PASTA SHAPES SERIES

Pasta's not gonna work on a desert island, is it? Let's just call these my standbys instead. 'These are my desert island pasta shapes, assuming my dessert island also has pots and pans and salt and pepper and butter and oil and cheeses and tomatoes and anchovies and guanciale and garlic and onion and various herbs (both tender and woodsy) and red pepper flakes, and that's at a bare minumum and doesn't include the almost-as-essential breadcrumbs and dried porcini and canned tuna and sardines and all the other seafood and livestock and sausages and poultry and spices and brocooli rabe and peas and.ah, screw it.

PASTA SHAPES SERIES

'Nothing I like more in my pasta life than about 48-60 spaghettos dressed in canned-clam sauce, so I think I'm going to go with those, which I suppose is evidence of my lack of a functioning imagination, that lack being also responsible for the fact that I'm not the biggest fan of noodles that aren't longer than they are wide, or noodles of the fussily shaped kind-the radiatores, the spoked wheels, even, nay, especially, especially bow ties-or noodles with holes in them (particularly bucatini, which brings to mind non-food-related tubes, like medical equipment) (and u*eth*as)(and an open box trips my sympathetic trypophobia), so I'm sort of stuck, since everyone knows angel hair is bad (too thin) and spaghettoni are, too (too thick, I mean), and spaghettini are just the box you grab when you make a mistake-you're rushing through the store with a crying toddler, or you've just been laid off, or you have a concussion, or you're otherwise discombobulated (because no one says before they go to the store, 'You know what I need? Spaghettini!')-and while I like ramen that has the kind of flat width of linguine, linguine just doesn't really cut it for me except for, sometimes, in a fresh clam sauce, but even then I prefer it when the briny and buttery sauce clings to a noodle that's shaped like a long cylindrical prism, not a rectangular one like the pasta shape made by pressing a sheet on a series of strings in short, a spaghetto, surrounded by its fellows, which I suppose is a very long and boring way (hello!) of saying, 'Spaghetti!'' - Sho Spaeth, editor

Pasta shapes