A Splendid and Rebellious Pasta Salad
A Splendid and Rebellious Pasta Salad
From an inventive new cookbook by The Sporkful's Dan Pashman. Plus, a simple yet glorious tomato dish you'll make over and over and over and over. And over.
WHEN WE DEDICATED OUR REMAINING YEARS on this planet to salad back in 2020, we knew it might seem like an odd decision to friends and strangers. But we’ve never looked back, and we feel just fine when even our fondest supporters marvel dismissively at the Department of Salad enterprise—as if we’ve been writing about, I don’t know, stork-beak pliers.
“A salad newsletter of all things!,” they’ll say. Which implies that picking a manifold but often maligned dish as delicious as salad to investigate and elevate and propagate is somehow more absurd than ignoring it the way the rest of the world tends to do. As if letting salad remain unsung—relegated to a tiny plate positioned to the left of a tiny fork at the dinner table—were even a choice.
But never mind. I came here to say that while I’m obviously just really crazy about salad, part of the reason I continue with this life is that it has been freeing rather than restrictive. Writing about salad, it turns out, is writing about all the things that any food can be—because any food can be salad.
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And my point today is that I’ve always leapt enthusiastically into the tractor beam emitted by people with obsessive fascinations, those 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird people who understand that limiting one’s focus often opens a door to all kinds of enlightenment.
I’m talking about writers who are able to redirect and compel our fascination toward their own for, say, the history and engineering of the pencil, like Henry Petroski; or grammar and Greece, like my friend Mary Norris; or human cadavers and life in space and the afterlife, like Mary Roach; or milk and oysters and salt, like Mark Kurlansky.
Dan Pashman’s new cookbook, Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People, is my favorite recent example in the food category. As many of you may know, Pashman is the creator and host of the extremely popular, James Beard award winning, long-running podcast, The Sporkful. I was recently a guest! Take a listen:
It was especially fun for me because Pashman is a proud purveyor of the joys of healthy fixations. In addition to many other things, he’s known for tirelessly figuring out the very best way to eat a dish. As the science-based food avatar J. Kenji López-Alt puts it in his foreword to the book, “Whether he’s imploring you to fold your New York slice inside out so that the cheese hits your tongue first. . . or suggesting that you cook your falafel mixture in a waffle iron. . . you can always count on Dan to offer passionate, thoughtful-bordering-on-obsessive opinions.”
(If anyone is equipped to “get” the Department of Salad, it’s Dan Pashman.)
The idea for his book was the roundabout result of his preoccupation with how few noodles satisfied his criteria for a superior shape, which he delineates in his very funny introduction. (Don’t try to serve Pashman angel-hair pasta, by the way.)
The criteria are:
Forkability: how easy it is to get the shape on your fork and keep it there
Sauceability: how readily sauce adheres to the shape
And most important of all. . .
Toothsinkability: how satisfying it is to sink your teeth into it
But he’s humble, “a food obsessed weirdo,” as he puts it, rather than a chef. So to find out if he knew what he was talking about, he decided it wasn’t enough for him to simply ponder a new and possibly better pasta. He’d have to invent one.
Pashman spent three years on his project, dreaming of pasta, sketching pasta while sitting at his daughter’s soccer games, and studying pasta. He visited the North Dakota State University Pasta Lab. (I love the sound of that!) He interviewed the translator of The Encyclopedia of Pasta, by Oretta Zanini DeVita. He convinced the only pasta die (or mold) designer in America to work with him. And on and on. You can listen to the whole story on The Sporkful series, here.
Long story short: The pasta—a combination of Pashman’s two favorite shapes, bucatini and mafalde, which he named cascatelli—was an absolutely huge hit. It sold out immediately at the Sfoglini website, and was featured on the big morning TV shows and NPR and in the New York Times and Food & Wine, among many other outlets. It made the cover of Time magazine, as one of the best inventions of 2021!
Which brings us back to the delightful cookbook. If you picked it up and flipped through it knowing nothing about Pashman’s project, you’d think you were in an alternate universe, where no one had ever heard of marinara sauce.
It features such delicious-sounding and imagination-stimulating dishes as Mac ’n’ Dal; Shrimp with Aji Amarillo, Olives, and Lime-Corn Nut Pangrattato; The Faux Manti (Armenian Spiced Lamb and Shells); Crispy Gnocchi Salad with Preserved Lemon-Tomato Dressing; and Tortellini in Kimchi Parmesan Brodo, to name a few.
And the reason the book is dedicated to exploring flavors beyond red sauce? When The Sporkful’s listeners began sending Pashman photos of the meals they’d made with his new noodle, cascatelli, “Seventy-five percent of the pictures I received showed the pasta with tomato sauce, meat sauce, or Mac ’n’ cheese,” he writes.
And so he started out, along with a talented band of recipe developers, on a quest to release pasta from the shackles of overfamiliar sauces.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it—and I mean that in the best way possible. Although it may sound like a “fancy,” book, it’s actually super user friendly and full of great techniques and tips. Also on the plus side, as Pashman makes clear in his intro, the book has no “pictures of Tuscany,” “wagon wheels” or “three-hour recipes for tomato sauce.”
The book does have an entire section called “Pasta Salads Redeemed: Fresh and Bright, Hold the Mayo” and the salad I have for you from that chapter definitely lives up to the title. I don’t have much else to say about the recipe except that it is utterly delicious and that you really should obey Pashman on undercooking the ditalini a bit—it goes soft on you fast. Also: I just used large, stuffed manzanilla olives here, and they were great. Also, also: Trader Joe’s has a terrific Calabrian chili paste/bomba sauce. Also, also, also: This is a dish I think you’ll make again and again, until you have it memorized and no longer need to even look at the recipe. It might also be one that you’ll eat for breakfast, like I did.
I’m giving the Pashman recipe to you almost verbatim from the book, aside from a few small stylistic omissions, including the fact that it takes only about 30 minutes to make and was developed with Asha Loupy.
I also have a cherry tomato and orange salad for you, one that I’ve made so many times in the last decade or so that I no longer need to look at the recipe. Is there a better stamp of approval for a dish? I highly recommend you make it—I practically insist.
In other recommendations
Will you look at these gorgeous paper mushrooms, by the Minneapolis artist Ann Wood? She also makes food and flowers and other work that positively sends me.
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Would you mind hitting the ❤️ button at the top left or bottom left of this newsletter if you enjoy being here? It means more to us than you might imagine. XO—Emily
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*RECIPE Raw Heirloom Puttanesca with Fish Sauce and Calabrian Chili, from Anything’s Pastable, by Dan Pashman
Serves 2 to 4
Dan Pashman’s Recipe Note: We’ve arrived at the fifth of my five Sleeper Hits of the cookbook. By the metric of Flavor Generated per Minute of Effort, this one is off the charts.
Puttanesca— the beloved pasta dish of Naples— is traditionally a cooked tomato sauce with anchovies, olives, capers, chili flakes, and garlic, tossed with a long pasta like spaghetti. This fresh version uses grated heirloom tomatoes and good extra- virgin olive oil as a base for the sauce, which is layered with a couple of spoonfuls of fish sauce (instead of anchovies), green olives, capers, grated garlic, torn basil, and a kiss of Calabrian chili paste for heat.
I know I said I’m tired of tomato sauces, but uncooked tomato sauces are totally different!
Because tomatoes are the star of this dish, you want to make this at the height of summer when heirloom tomatoes are the best, sweetest versions of themselves. This is also the time to pull out that bottle of your extra- good extra- virgin olive oil, because you will taste the difference.
Instead of spaghetti, I like this with pastina (small pasta shapes), like ditalini, which gives me the ability to scoop everything up with a spoon and enjoy its almost brothy sauce. This is a fantastic meatless main course (except the fish sauce) or summer barbecue side with burgers or steaks, easily doubled and delicious when made ahead. In fact it might be better when made ahead, because ditalini excels at soaking up the intense flavors of the sauce without turning too soft.
1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus more as needed
1½ pounds ripe but firm heirloom tomatoes (see tip)
½ cup extra- virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
1½ tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon Calabrian chili paste (bomba sauce; see note)
1 garlic clove, finely grated
1 cup pitted green olives, thinly sliced (see note)
3 tablespoons drained capers
8 ounces (1¾ cups) ditalini (a.k.a. tubetti; or use orecchiette)
½ cup chopped fresh basil leaves, plus small leaves for serving
Bring 2 ½ quarts of water and the salt to a boil in a large saucepan. Slice ¼ inch off the top of each tomato and remove the tough core (see tip). Place a box grater in a large bowl and use the large holes to shred the cut side of the tomato until the flesh has all been grated off the skin; discard the skins. Add the oil, fish sauce, chili paste, and garlic to the tomatoes and whisk until the oil is evenly incorporated. Stir in the olives and capers and let sit for at least 15 minutes and up to 3 hours.
Add the pasta to the boiling water (remember, it’s only half the package!) and cook until just al dente (the low end of the package instructions). Drain, shaking off the excess water, and immediately transfer to the bowl with the tomato mixture, stirring to combine. Stir in the basil, then taste and add salt if necessary.
Transfer the pasta to a serving bowl or individual bowls, drizzle with more oil, sprinkle with basil leaves, and serve. Eat it with a spoon! TIP: Use a small paring knife to cut out the cone- shaped core until all the hard, whitish flesh is gone. If your tomatoes have tough brown spots, cut them out too. You want ripe but firm tomatoes for this recipe— the super- ripe, super- soft ones aren’t ideal for grating. When you sniff the stem ends, they should smell like a fresh- cut tomato.
CALABRIAN CHILI PASTE NOTE: Calabrian chili paste is also sometimes called bomba sauce or, in the case of the TuttoCalabria brand found at Whole Foods and other specialty stores, Hot Pepper Paté. You can add as much or as little as you like depending on how spicy you want it. I suggest serving more on the side so people can adjust to their liking. Calabrian chili paste is also great on pizza, as a sandwich spread, as an addition to jarred tomato sauce, and as an ingredient in the Cascatelli with Spicy Broccoli Rabe Pesto and the Eggplant Timpano [featured in Anything’s Pastable].
OLIVES NOTE: This dish has a lot of olives, which I really enjoy. To me they’re the “meat” of the dish. But if you’re not as olive crazy as I am, reduce to ⅔ cup.
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*RECIPE: Cherry Tomato and Orange Salad
Serves 4
This recipe, which I’ve been making forever, is adapted from an old issue of Gourmet magazine. The original recipe called for 2 large lemons. I use 1 large lemon, to which I add 2 large oranges, and less sugar. I just love the flavors of citrus with tomatoes. With no other additions beyond a bit of olive oil and chives, this dish is a lot more delicious than it should be—a little miracle that’s nice at breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
1 large lemon
Grated zest of ½ large lemon
2 large (or 3 small) oranges (I used a navel orange and a cara cara)
2 teaspoons sugar
3 cups (about 1 pound) cherry tomatoes, cut in half
2 heaping tablespoons chopped fresh chives
1 ½ tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
Remove the zest from the lemon and set aside. Supreme the oranges and the lemon (here’s how). Cut the orange segments in half and the lemon segments into four pieces and place in a bowl with any juices produced and the sugar; stir gently. Add the remaining ingredients, including the lemon zest, and stir again gently to combine. Let this sit at room temperature for at least 15 minutes before serving.
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🥬 🥬🥬 🥬That’s It! We’re done here! We’ll see our paid subscribers soon with a recipe for Homemade Kidney Pies. I’m kidding—it’s going to be salad.
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I just love the way your mind works, Emily -- anyone who can work in a Wallace Stevens reference into a post about salad makes my day 👏 👏 👏
Love love love! The thing about looking at something from a curtailed view reminds me of Walker Percy's "Lamcelot" -- the character has a window he looks out of and watches everything through that lens. I can't remember if he was in a hospital a prison or his own house, but I think about this book a lot. Very Southern.