan Pashman: Right.
[LAUGHING]
Andrea Nguyen: They're tiny. Can't we make them a little bit bigger, Andrew? I mean, manti’s kind of flexible in size, right?
Andrew Janjigian: Yeah, you can make them a little bigger. You can't make them huge. I like to think of manti ... It's kind of like breakfast cereal, but for dinner with meat in it. I mean, it is like a bowl of manti-O's.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: Andrea, I asked Andrew this question, I'll ask you, too. What tweaks, if any, did you make to his recipe?
Andrea Nguyen: I did none. I totally, you know, put myself in his hands. Because, you know, one of my things is that if I'm cooking a recipe from someone that I know and trust, I'm like, "Yeah, just tell me what to do because I really want to be told what to do."
Dan Pashman: What I loved about this recipe, Andrew, at the point that I was testing it the first time, I had gotten to my declaration, like, I'm not putting any basic tomato sauce recipes in this cookbook — unless it's really different from anything I've had before. And when it's cooking up in the pan and the sauce is the color of a dark tomato sauce, and I'm thinking, "This looks a lot like a basic meat sauce." And then you get it on the plate, and then you add the yogurt, and then you taste it, and you're like, "Oh ... [LAUGHS] This is not at all like a basic tomato sauce." It has so much more going on and don't let looks fool you into thinking that this is anything like a traditional tomato-based meat sauce, cause it's a whole other ball game.
Andrea Nguyen: And that yogurt adds, like, this creaminess that you don't expect, but also the punch of the garlic being in there too.
Dan Pashman: Yeah.
Andrea Nguyen: So it's very exciting.
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Dan Pashman: All right, well thanks so much to both of you two. Is there an appropriate — do The Glutamates, do we have a sign-off? Do we have a virtual Zoom handshake? How does that work?
Andrea Nguyen: I don't know, like a four-finger pinch or something?
[LAUGHING]
Andrew Janjigian: That works.
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Dan Pashman: That’s my fellow Glutamates, Andrea Nguyen and Andrew Janjigian. You can find both of their dishes in my cookbook, Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People, which is available now wherever books are sold. And remember, you can get a gift set of the book plus one box each of my three pasta shapes from Sfoglini. That set is 20% off now through National Pasta Day, which is next Thursday, October 17th. That’s only at Sfoglini.com, we’ll link to that page in the show notes. While you’re online find Andrea on Instagram @andreanguyen88, and you can find Andrew on Instagram @wordloaf.
Dan Pashman: My national pasta month events kick off tomorrow night in Brooklyn, then we got virtual events, Vegas, Toronto, Canandeguia, New York, near Rochester. It's all happening in the next couple week. Get the info at Sporkful.com/events.
Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, I’m live on stage in London with comedian Ed Gamble, host of the wildly popular podcast Off Menu. Ed talks about eating with abandon and having type 1 diabetes, and how all of that has affected his standup. That’s next week.
Dan Pashman: While you’re waiting for that one, check out last week’s episode with Jewish food icon Joan Nathan, who has spent her career documenting Jewish foods around the world. And I talk with Jeremy Salamon, owner of Agi’s Counter in Brooklyn and author of a new book about Hungarian and Jewish food. That one's up now.
Dan Pashman: And hey, did you know that you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? Then there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXM.com/sporkful.
Original theme music by Andrea Kristinsdottir.
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