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Hello from the Road! After several days of driving, a delightful dip in a roadside waterfall, a visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and a night of glamping in Michigan, we made it to Nebraska for our family reunion.
While we are here enjoying a week of cousin time and completing several 1,000 piece puzzles, here’s a recent interview I did with Dan Pashman, plus a delicious, summery pasta salad recipe from his new book Anything’s Pastable.
Welcome to the latest installment of The Four Questions, The Jewish Table’s semi-regular interview segment featuring Jewish food luminaries. This week I’m thrilled to be joined by Dan Pashman. Dan is something of a marvel. He is the founder of the award-winning podcast, The Sporkful. A few years back he created a *brand new pasta shape* called cascatelli, which is designed to maximize pasta’s “sauceability,” “forkability,” and “toothsinkability.” Today you can buy this pasta shape at Trader Joe’s (among many other places) which, I dunno, feels like a pretty big deal?
And this past spring he, with the help of a team of recipe developer collaborators, he published Anything’s Pastable, a cookbook that features more than 80 wildly inventive, globally-inspired pasta recipes.
I first met Dan and his wife Janie nearly two decades ago when they lived in Manhattan and were part of the CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) program I helped run at their synagogue. More recently, I had the pleasure of being a guest on The Sporkful alongside writer and journalist Aymann Ismail talking about Muslims’ and Jews’ relationship to pork in response to Impossible Foods launching a vegetarian pork product. (That was a very fun conversation.)
Over the years, I have enjoyed watching Dan’s star rise, and have appreciated his curious, cheerfully contrarian approach to food and eating. It takes a bold person to diss something as beloved as angel hair pasta. But when you think about it, he’s absolutely correct when he describes it as: “Much too thin, it goes from raw to mush as soon as you drop it in water.” It is also bold to include recipes like Cacio e Pepe e Chili Crisp, and Shakshuka and Shells rather than, say, from-scratch noodles or homemade tomato sauce in a book about pasta. His noodle kugel recipe, meanwhile, includes labneh and persimmon jam which…yes, please!
Below the interview, I’ve shared a pasta salad recipe from Anything’s Pastable called Lemony Tuna with Olives, Capers, Green Beans and Parsley. While researching Portico, I discovered how well noodles and tuna—plus lots of briny flavors—play together. Despite not being a huge fan of fish in general, the Spaghetti with Tuna and Tomato (Spaghetti Tonno e Pomodoro) is one of my favorite dishes in Portico. So I was delighted to see a warm-weather pasta salad in Dan’s book that follows a similar flavor profile.
Whether on his podcast, with his brand new pasta shape, or via his cookbook, Dan is always asking questions that challenge the food norms and push boundaries in a way that expand what’s possible. In this conversation, he shared his thoughts on why pasta traditions are meant to be broken, the team of recipe developers he worked with to create a “quintessentially American” cookbook, and his ideal Jewish meal.
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You’ve built your career in food around curiosity and cheerful contrarianism. Was there someone in your life who helped spark that curiosity about food?
I grew up in a food obsessed family. Long before the internet, when we were going on vacation, my mom would collect a folder of magazine clippings about the places she wanted to eat. I remember visiting my aunt in Houston in the 1980s and we had fajitas made with freshly made flour tortillas that blew my mind. That meal kicked off a Pashman family fajita kick—for a time we pretty much always had a flank steak marinating. More generally, I come from a long line of lawyers so I’ve learned to enjoy analyzing and overanalyzing things!
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Italian cuisine is notorious for holding tightly to tradition. But your book complicates the idea that food traditions have to be static—and reminds readers that noodles appear in many food cultures. Can you tell me more about your perspective and what you learned while working on the book?
The most important thing I learned is that pasta only became the “national food” of Italy about 100 years ago when the fascist regime needed to find a food to unite the disparate regions of the recently-formed country and feed the masses cheaply. I talk in the book about how carbonara, which is arguably one of the most famous Italian pasta dishes, was only invented in the 1940s and for a decade the ingredients varied widely. Also ciabatta, which feels like it has been around forever, was invented in the 1990s!
I think there has been a lot of mythologizing around Italian cuisine that people have bought into, but things are changing. Some people in Italy are pushing back about being too simplistic with their storytelling. The idea that there is any place on the planet where food has been cooked exactly the same way for centuries is ludicrous! You can’t stop a culture from changing and evolving.
Pasta is the perfect blank canvas for flavor and texture because it does not have a ton of flavor on its own. It gives the baseline of comfort food, and you can put just about anything on it. When we were working on the recipes, the question wasn’t “What works well with pasta?” It was “What do I like that I haven’t already seen on pasta?”
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Your book openly acknowledges—and truly celebrates—that you worked with a team of seven recipe developers. Talk to me about how you all worked together and what it was like to create a cookbook as a team?
I started by reaching out to friends in food media for recommendations of great recipe developers. I knew I didn’t just want Italian food people, I wanted people with a range of expertise and backgrounds who could help me create what I think of as a “quintessentially American” cookbook. It was honestly a haphazard process as I started reaching out to people and piecing it together. But they all added so much to the final book. I knew the way I credited recipe developers in the book was not the norm, but I did not realize how unusual it was until the book came out and people started commenting on it! People who work on cookbooks deserve to get the credit.
[Note: The Anything’s Pastable recipe team includes Asha Loupy, Katie Leaird, James Park, Darnell Reed, Irene Yoo, Nathalie Christian, and Rebeccah Marsters.
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Can you share a bit about your relationship with Jewish food?
I grew up eating classic Ashkenazi Jewish foods—bagels and lox, brisket, and kugels. And I still love all those foods. But in recent years, I have gained a deeper appreciation for the breadth of Jewish cuisine. A lot of the flavors of the Jewish diaspora, like preserved lemon and harissa, have made their way into this cookbook—though I don’t always call them out as specifically Jewish since they are often Jewish and other things.
Today, I would probably describe my ideal Jewish meal as a shawarma buffet. Store bought pita isn’t usually great, so I would serve it with flour tortillas. But I’d make chicken or lamb shawarma marinated in NY Shuk’s Shawarma BBQ Sauce, and put out a big spread with pickles and hummus and tomato and cucumber salad and let people go to town.
Serves 4 to 6
Headnote from Anything’s Pastable: We’ll start our pasta salad odyssey with one of my go-to weekday lunches, which I often throw together with leftover pasta from last night’s dinner. Everyone needs a good pantry pasta salad in their back pocket for those meals, or for days when it’s too hot to cook or you get a last-minute invite—something that delivers on ease, elegance, and flavor. This is that dish for me. Here we’re pairing it with torchiette (little torches), which are similar to my vesuvio shape and work on similar principles, with curving slides that hold bits and pieces. With torchiette, I love the dynamic contrast between the torch’s narrower, denser handle and wider flame.
[Leah’s note: If you don’t have preserved lemon, this dish still tastes very good without it. You can up the lemon zest a bit to compensate.]
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt, plus more as needed
1 1/4 cups roughly chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, divided
⅔ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 tablespoons finely chopped preserved lemon, plus 1 tablespoon preserved lemon liquid
2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound torchiette pasta (a.k.a. torchio; or use vesuvio, cascatelli, or rigatoni)
8 ounces haricots verts (or regular green beans), cut into 1-inch pieces
8 to 12 ounces jarred or canned oil-packed tuna, lightly drained (*see note)
⅔ cup pitted green olives, torn in half (use a full cup if you really love olives)
2 tablespoons drained capers, roughly chopped
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Bring 4 quarts of water and the salt to a boil in a large pot. Meanwhile, in a blender, combine 1/2 cup of the parsley, the olive oil, lemon zest and juice, preserved lemon and preserved lemon liquid, garlic, and 1/2 teaspoon of the pepper. Blend until smooth, about 30 seconds, then transfer to a large bowl, scraping out the blender jar.
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Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook until just al dente (the low end of the package instructions). During the last 3 minutes of cooking, add the green beans to the pot. Drain the pasta and beans, shaking off the excess water, and immediately transfer to the bowl with the dressing. Add the tuna (flaking it into large pieces), olives, capers, 1/2 cup of the parsley, and the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of pepper and gently fold until evenly coated. Taste and season with more salt, if necessary.
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Transfer the pasta to a serving dish, sprinkle with the remaining 1/4 cup of parsley, and serve warm, room temperature, or cold.
[*Note from Dan: When it comes to tuna, this is the time to splurge on the good stuff instead of the flaked tuna packed in water. Look for tuna packed in olive oil—I love Spanish brands Ortiz and La Brujula, the Italian brand Tonnino, and Portuguese brands Santa Catarina and Porthos. When draining the tuna, you want to get rid of just the excess of oil in the tin or jar, letting a little of the flavorful stuff cling to the fish. And whatever you do, don’t rinse it!]
