"Lotsa Pasta" w/ Dan Pashman (LIVE from On Air Fest!)

Published Mar 18, 2024, 8:00 AM

Hello, Puzzlers! Today's episode was recorded live at the On Air Fest in Brooklyn, NY. Puzzling with us was: Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful and author of the new book "Anything's Pastable."

Join host A.J. Jacobs and his guests as they puzzle–and laugh–their way through new spins on old favorites, like anagrams and palindromes, as well as quirky originals such as “Ask Chat GPT” and audio rebuses.

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"The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs" is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and is a co-production with Neuhaus Ideas. 

Our executive producers are Neely Lohmann and Adam Neuhaus of Neuhaus Ideas, and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts.

The show is produced by Jody Avirgan and Brittani Brown of Roulette Productions. 

Our Chief Puzzle Officer is Greg Pliska. Our associate producer is Andrea Schoenberg.

Hello, puzzlers, Welcome to the Puzzler Podcast. The melted pat of butter at the center of your puzzle, Pancake. I am your host, A J. Jacobs, and we are here live at the on Air fest in historic Brooklyn. Then there are people in the audience. You can hear them. I am not making it up. There are people there that was not AI, and I am here with our guests, the amazing Dan Pashman, writer, culinary pioneer and host of the spark Full podcast.

Welcome Dan, Hey J.

How are you great?

To have you now? Dan? Before we get to the puzzle very quickly. Dan, of course great foodie. He loves food. However he hates spaghetti. Why the spaghetti hatred?

Please look, Aj, if you invite me to your house for dinner and serve me spaghetti, I'll eat whatever possible you put in front of me. I love pasta, but I have these three metrics that I come up with to judge all pasta shapes, and they are fork ability, which is how easy to get it on the fork and keep it there, sauce ability, how readily to sauce it here? And tooth sinkability, which is how satisfying is it to sink your teeth into it. And spaghetti is not good at any of those. If you try to get a good bite of spaghetti on a fork, you know it's either too big or it's too small. You have danglers that are going to leave sauce all over your face. It slides off the fork when you finish it, half the sauce is still on the plate. And maybe if it's very good spaghetti cooked just right, it will have a B plus level of tooth sinkability. But I just think that we can do better. Okay, it's the first pasta shape that was industrialized. It's very primitive, so like you know, progress, there's such thing as progress, and pasta too aj And well.

You have some very strong words about the spaghetti on your show. You say that the Lady in the Tramp has done a great disservice yes to American cuisine.

Yeah, you know that there's so much romanticism around spaghetti and spaghetti and meatballs. Spaghettian meatballs is not even an Italian thing, it's an Italian American invention.

Italians think that.

Spaghetti and meatballs is total sacrilege. Not that they're always right either, but I'm just saying, and you know, so, you know these two dogs eating spaghetti meatballs in an alley, why is that suppost? Like all we should learn from that is that spaghetti is a pasta shape that's just fit for dogs.

What about slurp ability, I feel that there's something enjoyable about slurping it up.

I mean, look, I think a good noodle slurp certainly has its place. Linguini, though, is better for slurping because you look at the cross section of Linguini at a glance, you may think that it's a narrower fetichini, but it's actually if you look at the cross section, you'll note that it's ovular, So it's the perfect shape for pursing your lips to create a seal that will allow you to suck it in more effectively.

This man is giving a lot of thought to pasta.

Some might say too much, But all.

Right, well we have Chief Puzzle Officer Greg has come up with a pasta puzzle, a pasta based puzzle that we thought we should give you.

It's got no slurpability. It's just a puzzle. They can't eat it, all right, take it away. Well in celebration of pasta. We bring you a puzzle that we call lots of pasta. Each answer is two rhyming words, one of which is a type of pasta. Now, the purest here are recognizing that lotsa and pasta don't actually rhyme technically, but we don't care.

Okay, all right, it's taking a liberal view of the idea rhyme.

But I promise all the answers do actually run. Okay, so we're not cheating there. So we might give you the clue sacred square shaped pasta, and that would be exactly Now. The good thing is we have a live audience. So if you're stuck on any of the yes, I can look any of your one hundred, well, be happy to.

I do want one other thing. I would love one, just one sentence on the pasta mentioned in the clue. After you solve it, be like, Okay, ravioli sucks, and here's why, really quickly.

Okay, do you want to do ravioli while we're here?

I mean it's it's it's such a varied category. I'm not going to make a blanket statement about it, but.

I will say that I such a diplomat sometimes I would say that I prefer prefer square ravioli over a circular one because a square ravioli will have more perimeter edge and relation to interior filling. And I like the textual contrast between the sort of like soft meadia center and the more too sinkable and ideally jagged edge.

Of course that's what I was thinking too.

All right, here's your first clue. A big, heavy jungle knife used for chopping the most famous pasta in.

The world, Spaghetti Machetti.

Spaghetti machetti.

And we know how you feel about spaghetti.

Yeah, I'm not a fan. We know that we got that so you could take the machetti to the spaghetti.

That it was making it worse. It's never gonna stand before, keep it chopping up.

You're just killing it and moving on to something good. All right, here's your next one. A two piece bathing suit made out of long, flat strands of pasta. A linguini bikini. Oh, very good, except.

Flat fini bikini.

Already that that was ovular. This is bikini.

I thought I had it right away.

Yeah, all right, feticini is probably it's It's definitely one of my more beloved of the commonly available long shapes. Fetini means ribbons. I like that it's too sinkability. I I love fresh fetichini. And in my forthcoming cookbook, one of the recipes I'm most excited about it is this thing I it came to me in a vision while I was driving, called pasta pizza. And you take fetucini, you cook it and then you mix it with egg and olive oil, and you put it on a flat sheet pan and you bake it and it coheres into like a flat like nest structure, and then you can top it like a pizza, and so it becomes like a pizza crust made of pasta, and then you top it like a pizza. You can cut it up and eat it with your hands like a pizza.

It's like my kid's two favorite meals in one, exactly perfect. Yeah.

I told my daughter. I was like, I've read it something called pasta pizza. And she's like, oh great. I was like, do you want to hear more about it? And she was like, no, it sounds good. And if I ask you to talk about it, you're just gonna go on for like an.

Hour or so.

I was gonna avoid that.

She knows you well on this subject at least. All right, here's the next one. Corkshoice shaped pasta eaten straight out of the freezer. Corkscrew corkscrew shaped pasta eating eaten straight out of the freezer.

Mmmm.

Now there's a few quarkscrew.

Ron object.

I mean, there's there's fusili and rotini, which those terms kind of get thrown around for really what are a few different shapes.

But see he said it.

The right way.

We were counting on you saying it with an American accent. Oh, I was gonna say you said sill and I in my mind think fusilli, fusilly, crazy bastard.

But there's also copa tappy that's actually the best corkscrews shape.

It's a tube and it's got ridges.

On the outside.

But that's a contract.

Sorry sorry Hill.

Yeah, but eaten straight out of the freezer. So it's really cold, like frozen. But when something's cold, how does it feel?

Chili?

Chili?

Got it all right?

Pronunciation is wrong. We should have done corkscrew shaped pasta made out of metal, which would be steely fusilla. That would have been correct, So we can edit that either way. All right, one more, all right, Skater Harding's secret recipe for this baked pasta dish includes whacking the pasta with a baton.

Baked so Skater Harding, yes, would have to mean Tanya Hardings, who was famous for having her boyfriend Jeff Gluley.

Uh didn't he?

Yeah, it's a deep cut.

Did he?

Did he go after Nancy Kerrigan? Or he hired someone allegedly? Okay, attorney is here?

Sorry I lost the thread here, So so pasta?

Yes, that rhymes with Tanya.

Tanya Lasagnac, got it?

Actually, I gotta do one more, all right? This is what you get when you eat too much of Dan Pashman's pasta.

Well, my pasta is cascatelli. I guess I would when you probably get cas belly. Yes, exactly, you did great. Did you know your pasta?

All right?

And by the way, you don't. You're not a pasta hater. You're a pasta lover. Even though you did not like spaghetti, you did something about it. You didn't just complain. You created.

Yeah.

I spent three years on it and it came out a couple of years ago. His name one of Time Magazine's Best inventions of the Year. It's this pasta tap especially designed to hold a ton of sauce staying especially delicius to sink your teeth into. And now that adventure has inspired me to write a new cookbook that's coming out right now called Anything's Possible eighty one Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People.

And we have Caska Telly as a prize for a couple of puzzles coming up. Well, thank you, Dan, you were fantastic. Before we wrap up, as always, Greg, do we have one for the folks.

And extra credit for the folks at home. Now, people here, don't shout this out. This is for the folks at home. Then we'll let you shout it out. It's soft dough dumplings eaten by the Norse god of mischief.

Norse God of mischief. All right, puzzlers, please don't forget to subscribe to the Puzzler podcast and we'll meet you here tomorrow for more puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzling lye.

Hello puzzlers, Greg Pliska, your chief puzzle officer, here to bring you the answer to last episode's extra We played with the wonderful Charlotte Wilder a game called Bewilder Wilder, where every answer is a two word phrase where the first word starts with bee and the second word is the remaining letters with the bee eliminated. Your extra credit clue was this is a Mexican dish wrapped in a corn husk by a very passive man. And the answer, of course is beta male Tomali.

I love that one.

I love the way it totally transforms when you cut off the bee at the beginning. Well, all of you will play with us alpha, beta, delta, gamma, male, female, non binary.

We love having you.

Thanks for being here with us on the puzzler, and we will be with you again next time.

The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs

Finally, your daily puzzle fix—in audio form! Every day, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jaco 
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