Everything You Need to Know About Cascatelli, the Brand-New Pasta Shape from Sfoglini
Courtesy of SFOGLINI
Pasta is said to have been invented some 2,000 years, but an all-new pasta shape from Sfoglini was created through a very modern medium: a podcast. Dan Pashman, host of the James Beard Award-winning podcast The Sporkful, aimed to create the perfect pasta shape through his series "Mission: ImPASTAble." Over the course of three years, Pashman thought of the qualities that constitute the ideal pasta shape and developed three criteria: sauce-ability (how well sauce adheres to the pasta), fork-ability (how easy it is to stab with a fork), and tooth-sinkability (how satisfying it feels to sink your teeth into it).
The result is cascatelli, a short, curly shaped pasta with ruffled edges that are similar to mafaldine. The name translates to "waterfalls" in Italian and it aptly describes the visual appearance of this pasta. This extra-special shape even got its own high-quality bronze die, which was designed exclusively for shaping and cutting the groundbreaking product.
Related: 15 Classic Italian Pasta Recipes Everyone Should Know How to Make
The new shape has caught the attention of cooks, pasta lovers, and celebrities everywhere. According to Pashman's Instagram account, the first 3,700 boxes of cascatelli sold out in less than two hours and a second batch totaling 8,000 boxes sold out in 12 hours. Actress Sarah Jessica Parker got her hands on a box of cascatelli and called it "indescribably delicious." She wrote to Pashman on Instagram and said that his new shape is "perfectly sized, almost bouncy (in all the right ways) wonderfully textured, it's like a slice of, dare I say steak? We are all looking forward to it with Bolognese, pesto, amatriciana, clams, simple lemon and basil, (olive oil) it's the gift that keeps on giving!"
Pashman recommends serving cascatelli with a heavier, creamy sauce. "I would say anything thick, first of all, is going to get up in the grooves. It's going to get into the sauce trough, which is what I call the area between the two ruffles—that canyon. Anything with little bits, like meat sauce, will get stuck in the ruffles really nicely," he told Esquire.
Cascatelli is now available for pre-order from Sfoglini's website or their Amazon store for $4.50 per pound or $17.99 for a four-pack (and trust us, you're going to want to stock up). According to Sfoglini, orders placed now for cascatelli will ship in approximately 12 weeks, due to the overwhelming demand.
