After declaring six years ago that “spaghetti sucks” on his two-time James Beard and Webby Award-winning podcast, The Sporkful, Dan Pashman created a sensation with his “Cascatelli,” a spiral pasta shape included in TIME magazine’s “Best Inventions of the Year” and featured everywhere from CBS This Morning, NBC’s The TODAY Show and Good Morning America, to NPR and The New York Times. International news coverage included outlets in Italy, France, Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Israel.
Not to rest on his success, Pashman has gone beyond pasta to the sauces in which they are adorned. Anything's Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People (William Morrow/HarperCollins) was published in mid-March.
Pashman wrote Anything’s Pastable as a continuation of his quest to add some creativity and fun to the pasta world. With a foreword by bestselling author and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt, the book highlights 81 recipes co-created with food experts, including James Park (writer for The Kitchn, Eater, Food52, and more), Katie Leaird (recipe developer and food writer for The Kitchn, Serious Eats, America’s Test Kitchen, and Asha Loupy (recipe editor for Diaspora Co.).
Whether showcasing a new flavor combination as in the Kimchi Carbonara or an obscure Italian dish like Spaghetti All’Assassina (a crispy fried pasta that Dan learned to make from one of the inventors of the dish, 80-year-old Italian chef Pietro Lonigro in Bari), Anything’s Pastable is not your traditional pasta cookbook. There is no recipe for marinara sauce, it does not require you to make fresh pasta from scratch, and there are no photos of Tuscany.
Related: Shop The Sporkful Collection from Sfoglini Pasta
A reflection of Pashman’s charmingly obsessive desire to find new and creative ways to enjoy a meal, the cookbook shares clever techniques alongside the recipes. For example, instead of a recipe for tomato sauce, he offers a Jarred Tomato Sauce Decision Tree, to help busy home cooks level up the convenient pantry staple. Organized into seven chapters, most of the recipes take less than an hour to make, apart from a few “project recipes” for those who want to fill a day with cooking:
• Pestos, Pangrattatos, and the “Jarred Tomato Sauce Decision Tree”
• Classic Comfort: Hugs on a Plate
• Carby and Crispy: Adventures in Texture
• Zing: Flavor Bombs, Not Belly Bombs
• Stews, Rouxes, and Ragus: Thick, Hearty, Warm & Toasty
• Pasta Salads Redeemed: Fresh & Bright, Hold the Mayo
• To the Forno!: Baked Pasta Dishes
To help celebrate the release of his new book, Pashman has generously shared his recipe for Cavatelli with Roasted Artichokes and Preserved Lemons.
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