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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Pasta is one of the greatest foods ever invented. But it can get a little predictable, especially the pasta dishes we make for ourselves. Whether it's another night of spaghetti or a slightly jazzed up fettuccine alfredo, it can get boring making the same dish over and over.
Our friend Dan Pashman took note of this conundrum and decided to kickstart a pasta revolution. I'm the creator and host of the Sporkful Food Podcast, the inventor of the Cascatelli pasta shape and author of the new cookbook, Anything's Possible. For those who aren't familiar with the pasta shape that Dan created, it's called Cascatelli. Dan based the creation of Cascatelli on three metrics. First, there's forkability, which is how easy it is to get onto your fork. Second,
Second is sauce ability. How readily does the sauce adhere to the shape? And finally, there's tooth sink ability. That's one word, which is how satisfying it is to sink your teeth into. I set out to invent a new shape of pasta that would hopefully be effective at all three of my metrics. And it took three years and a lot of setbacks. It was much harder than I anticipated. And I got a lot of doors slammed in my face because
But the end result was this shape called Cascatelli, which has these sort of two parallel ruffles that protrude from the main body of it. It's a short shape, and the sauce goes in between the ruffles. It holds a lot of sauce. It's got a lot of interesting textures, and it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. It's now in stores across the country, which is still bananas to me. I still buy it in the store even though I don't have to because I get so excited when I see it there. It was named one of Time Magazine's Best Inventions of the Year. It was on the cover of Time Magazine. That's amazing.
Well, it's a little weird to be in your 40s and already know that you're probably never going to top whatever it is you just did.
But, you know, there are worse things to be known for. It's pretty good, inventing a pasta shape. The creation of Cascatelli is documented in the Sporkful's Mission Impostable series, which you can find a link to in the show notes. But that is not why Dan is here today. Ever since Dan's pasta shape went viral and Dan's pasta dreams came true, a new unexpected problem emerged. Well, the problem was that I'm getting photo after photo from all over the country and all over the world, and 75% of the photos are...
Cascatelli with tomato sauce, meat sauce, mac and cheese. I mean, maybe a couple of party animals might have made pesto. It was very, the range was very narrow. It just generally made me a little sad because I just felt like there's so much more we could be putting on pasta. And it made me realize even for myself, like I had fallen into a red sauce rut. I just wanted to show other people and myself that there's a lot more that we can and should be putting on our pasta. So that's when I had the idea for a cookbook.
That cookbook's name is Anything's Pastable, 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People, which is a great title. It came out a few weeks ago, and it's a bit different than what you'd expect from a pasta cookbook.
I set out to try to write a cookbook that would have no traditional Italian pasta sauce recipes in it. There is no recipe for marinara. There's no bolognese. There's no plain old cacio e pepe or carbonara. None of those. I'm not against those dishes. I just feel like the world didn't need another recipe for those. Right.
So that was really my mission was a cookbook of pasta sausage with none of the traditional basic ones that everyone knows. What kind of recipes will people find in your book? So first off, we're pushing far beyond Italian cuisine to take inspiration from the many cuisines and ingredients that I love and cook with in my own home. So that means cacio e pepe with chili crisp.
kimchi carbonara, keema bolognese, the great Indian spiced ground meat dish keema mashed up with bolognese. It's a dish for a roasted artichoke and preserved lemon sauce, which is like classic Italian thing is artichokes and lemon. They would do lemon juice instead of we're doing preserved lemon, which is North African, Middle Eastern ingredients adds more savoriness. So oftentimes it's not inventing something that's so out of left field. It's just taking something that you know and tweaking it a little bit to make it new and different.
The Sporkful podcast four-part series about the making of anything's possible covers all aspects of the design of the cookbook, from the design of the recipes to photos of the food to the thought behind the language used in the recipes. There are a million decisions to be made.
I'm sure that 99 PI listeners probably are more attuned to the design of a cookbook than the average person. But the things that I never fully considered that you have to think about things like, all right, you're going to depict this dish. Now, look, it actually doesn't require a ton of talent to make food look delicious. OK, like turn on Instagram. A lot of people are doing it. But what is difficult is to present a dish in a way that tells you something more about the story behind the food and the person who has written this book.
And that is real craft. And so it's things like, okay, there's a plate of delicious food. What kind of plate is it on? Is it a wine glass? Is it a pint of beer?
Is it fancy silverware? Is the silverware and the place setting set just so? Or is it a bit askew? Has a bite been taken out of the food? Are there crumbs on the table? I wanted the look of my book to feel lived in and real. So I wanted a crumpled up napkin here. I wanted a hand coming in and grabbing something. I wanted a bite taken out. Because my style is accessible. I'm not a fancy chef. I didn't want it to look like, you know, the Four Seasons in the book. I wanted it to look like this could be your house. I mean, to make...
a photo look like a regular person just sprinkled these crumbs willy-nilly. I mean, there are people with tweezers and paintbrushes arranging the crumbs just so. That's awesome. So you hear a lot of that painstaking work in episode four of our series. So when you were thinking about these different creative possibilities,
pasta recipes. One of your sources of inspiration was, you know, some of the Italian recipes that didn't make it over and spread through jars across our shelves. Talk about that and like what led you to go to Italy to do research other than the fact that that's such a great scam. Right. Yeah. Hats off. Right. Right. Yeah.
You mean I can go to Italy for work? OK. So I want to go to Italy because I could. But also, yes, I wanted to feature some obscure Italian pasta dishes that I came across in my initial research that are not known in America, in regions of Italy that are not often traveled by tourists from the U.S. And so one of them is called Spaghetti alla Sassina that was invented in a city called Bari in the southeastern corner and the heel of the boot of Italy.
That's this spaghetti cooked in a spicy tomato sauce until the sauce almost turns to a paste. And you keep pan frying it until the pasta turns charred and crispy, crunchy in parts, golden brown and crispy in other parts, and yet still chewy in a third section of parts. You get all these different incredible textures. It's phenomenal. But you can't get it outside Bari. But I also wanted to kind of get a bigger picture view of Bari.
Italian pasta culture, you know, because look, when I invented Cascatelli, people always ask me, what do the Italians think? They must be shaking their fist at you. And when I started working on the cookbook, similar question, what are the Italians going to say? And I know that there is this sort of stereotype. I think to some degree, it's a bit of a caricature of these, you know, of Italians,
hating any variation from tradition, even though you could have two grandmas across the street from each other who cook the same dish differently. I was skeptical that Italian food was as set in stone as the people behind that caricature would have you believe. And so I decided to try to go to Italy to see for myself. And what you found, and this is the episode that we're going to play, is that not only is Italian food cuisine unique,
very mutable. It's kind of mind-blowingly recent, the things that we think of as Italian food that has been exported to the U.S. It's really kind of nuts. I'm still, my jaw's sort of still on the floor. Yeah.
First of all, Italy only became a country about 150 years ago. Right. Yes, of course, there's a lot of history in the region that goes back much further, but it was only unified about 150 years ago for a long time. And it's even still like a very regional place and somewhat fractious. And so the idea that there was one way to do things, you know, since the dawn of time, it just doesn't add up. Thanks so much, Dan. And we're going to play the episode. Thanks, Roman.
Today, we're bringing you the second episode of the Anything's Possible series where Dan Pashman embarks on a trip to Italy. It is a great episode. It is a really fun project. All four episodes of Anything's Possible are available right now from the Sporkville. The Anything's Possible cookbook is available in bookstores now. And if you want to go back and hear how cascatelli came to be, the Mission Impossible series is linked in the show notes. Here's Dan Pashman.
Previously on Anything's Possible. People who come to a cuisine as outsiders might feel less beholden to tradition. I think you're absolutely 100% wrong. Okay.
I was just thinking about the fact that I am having so much fun testing all these recipes. Janie, what are your thoughts? How does this whole process... It seems like so much work. I'm actually like, do you really want to do this cookbook? How many recipes do you want to have? I'm required by my book contract to have 75 to 100 recipes. Oh my God. This is my second book, and my first book, nobody bought. And if no one buys this book, I'm not going to get a third shot.
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. This is episode two of Anything's Possible, a four-part series giving you the inside story of the making of my first cookbook. By the end, you'll never look at a cookbook the same way again. Now, if you haven't listened to part one yet, please go back and start there. Okay, let's get into it.
We'll pick up where we left off. It's the spring of 2022, and I'm pushing aside my doubts and fully immersing myself in recipe research and development. A lot of the recipes in my book will be things that my recipe developers and I come up with.
But in reading through old cookbooks and talking to people who've lived in Italy, I've also come across a few obscure Italian pasta dishes that seem perfect for my book. They're mostly unknown even in Italy, outside their specific regions. They're pretty easy to make, and they contain surprising twists that really make them stand out from the ones you've seen a million times. But these dishes are so obscure that it's hard to find people in America who know how to make them. I decide that if I'm going to do them right, I have to go on a research trip to Italy.
My daughter Emily's response to that news? Well, one great thing will be that I can taste these little-known dishes in the places they're from, cooked by the people who know them best. But in addition to researching these dishes, I have a larger goal for this trip.
You know, everyone jokes about how resistant Italians are to any deviation from tradition. With Cascatelli, one of the most common questions I got was, what do the Italians think? I can anticipate a similar question with this cookbook. What do Italians think of ideas I want to try like kimchi carbonara, mac and doll, and furikake pesto? The obvious answer is they won't like it because that's not the way it's always been done.
But I was surprised to learn in my research that one of the pasta dishes I want to go to Italy to learn about was actually only invented about 60 years ago. The notion of a new addition to Italy's pasta canon hadn't really occurred to me. I just assumed all the Italian pasta recipes were from ancient times. But this newer dish made me wonder, how do evolution and innovation happen in a food culture that always seems to be depicted in sepia tones? And where does my book fit into that process?
With those questions in mind, I board a flight to Italy. It's a pleasure to welcome you to Rome, where the correct local time is 7. In the peak of summer 2022, I arrive in Rome. On my first day, the heat index is 102 degrees. When you walk out the door, it feels like... Like a wall of rendered guanciale fat washing over us.
It's really something. I'm about to eat my way across Rome with food writer Katie Parla, an American who's been living in Italy for 20 years. She's written multiple cookbooks about Italian cuisine and gives food tours, including to folks like Stanley Tucci, Andrew Zimmern, and Action Bronson on their TV shows. Katie and I head to lunch. On the way, she explains that Italian food is very regional. There are lots of dishes that are only found in one area and sometimes in only one town.
Historically, Rome has been one of the few places where different culinary traditions have mixed. So it's a good place to explore my larger questions of how Italian pasta culture evolves. We arrive at our first stop, Piatto Romano. We're here because the food is always delicious. They do things that really reflect the location that we're in.
Katie orders us three pasta dishes, a salad, and some wine. And it's at this restaurant where everything changes for me. Because Katie drops a pasta bombshell. The 20th century is when Italians start eating pasta regularly. Some regions still don't really consume it in a significant way at all. Wait. You're telling me that pasta wasn't a big thing in Italy until the 1900s?
That's right. People in, let's say, Basilicata, like the region where my family is from, they might have eaten pasta on a holiday if the duke or the noble in that town provided flour. There would be a knowledge that pasta existed, but it wasn't a daily thing. But that's like, that's surprising to me.
I mean, that makes it a relatively new thing. Pasta as part of an Italian national identity is a 20th century thing. Katie explains that Italy's separate regions were just unified into one country in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s, the fascists come to power, and they need to figure out how to feed a growing population. They also want to unite the people under one nationalist identity.
They decide the solution to both problems is pasta, because it's cheap and easy to make, and it's already a staple in some parts of the country. So the fascist government builds pasta factories in regions where there were none before, including in Rome. There's a really great archive of, like, fascist propaganda, like, everything you can imagine that they're trying to promote as elements of a new Italian identity, and pasta really figures into that.
But it's just surprising to me because Italians are so protective of pasta. Completely. And they'll tell you it's authentic and we've been making this for a long time, but it's often not totally accurate. Something that I'm trying to sort of figure out how I should go about with this cookbook is my pasta shape has faced a lot of skepticism from Italians, which is fine. Understandable.
That being said, the fact that it only has been basically the national dish of Italy for 100 years makes me feel like it's a space that is actually more open to new ideas than maybe might seem at first glance. Yeah, and Italians might reject it depending on where they're from. But if it tastes delicious and you keep forcing them to eat it, they can get on board. LAUGHTER
That evening, Katie and I meet up for dinner at Cesare al Casaletto. I had asked her to show me examples of new ideas in pasta and robe. Where's the innovation happening? So she takes me to try Chef Leonardo Pia's deep-fried gnocchi with cacio e pepe sauce.
TBH, it tastes like tater tots. I mean, I could eat deep fried gnocchi every day forever. Also, I would dip these in ranch. Yes. This deep fried gnocchi with cacio e pepe sauce is incredible. And when Leonardo comes over to our table to chat, he tells me the dish came about because he has these ingredients in the kitchen all the time. One day, he decided to combine them. As he says, this is how a lot of culinary evolution happens.
After the feast, it's time to call it a night. We accomplished a lot today, Katie. We did a lot. You're talking calorically, right? The next day, Katie and I meet up for another dinner, this time at a trattoria called Armando al Panteón, Armando at the Pantheon. The grita here is pretty legendary.
Gricia. Gricia. That's carbonara without eggs. So, while that does describe it, it implies that carbonara was first. But in fact, Gricia is the OG shepherd's pasta that's made with pepper, pecorino, guanciale. They make theirs with white wine as well. And that's tossed with pasta. Guanciale is cured pork jowl. Similar to bacon, but not so smoky. More porky. The server brings the Gricia over to our table.
Bon appetito. Those are like slabs of guanciale. Yeah.
This is outstanding. One of my faves. Not only is the pasta perfectly tooth-sinkable, and the guanciale perfectly meaty with crispy edges, and the pecorino mounded on top like a perfectly fresh snowfall, but the black pepper they sprinkle on top is cracked whole peppercorns, earthy and fragrant. Looking back, it's probably the single best pasta dish I ate in Italy. As Katie said, Griccio was a shepherd's pasta. It first appeared in the Italian countryside.
But in the mid-1900s, there was a huge migration from the country into cities. That's where, legend has it, Grisha gave birth to its two most famous babies. And that was around for a really long time before it's enriched with tomato sauce to make a matrishana. And then ultimately enriched with egg in the late 50s and early 60s to make carbonara.
Wait, carbonara only dates back to the 1950s? Katie's dropping bombshells left and right. I always assumed the Roman emperors ate carbonara. Turns out my parents are older. And that may not even be the most shocking thing about it. After three epic meals, I say goodbye to Katie and prepare to leave Rome and head south.
But before I tell you more about my trip, I want to dive deeper into the history of Carbonara, because it has a lot to tell us about the evolution of Italian food. This is Luca Cesari. He's a food writer and historian based in Bologna. Last year, he published a book called The Discovery of Pasta, which has a whole chapter on the history of Carbonara.
I talked to Luca with the help of an interpreter named Lilia Pino-Bluin. We all thought that carbonara had existed forever and ever since the Middle Ages. Today, any Italian will tell you that carbonara is a pasta coated in a sauce made from guanciale, raw beaten eggs, pecorino romano cheese, and black pepper.
But Luca says Italians only coalesced around this recipe in the last 20 years. In fact, over the course of Carbonara's history, tons of other ingredients have been used in Carbonara. Luca tells me about one recipe printed in Harper's Bazaar in 1954. Harper's Bazaar makes the only recipe with chopped clams. Clams? Chopped clams. Chopped clams. Clams.
Chopped Glam, sir. Parmesan and eggs. And Luca, what would happen if you went into a restaurant or any Nona's house in Italy today and said...
I would like traditional carbonara with chopped clams, please. They would literally take you straight to a madhouse. They would put you in restraints and carry you out to a madhouse.
For decades, cream was another common addition to carbonara, even though Luca says most Italians today would clutch their cannolis at the thought. Still, they might find the larger idea that carbonara is so relatively new to be most scandalous.
Luca has spent years poring through newspaper archives, cookbooks, and other pop culture artifacts to confirm this. Before 1949, there's no trace of a pasta dish known as carbonara. Luca says there were earlier dishes that might have been forerunners to carbonara, like gricia, which I mentioned earlier. Based on his research, he believes carbonara likely came about when American soldiers were in Rome at the end of World War II.
American rations of canned bacon and eggs made their way into Italian kitchens. And people might have had the idea of mixing it in with pasta and probably some cheese. And then this dish became very, very popular among the troops and the American officers because it was a mix of the most...
traditional Italian food, that is spaghetti or pasta, and then the flavors of an Anglo-American breakfast. And that creates a bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic. So is it fair to say that carbonara is a form of culinary fusion? Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, it is the ultimate culinary hybrid par excellence. So Carbonara could probably only have come into existence with contributions from Americans who were in Italy during World War II. That's why Luca calls it an American dish born in Italy.
In other words, I'm far from the first American to contribute to pasta's evolution. But even when carbonara was created, there was not widespread agreement on what the ingredients were. Luca says old cookbooks often list the cheese as parmigiano instead of pecorino, and the meat as bacon or pancetta, which is basically Italian bacon instead of guanciale. The very first recipe printed in Italy had pancetta and gruyere, a cheese that's not even Italian. Other recipes had mushrooms or garlic, and there was that infamous one with the clams.
Luca tells me when he shares his research with Italians, some of them object. They insist their grandmother's grandmother made carbonara the exact same way people make it today. But others are open to a new perspective. The storytelling around carbonara
cuisine is changing. Some people do start to say, well, maybe what we've told each other up until now is not all that realistic. Maybe the time has come for us to listen to those who do research and those who have documents, and maybe the history of our gastronomy is not as linear as we've always thought it was.
So, Luca, I am writing a cookbook. I am trying to show people that there are a lot more ingredients that you can and should put on pasta. On one hand, I have a great respect for Italian food and culture. I love Italian food and culture. Okay. I also want to play with it in my own way. Yeah. So as I work on this cookbook, as I attempt to do that...
What advice do you have for me? Oh. Over Zoom, Luca shakes his head and wags a finger at me as if to say, I don't have advice. He just has one word of encouragement and he doesn't need a translator. Go. Go. After talking with Luca, I'm feeling emboldened to put my own spin on pasta dishes and thinking that maybe Italians should give their cuisine more credit for its continued evolution, which I find exciting.
Coming up, we pick up my Italy trip when I journey all the way to the southern tip of the heel of the country's boot to find three pasta dishes I've never seen in an American restaurant. Stick around. And now, a delicious word from our sponsors. ♪
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Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. I got some exciting news. I am taking The Sporkful on tour. When my cookbook comes out, I'm doing a series of live podcast tapings and book signings. I'll be in conversation with some incredible folks hitting New York, Long Island, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Atlanta, Miami, D.C., Philly, Boston, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, and still more to come. For all the details and the full list of my special guests, go to sporkful.com slash tour.
Okay, back to Italy. Over several days in Rome, I learned a lot of crucial information and ate a lot of pasta. But now it's time to move on.
I board a train to the region of Puglia. As I travel south, Italy's mountains and hills flatten. The air becomes dusty. There are palm trees and cacti. I spend a lot of time on the ride trying to figure out whether Italy has actual deserts. But it proves challenging because Google refuses to believe I don't mean to be searching for Italian desserts. After more than six hours, I arrive in the city of Lecce, in the southeastern corner of Italy. Final destination of this journey.
Even if you've never been to Italy, you've heard of Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Sicily, Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast. Lecce is not near any of those places. There's not enough water to sustain livestock, which means there's no dairy and almost no meat. So the food here is very different from the rest of Italy and from the Italian classics most Americans know, which makes it perfect for my cookbook. I meet Silvestro Silvestori, who runs a cooking school in Lecce called The Awaiting Table. Buongiorno.
Oh, wow, this is such a cool room. Silvestro was born in Italy, grew up in America, then moved back to Italy as an adult. He became a student and teacher of what's called cucina povera, meaning the cuisine of poverty, peasant food. Poor people historically were forced to eat a lot of greens, forced to eat a lot of legumes. The pig of the Salento is actually probably the chickpea or the lentil. Lots and lots and lots of legumes. So where other Italians might be eating prosciutto and mozzarella, people in the Salento have traditionally eaten legumes, which grow well in dry climates.
These legumes form the basis of the two dishes I've come across in my research that I've journeyed to Silvestro's cooking school to learn about. One dish is ciceritria, which combines deep fried pasta and boiled pasta in a chickpea broth. Silvestro makes it for me, and it's super simple, but also kind of mind-blowing. That is so good. The combination of the crispy and chewy pasta textures is transcendent.
The next dish is fave chicoria, a puree of fava beans and chicory, which is a bitter green. In Leche, they serve it just like that, a puree, often with bread for dipping. But my recipe developer, Katie Laird, aka Supernona, lived and cooked here in Puglia and suggested something pretty revolutionary, which I run by Silvestro. So the idea with fave chicoria, this may be controversial, but we're thinking about adapting it into a pasta dish. What do you think of that?
change a name or inspired by or that sort of thing right playing with something like this is a dish and saying I've improved this for you I mean Jamie Oliver has this problem all the time when he comes to Italy but I put meatballs in it and he expects he's like a dog who expects that you love the fact that he chewed your slippers right there's no value of being reinterpreted when it's already perfect
How we name the recipes is something I've actually thought a lot about during this project. You know, I'm doing a recipe for kimchi carbonara, and I think calling it carbonara is fair game. It's carbonara with one ingredient added. But in the case of fave chicoria, I do get what Silvestro's saying. It isn't a pasta dish at all. So while Katie and I will make it into a pasta dish, we're not going to claim that it is fave chicoria.
We'll give it its own name and say it's inspired by 5-H accordion. So, should I show you how to make this? Yeah, let's do it. Silvestro and I make the traditional version of the dish, which will give me a reference point for the pasta I'll develop with Katie. He finishes it with what a recipe writer might call a drizzle of olive oil, but in reality is multiple glugs of it. The olive oil is pooling in the bottom of the bowl here, and it does not feel like too much because it's not just like a little bit of lubrication, it's like an ingredient. When I put a bite of this into my mouth, I am tasting a lot of olive oil. The
The fava beans are rich and creamy, the chicory is crunchy and bitter, and the olive oil is peppery and herbaceous. I can't wait to taste this over pasta. My journey to one of the farthest corners of Italy has been worth it. While the two dishes I came here to research will still require a lot of recipe testing and development before they're ready to go into the book, I've confirmed that they're really special, and I can't wait to share them. From Lecce, I travel an hour north to another city in Puglia, Bari.
This is where I'll have my first taste of a dish called spaghetti alla sassina. Spaghetti alla sassina literally means assassin's spaghetti. It's spaghetti cooked in spicy tomato sauce, pan-fried until the pasta turns charred and crispy crunchy. Like ciceritria, it's another dish that incorporates crispy fried pasta, although this is pan-fried.
It's only made in the city of Bari, and I am incredibly excited about its unconventional combination of textures and flavors. I'm taking my first taste of Spaghetti all'Assassina. It smells burnt and tomatoey. Minutes after getting off the train, I'm sitting at a restaurant called Ghiotto Panzerotto. A friend from Bari told me this place has his favorite assassina.
Now I have a hot, charred tower of it in front of me. This is amazing. It's honestly so much better than I expected it to be. You got the burnt crispy bits and the doughy bits. I knew I'd like the pasta. Crispy, crunchy on the outside and chewy inside. And the spice.
I didn't anticipate the role that tomato sauce would play. It cooks down to a sticky, sweet, spicy paste, which adds great flavor and another contrasting texture.
The assassina at Ghiotto is fantastic. But I don't really have anything to compare it to. I need more of a frame of reference. So I continue my assassina crawl at a restaurant called Chez Joe, where I discuss the dish with other diners. I think that the secret is don't boil the spaghetti. This man, Vincenzo, explains that there's a big debate in Bari about spaghetti all'assassina. Some people boil the pasta a bit before putting it in the pan with the sauce, just to soften it a little.
Others put raw, dried pasta straight into the pan with the sauce. Vincenzo makes clear which side he's on.
No, no boiled spaghetti before... Don't boil it. ...in the pan. What's the meaning of a pan? A pan. Yes. So, the spaghetti, in the Spaghetti alla Sassina. I know, normally, you want pasta al dente. Yes. But, for spaghetti, I feel like at Ghiotto...
The inside of the pasta was not so al dente. It was a little more soft. Yes. Which is good because the outside is hard. Yes. It's the same. Yes. So here, I think the pasta was al dente. It was cooked perfecto for al dente. But for assassina, you don't want al dente. Yes. You have...
You need two different consistenza. Yes, consistency. Different textures. Yes. Soft and hard. Yes. Crispy. And when you eat crispy, crunch, crunch, crunch. Yes. This guy's speaking my language. Vincenzo even teaches me my new favorite Italian word, the word for crunchy, croccante. It even sounds crunchy. Yes.
As I leave, Vincenzo asks me what hotel I'm staying at. He would later drop off a copy of an Italian mystery novel called Spaghetti alla Sassina, in which a fictional inventor of the dish is murdered. It's the fifth in a series of books featuring Bari's most dogged detective, Inspector Lolita Labosco. It's in Italian, so I'm probably not going to read it, but I love it.
Before I feel ready to recreate this dish from my cookbook, there's one more place I have to go. Good to see you again, my friend. Good to see you again. I meet up with Antonello Di Bari, who I first met through pasta circles. He runs a pasta factory in Bari. He agreed to show me around. I tell Antonello about my plans to include spaghetti alla sassina in my cookbook. A lot of people, even in Italy, don't know about it. People must know about it. Yeah, because that's...
It's crunchy, and you can never stop eating it. Antonello and I arrive at a restaurant called Al Sorso Preferito, the restaurant where spaghetti alla sassina was invented.
You know, it's rare that you can pinpoint the time and place a pasta dish was born. As we heard from the food writer and historian Luca Cesari, most pasta history is the stuff of lore. But Alsorso Preforito is one of the few that we do have a documented story for. Alsorso Preforito has white tablecloths, tile floors, shiny wood finishes, and wine bottles on shelves along the walls.
we're going to meet a chef who is one of the inventors of spaghetti alla assassina. But first, we sit down with another important figure in the dish's story, Massimo Dell'Erba. I have a lot of titles. Among them, I am president of the Accademia dell'Assassina. President of the Academy of the Assassina. You said you have many titles, Massimo. What are your other titles besides president? I am a physicist. LAUGHTER
Gunshot residues. Oh, like forensics. Yes. So you have always had a fascination with assassins and killers. Yes.
Massimo's Academy of the Assassina started as a joke. He and some friends set out to taste the dish at the restaurants around Bari that served it, with a rigorous scoring system that rated each version on crunch, spice, and char. They published their results in a Facebook group, which quickly grew to hundreds of members, each of whom had a different opinion about who in Bari makes the best assassina, how crunchy and spicy it should be, and perhaps most contentious of all, whether the spaghetti should be raw or partially boiled before it's fried in the pan with the sauce.
Along with the influence of social media, Massimo's academy led to something unexpected. Now there is not a restaurant in Bari that don't make the assassina. If you think that only nine years ago this was a dish...
And back then, Massimo says nobody in Bari made the dish at home. Now he's something of a local celebrity. I was all a big number of other things before, but now I am known only for this.
With help from Massimo, I've arranged to go into the kitchen to watch them make the dish and to meet chef and owner Pietro Lanigre. Is it the inventor? The inventor. It's a pleasure to meet you.
He's 80 years old now, short and bald, but full of energy. He's the only one still at the restaurant who was here when the dish was first invented around 1960. Chef Pietro explains that the chefs were making spaghetti with tomatoes and chili peppers, a classic dish, but they accidentally burned it. They were about to throw it out, and they decided instead to eat it. Massimo translates.
This crunchy was interesting. It was good. This burning, on the different level of burning,
So when the chefs there realized they had stumbled onto something, they experimented and refined the technique. Customers started asking for it more spicy, more crunchy. Chef Pietro tells me when he eventually bought the restaurant in 1974, he kept riffing on the dish. He added the technique of rotating the pasta in the pan to char more of it, which also further reduces the sauce into that sticky tomato paste. Eventually, he settled on the spaghetti alla sassina he serves today.
One of his cooks begins making it as he explains the process. Massimo looks on, and my friend Antonello takes over translating. Oh, that garlic's really frying up. When the garlic is fried? It's fried. Okay. You start to add tomato sauce. Right.
Now, contrary to what they do at the restaurants I visited yesterday, Chef Pietro does boil his spaghetti briefly before he fries it in the pan. But Massimo, president of the academy, is in the no-boil camp. So he starts debating the question with Chef Pietro and the other cooks in the kitchen. What's happening?
They are just discussing on how to cook it because as I told you before, there are many different ways to do it. So as I understand, Massimo is explaining that he does not... Cook it before. Right, right. He puts it in the pan uncooked. Here they cook it a little bit. What do the guys who invented assassina think about Massimo's technique?
It just said that it's a way to do it, but it's not the best way to do it. So they are discussing about that. Right, right. It's so funny. The discussion grows more heated. The older man, the chef, he's explaining that doing as Massimo usually do,
the result is going to be not the same because the risk is that spaghetti can burn too much. But I didn't add during cooking, the result is going to be different at the end. And Massimo just said, okay, you're right, but next time I come here, I'm going to cook it for you just to show which is the best. I guess in Italian pasta culture, even the guy who invented a dish can be accused of doing it wrong.
At this point, the pasta's been in the pan with the sauce for 15 or 20 minutes. Right, now it's starting to burn on the bottom. Now he's really using the spatula to, like, scrape the bottom of the pan. The spaghetti is starting to stick to the pan, which is good, right? It's starting to turn. We're starting to get some black bits. Is that finito? Yeah, it's ready. Oh, my gosh. The cooking may be finished, but the argument isn't. No, no. No.
It's just explaining how that you don't have to push so strongly with the... The spatula. Yeah, because otherwise you are going to take off even this part. You get too much of the burn part. Yeah, that is bitter and it's not good to eat. Right. And they are still fighting on this. Right. They're fighting over whether or not to cook the pasta in advance or they're fighting over whether or not to scrape the bottom of the pan.
They're just fighting for everything. Time to eat? Time to eat. All right, we're coming back out to the dining room where our plates of assassina are waiting. We all take bites and chew thoughtfully for a minute before Antonello delivers his verdict.
It's good, but it's not my favorite one. This way to make it, maybe the original way, okay, I will not discuss it.
But if you are friendly with the Italian way to eat pasta, these are overcooked. The pieces that are not burned are overcooked in your opinion, they're too soft. Antonello, do you agree? Yeah, I 100% agree. Few people have obtained results from academia over seven, very few,
This is five. You would rate this five out of ten? Yes. I have to say, I feel the same as Massimo and Antonello. As compared with the assassina at Kyoto, that first place I went to, this one just seems to have a little less of everything. Less spice, less crunch, less char, less sticky sweet tomato paste, and less of the nutty pasta flavor the pan frying it creates. Less of everything I love about it.
I decide that when I work on my own recipe for my cookbook, I'll use the assassina from Ghiotto as my North Star. That night I would return to eat it there a second time to sear it into my sense memory. Back at the table with Massimo and Antonello, our conversation turns to the future of spaghetti all'assassina. As the assassina becomes more popular and more known around Italy and around the world, it's natural that also it's going to change. Maybe. Evolution.
New people will bring new ideas. How do you feel about that? This is normal in cooking. It's normal in all the human activities. There is nothing that remains equal over time. Nothing stays the same? No, nothing is the same. But you have to remember which are the origins. They must survive together.
I agree. And I'm confident the people of Bari will preserve that point of reference for Spaghetti alla Sassina.
At the same time, the inevitable evolution is already happening. In just the last few years, restaurants in the city have created new versions of the dish, one with broccoli rabe instead of tomato sauce, another topped with a dollop of stracciatella cheese, the creamy, spreadable insides of a ball of burrata. So spaghetti alla sassina is a perfect example of how, even in Italian cuisine, people continue to come up with new ideas, just as people in kitchens have always done.
I come away from my time in Italy with a very different perspective on pasta culture and my place in it. I started out thinking of my book as an attempt to shake up a cuisine that might have been too stuck in its ways. Now I see my book as a contribution to the ongoing and never-ending evolution of pasta.
Coming up next week in episode three of Anything's Possible, I return home full of inspiration. I just think this is a good idea. This is going to be really delicious. And I can't wait to try it. And run smack into the reality of having to turn that inspiration into workable recipes. Feels like I accomplished nothing. Then later, the book enters the design phase, and I agonize over the cover, with input from Janie and the kids. I hate it. I actually hate it. Oh my God. Are you serious? Are you serious?
Special thanks to Katie Parla for showing me around Rome and schooling me on Italian history. Her most recent cookbook is Food of the Italian Islands.
The Sporkful is produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern, senior producer Andres O'Hara. Our editors on this series are Tracy Samuelson and Nora Ritchie with editorial help from Tamika Weatherspoon and Julia Russo. Our audio engineer is Jared O'Connell. Original theme music by Andrea Christensdottir. Additional music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producers are Colin Anderson and Nora Ritchie.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Crosby from Columbus, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better. The legend of Cayman Jack is just around the corner. With blue agave nectar, real lime juice, and cane sugar, discover legendary tastes with America's number one margarita. Premium flavored malt beverage. Please drink responsibly. All registered trademarks used under license by American Vintage Beverage Company, Chicago, Illinois.
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