Or linguini, or any of those long strings of pasta?
I’ve got mushrooms and sausage, so I’m guessing dinner tonight will end up being some kind of pasta sauce – and, yep, I’ve got rotini, which is my preferred pasta. I’ve also got a box of spaghetti, for reasons that aren’t altogether clear to me – it’s a complete PITA to eat. So much so, that I can’t think of a good reason to even have long strings of pasta (other, perhaps, than facilitating cute “dinner date” scenes for animated dogs).
Who eats spaghetti or linguini, and what does it add to the pasta experience that you can’t get more conveniently from rotini?
I find the thicker pastas like rotini and pene, while being easier to eat, bring too much of their own flavor to the party. I good thin spaghetti, like angel hair or vermincelli, provide just a hint of flavor, but are good for catching and delivering the sauce.
Just a guess, but possibly long thin strings of pasta are/were much easier to make and quicker to dry. I once saw a television show showing a cook making chinese noodles by hand, and he did this sort of taffy-pulling thing that in an amazingly short time divided a mass of dough into hundreds of strings.
My two cents: With penne or rotini, I have to make a conscoius effort to scoop up the sauce and fixin’s along with the pasta. There’s often sauce left at the bottom of the bowl after the pasta’s gone.
Swirling spaghetti or linguini tends to grab stuff up, and I’m more likely to be left with a clean plate. YMMV.
Spaghetti is my preferred pasta, and for that matter my favorite food, period. As a professional, I can swirl up a forkful of spaghetti in no time flat, so I don’t see how it’s hard to eat. Trying to stab something like penne, OTOH, is an absolute pain. For me, though, it really comes down to the fact that I really like the mouth feel, and also that the taste is more subtle than with most other pasta types.
I cannot understand the popularity of hard-shell tacos. They are the most poorly designed food ever. You have to turn your head sideways to eat them and still stuff ends up falling out; the way the ingredients are typically distributed, you get one bite with only meat and the next with only lettuce; and most of the time they end up breaking and shattering anyway. Why would anyone even try to eat the damned things, when you can take all the same ingredients and roll them up into a burrito, or make a taco salad out of them, or something?
My favorite pasta at the moment is bacatini (a thicker type of spaghetti with a pinhole running through its length.) I like the long, flat noodles better than the smaller shapes in general, because I like the texture I get from twirling the pasta in my fork and feeling each individual strand break as I bite into it. I also tend to sauce more in the Italian style (meaning, a lot less sauce than Italian-American styles of pasta) and I like the way the sauce distributes and lightly coats the longer strands of pasta.
But it depends, as there’s certain sauces I associate with certain pastas. Arrabbiata I like with penne. Amatriciana, bucatini. Puttanesca, spaghetti. Alfredo, fettuccine. And so on…
Hardshell tacos I don’t generally do, but soft shell tacos all the way for me. Burritos are just too heavy for me and have the wrong proportion of ingredients for my tastes. I do not like burritos at all. And no lettuce on my tacos, please. Onions and cilantro only, or, in the case of fish tacos, shredded cabbage.
My dear departed grandmother :::crosses self::: would be spinning in her grave in Bari, Italy if she heard you say this!!
Let’s be honest here…eating spaghetti with a spoon and a fork takes 2 hands. How can any good, self respecting Italian eat and talk at the same time without at least one hand free??
Personally, if I have a light sauce, like olive oil & garlic, I’ll do thin spaghetti. If it’s got meat in it, I’ll do ziti or something like that. If it’s a heavy cream sauce, like my home-made Alfredo sauce (which is so rich it would cause Dr. House to go into diagnostic shock after eating it!!), I prefer some good medium shells. The shells hold the sauce the best, and for a good cream sauce, that’s important.
Eating spaghetti with a fork and a spoon is only one step higher than the absolute SACRILEGE of cutting it up into small pieces for anyone older than about 3!
Sometimes I’ll cheat and use a spoon, but it’s not the “proper” way. If you’re doing it in the Italian style, you should use only the fork and the plate to roll the spaghetti.
I’m just curious what damn idiot invented Seashell pasta(CONCHIGLIE). It’s a long term practical joke as far as I am concerned. Carefully get your sauce to the perfect consistency, dump in the drained just-short-of-al-dente pasta stir together and … watch as some random amount of trapped water dumps out of the little cups and turns your sauce into thin and wimpy soup.
(Either works for me). 