TED Talks · Small thing Big idea

Why pasta comes in all shapes and sizes

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.

Level: B1 · 62 sentences

Transcript

  1. Is design. It is design when you compose plates,
  2. But it is amazing, even better and most delightful design when it's about the units.
  3. Pasta comes from Latin, and it means paste.
  4. It's about putting together water and some powder
  5. So that you can actually shape it.
  6. There are cultures in the world that use rice powder.
  7. Others use soy powder.
  8. In Italy, we tend to use durum wheat.
  9. Pasta existed for centuries, but it really blossomed during the Renaissance.
  10. And it's only later on in the 17th century
  11. That it became more mass-produced.
  12. Whenever you design an object of any kind,
  13. You you think of how you want it to perform.
  14. So think about the same for pasta.
  15. Do you want it to be ribbed
  16. Or you want it to be smooth?
  17. The ribbed ones absorb the sauce better.
  18. Do you want them to be round
  19. Or do you want them to be square?
  20. They have a different feel on the palate.
  21. Everything is for a reason.
  22. In the amazing taxonomy of the pasta species,
  23. There are many different ways to divide it,
  24. But one of the basic divisions is between fresh pasta and dry pasta.
  25. Dry pasta is all durum wheat flour and water fresh pasta could be either
  26. That or could be flour and eggs
  27. Just think of having a dough
  28. That you can shape in any way you want
  29. I mean really wouldn't you go crazy
  30. So fresh and dry but then there's also long and short and then within those families there's
  31. Even more diversity Let's talk about some really classical types of short pasta.
  32. Penne, we all know them, right?
  33. They are cut at a slanted angle,
  34. Perfect to pick up some of the sauce.
  35. Farfalle means butterflies, or how do you call it here?
  36. Bow ties, because they are like pinched in the middle.
  37. Orecchiette means little ears, and they're typical from Puglia, and they are delicious.
  38. And conchilla, shells, and of course they look like shells.
  39. They are ripped so they scoop up the sauce on the outside
  40. And they are smooth on the inside.
  41. Pasta is definitely gorgeous, but the form
  42. Also is about how it touches the palate,
  43. How it touches the tongue, so it's never just about giving it a shape.
  44. When you hone one object across centuries, standards become really, really high.
  45. Many so-called great designers failed miserably
  46. Because they tried to impose a shape onto pasta.
  47. The great Philippe Starck tried mandala.
  48. Some parts of it, the walls were very thick and the others were thinner,
  49. So when you would boil the pasta,
  50. Some of it would be completely mushy,
  51. While part of it was too crunchy and uncooked.
  52. So, really wrong.
  53. But they were not women from Bologna.
  54. They were not...
  55. Chefs from Naples.
  56. They were not centuries of families of grandmothers
  57. That were trying to improve on the thinness of the walls of the pasta.
  58. There's no way to trace pasta back to one designer, one inventor.
  59. And that's the beauty of it.
  60. It belongs to the people.
  61. I mean, if you think about it,
  62. This simple mixture of a carbohydrate and water becomes the scaffold for a whole culture to be built.