Pasta shapes wish list & poll

I love the new perennial pantry pasta and hope that there is another shape wish list - spaghetti or fettuccine.

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Thanks for chiming in, @jilldavenport!

We’re excited to choose our next pasta shape, and I have some context to share before adding a poll to this topic.

We bought our Italian pasta extruder off of Craigslist this summer, after luckily stumbling upon it. These are usually quite expensive machines, and we lucked out with a $2k price tag instead of $20k new! Our machine can produce 1 lb of pasta a minute, which is neither a tiny nor enormous amount of pasta. It’s just right at the moment.

We buy bronze dies from a company in California, which imports them from Italy. Our machine came with 2 fettuccine dies when we bought it, and we bought a campanelle die as our first shape.

@jilldavenport asked about spaghetti and fettuccine above, which raises the first constraint of shape. Our machine can make long and short extruded pasta noodles, but the challenge in making pasta is actually the drying. Long noodles are made at twice the length you’re used to, and balanced on drying racks, while short noodles are dried in bulk in bins. Here’s an interesting video from a French foodie inside an Italian pasta factory.

Short shapes are much easier for us right now while we continue to refine our pasta abilities, and we’d like to experiment with long noodles in the future. Our second constraint is cutting - we can cut at many speeds right now, but only perform a flat cut, unlike on a penne noodle. So, diagonal cuts aren’t an option right now.

Here’s the website where we get our dies from, feel free to peruse the shapes available on our Italpast Mac30 machine.

We’ve narrowed in on 5 we think would be great, and here’s a poll to vote on which one you’d like. I’ll add some photos in the next post.

Please join the conversation or vote, and thanks for reading! We’re also open to passionate arguments for shapes not on the poll :slight_smile:

Short Pasta Shape Poll
  • Macaroni
  • Rigatoni
  • Creste di Gallo
  • Radiatore
  • Gramigna

0 voters

All short pasta options:
Rigatoni
Gramigna
Ridged Macaroni
Cavatappi
Gnochetti
Fiorentini
Cous cous
Garganelli
Orzo
Fusili
Zucca
Tortiglioni
Creste di Gallo
Radiatore
Gemelli
Trottole

Here are some photos of the polled shapes:

Macaroni:
image
Rigatoni:
image
Creste di Gallo:
image
Radiatore:
image
Gramigna:
image

Very interested to learn what shapes people want.

I like to think that our current shape, Campanelle, falls at right about 50% along the continuum from business to fun (maybe 55% of the way to fun). No doubt it’s a classic shape that can stand up to meaty or creamy sauces but is not boring with the light sauces, but the bugle shape and the fringed edge are just not as buttoned up as say fusilli.

In addition to the specific shape that people would like to see, I’d be interested to hear if folks want something more on the business end (we’re talking rigatoni) or more towards the fun end (think creste di Gallo, trottole) as compared to Campanelle.

Any shapes that are outright incompatible with a certain type of sauce that we should avoid?

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I’m glad to get this conversation going! I voted for macaroni as it seems like the “workhorse” of pasta. Great for mac 'n cheese, casseroles, and lots of pasta salads. I’ll pack my patience for long pasta!

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Thanks for voting, everyone! We’ve ordered a Creste di Gallo bronze die from Italy. It will take a little bit to arrive, but we’re excited to start making this new shape when it shows up.

Personally, I’m a bit surprised! I expected Macaroni to poll higher, and am happy that folks like a party-forward pasta shape!