Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld of Grub Street, the food segment of the New York Magazine, decided to fight back against the current panic shopping mood with their personal top ten of imported, often whimsically shaped pasta available online. (Because: no need to worry, we won’t run low on pasta.) And in a challenge with 10 contestants, 4 qualifiers are Gustiamo pastas. Grazie Grub Street, we do like to think of ourselves as pasta nerds!
The pasta chart starts off with Tumminia Busiate: “Springy Sicilian pasta coils that dangle like your grandma’s old landline cord. Molini del Ponte’s Filippo Drago says ‘forget about sauce’. Dubious marketing shtick, we thought, but we tried it anyway, and damned if the unsauced little Twizzlers didn’t taste great: more like freshly baked bread than anything else.”
The yellow bag doesn’t go unnoticed, it’s Maccheroni Martelli: “Wonderfully chewy, remarkably flavorful ridged tubes of short-cut pasta that make you feel sorry for all other ridged tubes of short-cut pasta.”
No ranking of fancy pasta shapes would be complete without Candele Faella, and the Grub Street team seems to agree: “Super-long, hollow candles that deflate like balloons when you cook them. Ignacio Mattos uses them unconventionally for his cacio e pepe at Altro Paradiso. If you can’t fit candele into your pasta pot, you’re not alone.” Yes, you’re allowed to break them.
And finally, when we’re almost ready to wrap it up, we find Pastificio Faella again, with their Caserecci Faella: “Caserecci means ‘homemade’ in Italian, they look a little like straight-edged cavatelli, and have a similar dense and chewy mouthfeel. As such, they go well with sausage and broccoli rabe.”
Read here the full ranking of Grub Streets favorite pasta shapes.