Hasta La Ideas

My favorite pasta is rigatoni, because I like the texture; it’s ribbed for my pleasure, I like to say. The striations tend to hold the eggplant sauce I make for it far better than slippery penne.

Foodies and/or industrial designers should intuitively know that pastas are intentionally designed with different shapes and textures to capture different types of sauces. This is, and has become, such an art (or is it science?) that designer Caz Hildebrand has produced The Geometry of Pasta, a 288-page tome on “pasta morphology.” As “Fox Foodie” Elena Ferretti describes in her review of the book,

Fish flavors go with smooth-textured pasta like linguine or pacchieri – huge, hollow, tubes that unlike manicotti are never stuffed. Ridged pastas like rigatoni grasp hearty sauces well. Chunky sauces are good with tightly-spiraled, torpedo-shaped trofie. Soup requires pastinas – small pastas, like quadrettini or riso. Heavy, thick sauces go perfectly with a filled-pasta like angolott – veal, pork and sage-stuffed semi-circles. Think: delicate pasta, light sauce; heavier pasta, thicker sauce.

…Later pastas reflected Italy’s love of design, and have a decidedly industrial esthetic: eliche (“screws”) and fusilli (“spindles”); gomiti (“crank shafts”); lancette (“clock hands”); trivelli (“drills”) and radiatore (“radiators.”)

The Geometry of Pasta was written by Caz Hildebrand and co-author Jacob Kennedy.

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