Why pasta comes in all shapes and sizes Small Thing Big Idea a TED series
Transcriber: TED Translators admin
Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
Food is design.
It is design when you compose plates,
but it is amazing, even better
and most delightful design
when it’s about the units.
[Small thing.]
[Big idea.]
“Pasta” comes from Latin,
and it means “paste.”
It’s about putting together
water and some powder,
so that you can actually shape it.
There are cultures in the world
that use rice powder,
others use soy powder.
In Italy, we tend to use durum wheat.
Pasta existed for centuries,
but it really blossomed
during the Renaissance.
And it’s only later on in the 17th century
that it became more mass produced.
Whenever you design an object of any kind,
you think of how you want it to perform.
So think about the same for pasta.
Do you want it to be ribbed
or you want it to be smooth?
The ribbed ones absorb the sauce better.
Do you want them to be round
or do you want them to be square?
They have a different feel on the palate.
Everything is for a reason.
In the amazing taxonomy
of the pasta species,
there are many different
ways to divide it,
but one of the basic divisions
is between fresh pasta and dry pasta.
Dry pasta is always durum
wheat flour and water.
Fresh pasta could be either that
or it could be flour and eggs.
Just think of having a dough
that you can shape in any way you want.
I mean, really, wouldn’t you go crazy?
So fresh and dry, but then,
there’s also long and short.
And then within those families,
there’s even more diversity.
Let’s talk about some really
classical types of short pasta.
Penne – we all know them, right?
They are cut at a slanted angle,
perfect to pick up some of the sauce.
“Farfalle” means “butterflies,”
or how do you call it here,
bow ties, because they are,
like, pinched in the middle.
“Orecchiette” means “little ears,”
and they’re typical from Puglia,
and they are delicious.
And “conquilla,” shells,
and of course, they look like shells.
They are ribbed, so they scoop
up the sauce on the outside
and they are smooth on the inside.
Pasta is definitely gorgeous,
but the form also is about
how it touches the palate,
how it touches the tongue,
so it’s never just
about giving it a shape.
When you hone one object across centuries,
standards become really, really high.
Many so-called great designers
failed miserably,
because they tried
to impose a shape onto pasta.
The great Philippe Starck tried mandala.
Some parts of it, the walls,
were very thick,
and the others were thinner,
so when you would boil the pasta,
some of it would be completely mushy
while part of it
was too crunchy and uncooked.
So really wrong, but they
were not women from Bologna,
they were not chefs from Naples,
they were not centuries
of families of grandmothers
that were trying to improve
on the thinness of the walls of the pasta.
There’s no way to trace pasta
back to one designer, one inventor,
and that’s the beauty of it.
It belongs to the people.
And if you think about it,
this simple mixture
of a carbohydrate and water
becomes the scaffold
for a whole culture to be built.