FACTORALY - E110 PASTA

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Pasta is delicious — especially when it's served with a tasty sauce. But where does it come from? (Italy, obviously). And what types of pasta are there? (over 600). And what goes with which? This episode plunges into boiling water and comes up with some superb morcels. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Hi, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling full of pasta, thank you very much. How are you? Actually, I am. I've just had some. Have you? Oh, well, perfect.

There you go. I haven't just had some. I wish I had. But other than that, fine, thank you. Good. And hello to everyone listening to us at home on your dogwalk, in your car, on the train, wherever you happen to be. Yes. Hello. Hiya. For those of you who don't realize or have pressed the wrong button or have accidentally tuned into someone else's Bluetooth connection, my name is Simon Wells. And I'm Bruce Fielding. And we are both a pair of professional voiceover artists. I wonder what you're going to say then. Twits.

We're a pair of twits And we do voice stuff We do and nerdy stuff We do pub quizzes We win pub quizzes I was asked last night If I would be on somebody's pub quiz team I were you?

Yeah I said no Did you feel that they would be letting you down Or vice versa Yes, one of those Okay Excellent So what are we doing here Why are we doing it?

So what are we doing? We are hosting an episode of a podcast called Factorally. And Factorily is a lovely little show all about random facts and trivia and knowledge and things that you never knew nor realized you needed to know. We have a random generator that gives us our subjects every week. And this week we were given pasta. We were. We were. As our randomly generated subjects.

And we said, I don't know, really. Is there that much to say about pasta? Oh boy. So many of our weekly research sessions have started that way. Yes. Several pages of notes later. Now, interestingly, even though pasta was completely randomly generated for us, turns out October is National Pastor Month.

25th. There you go. The 25th is National Pastor Day. Isn't that great? Yeah, I don't know when this will go out, but if it's going out anywhere near the 25th, Happy National Pasta Day. So yes, it's actually come around at just the right time.

Do you like pasta, Bruce? I love pasta. Do you have a particular favourite? Yeah, I'm brand ambassador for a restaurant. Sure. Called the Villa Digijano, which we'll put a link to in the show notes. Why not? Because why not?

But they have had a thing on the menu since day one, which is a wild boar ragu with Talia Telly. And if you're having a ragu, have it with Talia Telly. Yes. I have been to, in fact, I think it was at the aforementioned restaurant that you and I first met in real life. We'd been to various socials online together, but I think it was actually at your restaurant where we first met in the flesh. Oh, right. I don't remember what I ate, but I remember it being good. No, it's a cracking place.

If you live in West London, if you live anywhere in London, it's worth travelling to. But anyway, they sell pasta there. But we're going to be talking about everything to do with pasta. And some of the pastures, they don't sell. So, as is our want, let's start off with the origin of the word pastor, shall we? The word pasta, probably quite unsurprisingly, it's an Italian origin. Is it anything to do we paste? That's right, it is. Yeah, it is.

There's a lucky guess. Isn't it? Very good. So the word pasta comes from the Latin word pasta or paste, which kind of means a dough or a paste. It's also where we get pastry from. So those things are connected. Yes. And those things both come from the ancient Greek word pasta, which refers to a barley porridge. Okay. So some ancient Greek was making a barley porridge and one thing led to the other. But that's where we get into. So not Egyptian then. Egyptians didn't invent pasta. Not on this occasion, no. Fair enough. No. But yes, the word pasta was first recorded as used in English in the 1830s.

But the word's been around for quite a while before that. And where did the stuff come from? Well, this one's ambiguous. So I thought... Don't say Marco Polo. Okay, I won't. Marco. Polo.

Marco. Polo. See, now, I was going to say China because noodles. Yes. Right. Generally speaking, I've looked at a good number of different culinary sites, and on the whole, people don't accept that Chinese noodles are a form of pasta. Oh. Because it's made with different ingredients in different ways, and even though it does resemble pasta, it kind of isn't. It's a noodle.

It's a noodle. So I can't really say, oh yes, the Chinese invented pasta around 2000 BC. They didn't. They invented noodles. But pasta, in the Italian sense, seems to have grown up entirely separately from that. There are stories of Marco Polo on his various adventures along the Silk Road, bringing the idea of noodles back to Europe with him. Most of those have been debunked as being the result of a 1920s marketing ploy by a pasta company. Really? Yeah.

Oh, wow. Apparently that's the first time that story was recorded. Vesta Chalmaine or something. Yes, something like that. What we can say is that the, I discovered a new word here, the Etruscans. Oh yes, yes. I haven't heard of them before. Very big on pottery.

Yes, that's right. So these people lived in Italy before it was really Italy, around 400 BC. When it was lots of different states. Lots of different states, exactly. And they made something that was written as pasta, and it was created the same way that you make pasta today. But they cut it into thin sheets and deep. fried it. Okay. It wasn't really pasta. It goes puffy if you deep fry. It's quite nice. Does it? I've never tried that. Yeah. Oh, interesting. If you deep fried dried pasta, it goes like sort of prawn crackers. Oh, does it really? Yeah. How interesting. I might have to try that. Um, but the first time we definitely get writings about the stuff that we would totally recognize as being modern pasta is around the 13th century in no surprises, Italy. Okay. So it might be 4,000 years ago. It might be a couple of thousand years ago. It's definitely at least

the 13th century. And it's around now. And it's still here now. I understand that one of the things that happened with pasta is that there was the Chamberlain to the King of Naples, a guy called Spadaccini. Oh, right. The King of Naples decided he didn't want to eat pasta with his fingers because a lot of people were doing that. Yeah. So this chapter, Spalluccini invented the fork. No way. The fork was invented as a result of the need to eat pasta. Yes. That's wonderful. Yeah. I mean, it's apocryphal. And therefore it's valid. All apocrypha is true on this. It might be true. That's brilliant. Well, I can, I can semi-corroborate that in as much that tomatoes, you know, a heavy, heavy sauce sauce.

Ho-ho-ho. Heavily used in cooking pasta sauces in Italy. Tomatoes weren't in introduced to Italy until the 16th century. And people thought they were poisonous, so they didn't use them anyway. Exactly, yeah. So they didn't really start being used until the 17th century. Yeah. The first recorded use of pasta cooked in a tomato sauce is not until 1790. So you've got a few hundred years of pasta being eaten before tomato sauces came along.

And I found a record saying that pasta was eaten just on its own dry by the fingers, as you say. Sometimes as a dessert, it was sometimes sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. soft cheese and things like that. Yeah, that would make sense. Like a pastry. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. All comes back to paste. So, yes, I can believe that it wasn't until

pasta started getting saucy that you actually needed an implement to eat it with. I can accept that. Yeah, why not? Why not? I saw one suggestion that pasta was introduced to Europe by the Moors in the 9th century when Sicily was under the rule of the emirs.

But even that was news to me. I never realized that Sicily was an emirate Around the 8th, 9th, 10th century, Sicily was under the rule of the emirs. Yeah, if you go there, there's a lot of architecture that looks sort of quite moorish. Interesting. You can't get enough of it. Mourish. So it's old and it comes from lots of places.

Okay. But we all know it to be Italian. Yeah, it's Italian. I found that the first license for a pasta factory was in Venice as early as 1740. So it was being mass produced in 1740. in a factory. Goodness me. That's quite early

by any manufacturing standards. Do you know when the most recent pasta was invented? Oh, no, I don't. It's in 2021. Really? They've invented a new pastor. So a chap called Dan Pashman, who is a blogger, a food blogger.

And he's sort of like, he thought there are so many different pastas. There must be the perfect pasta. And he tried loads. And he was looking for forkability and sourceability and mouth feel and all that stuff. And he couldn't find one that had everything. Right. And he thought, well, maybe I'll invent one.

So he invented this thing called casketele. Casketele. So it's like a little waterfall. Oh, cascade. If you look up casketele on our blog at factorily.com. Factorily.com. You'll find lots of pasta. It's actually factoring just to look at the page.

but yeah cascatelli was invented by this guy dan patchman in 2021 oh that's great and it's sort of like it's ribbed along the sides and it's curly and it's the right thickness and it basically it's custom-made pasta to suit dan patchman's wishes that's fantastic you said earlier on if you're doing a bolognese don't use spaghetti use talliatelli yes Why? It's to do with what holds the sauce best. Right. So if you've got a sauce which is like a ragu,

okay, spaghetti bolognese is a British invention. If you go to Italy and ask spaghetti bolognais, they kind of don't really know what you're talking about. Right, okay. But if you ask for a ragu, then they'll tell you not to bother with the spaghetti in to go from Italy instead. Okay. Because the ribbon shape holds on to the sauce much better.

Right, okay. So I read something similar that short and thin pasta is better suited to lighter sauces, kind of cheesy, creamy, even pesto-y type sources. Just a pesto or an olive oil or something like that. Something really simple. Big chunky tomatoy, beefy sauces are better suited to either long strands, like you mentioned tally-tellie, or tube shapes, you know, penet and rigatoni and things like that. Because the thickness and the size and the chunkiness of the sauce,

yeah clings on to those type of pastors better well we're talking about sources sources are very important for pasta because they're a bit dull without a source yes unless of course they're jewellery beg you pardon duchy and gabana invented pastore earrings oh come on they're kind of enameled for filey with jewels in them yeah I mean I thought you were going to talk about that thing we all did at school where you sort of got a pack of penne and threaded some string through it and wore it as a necklace. Oh, you did that as well, did you? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, I didn't do that. Well, did you? You missed out, Bruce. It was fun. Yeah, so the sources. Yes. One of the sources you mentioned was Pesto, which is a very nice basil and garlic and olive oil and deliciousness.

And it was invented in Genoa. Okay. And if you go to Genoa Airport and you fly home from Genoa, and you want to bring a souvenir of Genoa back with you. You know how you can't bring liquids on an aeroplane? Yes. If you fly from Genoa, you can take with you up to 500 grams of pesto. They've got a special scanner that makes sure that it's actually pesto that you're bringing back with you.

That's phenomenal. Yeah. They've got a special pesto scanner to make sure that that's what you're carrying. And I think that's the only place in the world where you can bring back more than 10 milliliters of fluid. liters of fluid on an aeroplane in your hand luggage. Well, well done, Bruce, for finding the most obscure pasta-related fact today. That's jolly good. What we're talking about, sauces, a ragu.

You know, people think that like Spagball is a really quick, easy thing to do. Yeah. Wrong. Yeah. It's a really slow, difficult thing to do. I will, however, give you one tip. If you want it to taste delicious and not too acidy, because you'll have lots of tomatoes and stuff.

Actually, two tips. So this tip is to make it taste sweeter and less acidy, just at the end, not on a high heat, but just when you turn the heat out, just put some milk into your ragu. Really? And it takes all the acidity out, and it turns it into sweetness.

Oh, nice. And it also makes it feel nice and creamy. Yeah. The other thing is put some bacon or salami in your ragu. Okay. Bacon in a ragu is delicious, as is what I do is I take a piece of Italian salami and then chop it up really fine and then pop that in there in the cooking process. And you get all that sort of Italian stuff going on in there. Oh, is anyone else hungry?

Yeah. I sort of looked at a basic definition of pasta, how you make it. You know, it's way too easy a thing to just go and buy a pack of it in the shop and never really give any attention to how it's made. Yes. Being someone who doesn't make it from scratch, I don't really know about these things. And I discovered a thing that led to a thing that I didn't know about a thing that I didn't know about, which is always fun. Yes. So essentially, pasta is made of dough.

Fresh pasta is made with eggs. Dried pasta is made without the eggs. You're shaking your head at me. I am because pasta is made. without eggs. It's only made with eggs if it tells you it's being made with eggs. It has in it the germ of the Durham wheat, which is the best wheat to make pasta with, which is yellow. So although pasta may look yellow in colour, it's not because of the egg. It's not because of the egg. It's not because of the egg. It's because of the wheat. So all the definitions I saw was that the difference

between fresh and dried pasta is that fresh pasta contains eggs and dried pasta doesn't. Are you saying that you can make fresh pasta without eggs? Yes. interesting. In fact, you should make fresh pasta with that eggs. Okay. Well, that changes everything. But anyway, you mentioned Durham wheat and I had a little look about... Is it from Durham? Well, no. See, that's what I thought. I was looking at this thing saying, you know, Durham wheat has been used in making pasta, you know, all the way back from whenever it started. And I thought, well, how on earth were they getting wheat from Durham all that time ago? But that's not it at all. It's Durham spelled D-U-R-U-M. Okay. Which comes from

the Latin durus, meaning hard. Like French, d'ur. And durability and that sort of thing. So durham wheat is a particularly hard variety of wheat, which is good for making pasta dough and also pizza dough. Do you know how hard it is to need durham wheat? Never try. It's so hard that at one point people had decided that using your hands was not the way to do it.

And actually they started to walk it. They used to use their feet to mash up the same. dough. The other thing I found out is that the flour made from Durham wheat is called Semolina. Yes. Now, to my mind, I've always thought that Semolina was a type of pudding that they served at school. Yes, with jam. That stuff is called semolina pudding. It's a pudding that's made by mixing Semolina with milk and sugar. Yes. But Semolina is just flour that's made from Durham Wheat. So all of those things I didn't know before this.

So that's a little bit of learning for me. All the names of pastas are just a bit odd, aren't they? Oh, this is so much fun, isn't it? What was your favourite? Oh, gosh, let me introduce them. Well, let's start off by saying that there are somewhere between 600 and 1,300 individually identifiable pasture shapes. They break down into three sorts, though, don't? they? Yeah. I can't remember what they are. Long short and... Yes. So the long and medium are things

like spaghetti and linguine and stuff. And then you get the short, which are things like conchile or fusili. And then you get the last sort, which is stretched pasta. Stretched, that was it. So that's things like the Orichete or the Finale or things like that, which are stretched. Oh, there's also soup pasta as well, which are. like little bits of pasta. Oh, minestroni and things like that. Well, yes. So little bits of things like fafalini, like tiny little butterflies and things like that. Alphabetti spaghetti technically is a soup pasta. So this is just wonderful. I love how descriptive these names are. Obviously, you know, there are, as we've said, there's somewhere between

600 and 1,000 of them. So it'd be pointless to try and name them all. But all of the pastas that I recognize as being sort of things that you buy at the supermarket, their names are just wonderfully descriptive. So Fafale are the little sort of bow-tie shaped things. Yes. And Fafale is butterfly so they're actually butterfly shaped, not bow-tie shaped. Yes. Penne

comes from pen. Yes. Because they're sort of quill-shaped, you know, the way they cut off at the end. Linguini is little tongues. Yes. Tautilini comes from twist. Rigotoni comes from regato, meaning ridged.

Yeah. Spaghetti comes from Spargo meaning string Oh Conchillier Which I always want to call conchigli No it's a hard

sea in the middle Yes Yeah That's related to Conch shell It's shell shaped Yeah Talietelli comes

From Talieri meaning to cut Vermichelli means little worms Tortellini means little tortellie

and tortellie means little pies There's lots of little and cute and sweet Yes Fuzilli

comes from Fuzzo, meaning spindle, they're all just, you know, you can just sort of picture these people hundreds and hundreds of years ago making lots of wonderful random shapes out of pasta and saying to each other, what shall we name this one?

Well, that's a little bit twisted, so we'll call it twist, and that one's a little bit butterfly shaped, so we'll call it butterfly. It's so literal. It's wonderful. Okay, here's one. Guess what this one looks like?

Radiatory. Looks like a radiator. Yeah. No, really? Yes. That was a lucky guess. So they were created between the first and second-old wars. You know those old school radiators that's like circular with ridges.

Oh, right, yes, yes. Those. It looks a bit like the top of the top of radiators. Yeah, yeah. That's brilliant. But I just love how descriptive and literal all of these names are. I'd always assumed they had really sort of scientific technical translations. But nope, they're just named after the thing that they look a bit like.

Do you know in my kitchen I've got that lemon squeezer that looks like a spaceship? It looks to me like the Martians from War of the Worlds. Yes. So that was designed by Philippe Stark and in 1987 he invented something called Mandala. For a French pasta maker called Panzani and it's designed to compensate for over-cooking. Okay. So if you're the sort of person who cooks their pasta for far too long.

Yeah. This mandala pasta is there to help you to still find it a bit chewy. Right. It'll sort of withstand your ineptitude in cooking. Yeah, so well done Philippe Stark. Philippe Stark, didn't he design your chairs as well? Yes, he designed, and also a pair of my glasses. Fine.

See, well, see lots of our previous episodes for things that Bruce owns designed by Philippe Stark. Yes. You know when you make lasagna? Yes. So lasagna is made by putting sheets of pasta, then some meat, and then pasta and then meat, and then pasta and then meat, and then obviously the begeneral sauce that goes with it. Do you know how many sheets you should have in a proper lasagna? No, I don't. Is there a prescribed number? There is. Between five and seven.

Anything else other than five, six or seven sheets is unlucky. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, okay. So it's not that that makes a particularly good constitution of a lasagna. It's just a... It's just superstition. Great. Do you know what the rarest pastor is?

No, I don't. So there is a pasta that's made in Sicily. In only one village called Nworo. And in Nworo, there are about five or ten people who are capable of making this pasta, which is called Sufilindeu, which is sort of like this. sort of like the hair of the gods and what they do is they take their specific pasta which they make just using durham wheat and water but they get it to a specific consistency and they stretch it and they stretch it and they stretch it so each time they stretch it it

makes two so two four six eight ending up with two hundred and fifty six strands of pasta then they put it on a little sort of round table and dry it out and then they sort of chop it up into chunks and and it is supposed to be absolutely amazing um you have it with a sort like a soupy sort of stew made with bits of uh lamb actually and and pork um but it is i tell you what there's a video of of some women doing it which i found on youtube and if you go to the show notes you will find video of women making pasta by hand that is so find that it can't be done by a machine. Wow.

If you're American, there are certain things which are a taste of home, and one of them is a box of craft mac and cheese, which I don't get. I've actually had that in America, and it only makes sense to me in America. Yes. If someone gave me that in England, I'd say it was disgusting. Having eaten it in America, it sort of felt okay somehow. I don't understand my own logic of that. Well, mac and cheese started in sort of medieval Europe.

Oh. The earliest written pasta and cheese dish was found in a 13th century Italian cookbook. Really? Yeah. It's our old friend Thomas Jefferson. Oh, goodness me. He who invented the swivel chair. Yes, who introduced the dish to America in the 18th century.

Right, okay. He'd had it in France and Italy. Yeah. He had a chef. James Hemings didn't really work for him voluntarily. let's put it that way. Okay. Yeah.

But James Hemings brought mac and cheese to the White House. And therefore it became very popular. It was very cheap. During the Great Depression, Kraft started making it in boxes in 1937. And sort of took it from there. And now it's an American standard. Yes. That's interesting, isn't it?

I can't, I can't picture macaroni going with anything other than cheese. the two are so synonymous with each other mac and cheese I can't imagine macaroni with ragu or mac and carbunara or you know it just doesn't work does it no no actually doesn't speaking of Americans I was looking how popular

pasta is how much he's eaten it's just such a ubiquitous thing isn't it you get it absolutely everywhere apparently in America it's estimated that around 10 kilos of pasta is eaten per person per year which I didn't think was all that much

and then I read the Italian figure is estimated that in Italy they eat over 25 kilos of pasta per person per year. Yeah I read 60 I really Yeah that's very different estimates isn't it Apparently around

17 million tonnes of pasta are produced globally each year Wow And according to I love the fact that this exists, the International Pastor Organisation, the Italians consume roughly 600 million kilometres of spaghetti

per year, which would be enough to wrap the entire planet 15,000 times. Wow. You'd get quite fat on that, wouldn't you? Yes. I mean, thankfully that's a whole country and not one person, but yes, you would. Unless you

cooked it first and then chilled it and then heated it up again. Right. It's a thing called start retrogradation of course it is what happens is if you cook pasta and then chill it ideally for about you know 24 hours if you eat it cold or even reheat it after it's chilling it will have changed the carbohydrates in it into a thing called resistant starch which is a type of fiber that's less digestible and results in a smaller blood sugar peak and fewer absorbed

calories how interesting so it'll taste the same but it's much better for you to have cooked your pasta a day in advance huh who'd have thought so I think that Stephen Tyler must have been a big fan of pasta Steve Tyler of all of aerosmith yes okay because you know the thing about the the blue M&Ms in a rider to make sure that somebody's actually read the rider oh yes yeah apparently Aerosmith in their rider insisted on a bath full of pasta. Okay.

That seems odd. So, yeah. So if you show up at a gig and there's a bath full of pasta with groupies and people like that, bribing around in your pasta, you know you're an aerosmith gig. That's great. Did they specify a particular source or was it just the pasta? I think it just said pasta. Right.

How interesting. I bet they're, you know, they could probably make quite a killing of serving some of that afterwards to loyal fans. So I imagine you've got some fairly tall tales of long pasta. Oh, I've got so many pasta related records. What are the good ones? Right. The fastest time to eat a bowl of pasta.

Seven seconds. 17 seconds. This is a lady from London called Leah Shudkeva. And she's something of a cereal speed-eating contestant. She's got quite a few of these records. And she had a bowl of spaghetti ragu, not bolognese, in 17.03 seconds in 2023. How big is a bowl? Is there sort of like an official measure of a bowl?

There must have been. How much pasta versus how much sauce. Exactly. It didn't specifically say in terms of grams or size or anything like that. But we have to assume everyone on the competition was eating the same amount. The same. Yeah. We've got the largest ever bowl of pasta, which weighed. 7,900 kilograms.

Seven tons. Nearly eight tons. Nearly eight tons. Yep. This was achieved by a few people in conjunction with a particular restaurant in Krakow in 2015. Who ate that? Well, they were having an annual half marathon in Krakow.

And these guys made this almost eight ton bowl of pasta. They had to specially make a bowl to fit it. Of course they did. They made this particular wooden bowl, which was 4.6 metres in diameter. Wow. And once the half marathon was over, they invited all of the contestants to come and sit at a little table

and take their fill, yeah, absolutely. About 10,000 people, including the contestants and followers and watches, etc, came along to partake. So that was fun. These very same people also made the world's largest lasagna, 4,865 kilos, again, had to make a special dish, measuring 25 metres long. It contained 2.5 kilos of pasta sheets. It contained 800 kilos of mint beef. It's just preposterous.

Wow. And this one was particularly made during the 2012 UEFA Cup in Poland. And again, they just invited a whole load of people to come and partote. The longest strand of pasta ever measured. This is ridiculous. 3,776 meters. 3.7 kilometres? Yeah.

Wow. This was achieved by Lawson Incorporated, who is a convenience store chain in Tokyo. That was in 2010. It was a publicity stunt. And, yeah, there are many, many more. But those were the ones that stuck out to me. Goodness me. Well, I've run out of pasta.

I've just got the sauce left on the plate. Yes, I have finished my bowl as well. You don't use a spoon, do you? Oh, no. So thank you very much for listening. Indeed. If you have enjoyed it, we would love you to give us a five Stelline review. That's Italian for stars.

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