If I was in a kidnapping situation and needed to subtly signal that something was terribly wrong without alerting my captors, I would loudly declare that farfalle is a fantastic pasta shape.
I would shout endlessly about how well it always cooks — even the knot of the bowtie. I would preach about how “butterfly” pasta is truly perfect for every kind of sauce, because it picks up every bit of sauce, and it’s easily forked. I would assert that we should serve it to more people, because we should base all our gastronomic experiences on the palettes of children and potluck attendees.
I would hope that anyone listening would know these are the words of a person in trouble and call the police. No one of sound mind would say these things about farfalle.
Farfalle is what’s known as a bad pasta shape — a finicky, useless noodle that no good sauce should have to suffer. Along with its poorly formed kin, like angel hair and wagon wheel, it detracts from the sublime experience of eating pasta; all are poor vehicles for a good ragu and unnecessarily difficult to cook well. Some of these shapes are so terrible at their job that they’re relegated to pasta salad, the culinary world’s equivalent to a participation trophy.
The inferiority of these noodles isn’t a secret. Debates about the worst forms simmer online, and the clunkers have become common knowledge. And yet, they still exist. Some lackluster shapes — like the unnervingly popular penne — even have us in a stranglehold, a stasis where we never desire something better for ourselves.
When pasta is so good, why are some shapes so bad? If they’re so bad, why do they continue to exist? Why do we not simply free ourselves from the tyranny of farfalle?
Why penne sucks, actually
To understand what people mean when they disparage “bad” pasta shapes, it’s helpful to understand what makes the good shapes good. Over the years, and as more and more people have gotten interested in food and cooking, shapes like rigatoni, bucatini, and orecchiette have reached the top tiers of pasta hierarchy.
What is it that we love in beloved shapes?
One commonality among those is that they tend to be unfussy and cook evenly, making it easier to achieve the hallowed state known as al dente.
Then, there’s how these pasta holds the sauce. Chefs will tell you that ridges, ruffles, and pockets are fantastic for chunky sauces, hence rigatoni’s premier status. When it comes to noodles, most shine in thinner, glossier, olive-oil based or seafood (think: vongole) sauces. But the greats can punch above their weight. Bucatini’s hollow middle basically turns it into a straw, great for any and everything, but especially for something like a silky carbonara, with all of its bits of guanciale leveling it up to the status of king among kings.
For Scott Ketchum, the CEO and co-founder of the Sfologini pasta company, it’s his job to think about pasta all day.
Back in 2021, Ketchum, Sfoglini, and Sporkful podcast host Dan Pashman made news for creating cascatelli, a new pasta shape that emphasizes sauce capture and mouth feel. The secret behind cascatelli and all very good pastas, Ketchum says, is an edged ruffle and some kind of pocket that can hold a sauce’s other ingredients.
“We made two ridges that are perpendicular from the surface — this was the hardest thing to do with that shape because it’s tough engineering-wise for a pasta,” Ketchum told Vox. “But that created this trough down the center, which is kind of like a pocket shape, but that holds all the sauce in between.”
There’s something slightly inelegant in using words like trough or straw to describe good pasta, but it drives home the point. Pasta is a delivery system. It should maximize the amount of flavor in each bite while efficiently getting the sauce from the bowl into your mouth.
Look, it’s penne, one of the most popular and pathetic pasta shapes on the planet! Gado/Getty Images
According to culinary experts, there are roughly 350 shapes that officially exist. With that number in mind, it’s impressive that author and chef Alison Roman can quickly identify her least favorite, a shape that is far and away worse than at least 349 of its kin.
“I think penne is the absolute worst pasta shape on the planet,” Roman, a famous maker of pastas and author of the forthcoming cookbook Something From Nothing, told Vox. “I’ve always felt this way, since I was a kid.”
Like any good vendetta, Roman has spent an enormous amount of time thinking about why she harbors this hatred — why the combination of flour, water, and eggs molded into a tube with sharp ends rankles her so.
“What I’ve come up with is that the hole is both too small and too big,” she said. “I don’t like the pointy ends, okay? And the ridges are not ridgy enough.”
Penne’s pitiful passage and slanted opening, Roman says, are not big enough to hold hearty bits. At the same time, it’s too large for thinner sauces. I ask her about the alternative of ridgeless penne, and she tells me it’s a malpractice of pasta. Not only is it burdened with all the earthly faults of regular penne, it can’t even catch sauce.
Roman joked that penne’s continued presence in the world around her must be part of a grand conspiracy, one that involves vodka sauce (which Roman also does not enjoy) and indoctrination into mediocrity. She also pushed back at the common notion that children like penne, arguing that it’s less about what kids like than what parents serve them. If parents served kids bucatini, she argues, kids would love bucatini.
Ketchum also dislikes penne.
“In life, I love whimsy and light. But in pasta, I think maybe I don’t.”
— Morgan Bolling, America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country executive editor
“I’m not a big fan of penne,” Ketchum said, citing the aforementioned problems with its tube space. “But it’s still one of the most popular shapes in the country, if not the world — to me, that is tied to just people using it so much throughout their lives that that’s kind of their go-to shape.”
I asked Morgan Bolling, the executive editor of America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country, if she harbored a similar kind of thoughtful hatred for a particular pasta shape. Her answer: rotelle, aka wagon wheel.
“In life, I love whimsy and light,” Bolling said. “But in pasta, I think maybe I don’t.”
Wagon wheel is perhaps terminally whimsical, trying too hard to entertain and not trying hard enough, if at all, to be a pasta worth eating. Its circular shape doesn’t really allow it to cling to sauces. Its numerous holes, Bolling said, don’t hold the bits of tomato, sausage, or veggies that you would like them to.
The thing about bad pasta shapes is that their badness is sometimes predicated on another noodle or form being a far superior fit. Bolling points out that orecchiette (aka “little ears”) possesses wagon wheel’s whimsicality, but its dimpled pockets actually hold onto bits of breadcrumbs, sausage, and broccoli rabe.
“I don’t feel like wagon wheels need a home in the world anymore,” Bolling adds.
If this were survival of the fittest, bad pastas would cease to exist. A beautiful world without wagon wheels or penne could be a possibility. But that’s not how the pasta world twirls.
Who keeps buying bad pastas?
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Oh Alex, I just can’t think of a pasta shape that I hate. They’re all so wonderful!” One, you are a liar. Two, think of the most off-putting pasta salad you’ve ever eaten. That’s where the worst shape lives.
“You go to these potlucks, cookouts, or barbecues, and someone brings a bad pasta salad — that’s wagon wheels to me,” Bolling said.
Bad pasta shapes, the experts I spoke to all said, are often something that happens to you rather than something you make or order for yourself. That’s perhaps why we largely come into contact with bad shapes at potlucks, where the veil between food we like and food lunatics foist on us is thin.
These cursed communal dishes, including baked pastas, have a few things in common: No one knows who brought the bad pasta salad. No one is totally sure what’s in it. No one knows who took it home at the end of the night. All anyone knows is that it’s a dish they wish they never bit into.
To be clear, pasta salad varies, and good ones do exist, I’m told. But the common thread of terrible ones is too oily of a dressing, a lack of seasoning, and hunks of ingredients. A bad shape only makes those elements worse.
“If you can accept joy into your heart, if you cannot take yourself so seriously, then you can accept that bow ties are actually quite nice.”
— Alison Roman, author and chef
The existence of bad pasta shapes and their continued presence in our lives has created a frustrating, perpetual pasta paradox. If people understand the bad points of pasta shapes like penne and wagon wheels and do not enjoy eating them, why do companies still make them? Are there that many people making bad pasta salads to keep the money rolling in? Not exactly.
“People are passionate about the pasta shapes they grew up with,” said Ketchum. Ketchum explained to me that nostalgia and childhood sentimentality may explain why people keep purchasing and extending the shelf life of maligned shapes, even if they know that rigatoni would be a better choice for pasta salad.
I asked Ketchum about wagon wheels, and he said that he actually has fond childhood memories of eating them in a “casserole-ish” dish at an Italian restaurant in his hometown. Ketchum grew up in Iowa, and though he does not think that one restaurant is keeping the entire wagon wheel shape afloat, he believes it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
“It’s funny, we actually talked about maybe bringing a wagon wheel back this year,” Ketchum tells Vox, noting that he and his team thought about tinkering with the length of the spokes or finding a way to give the pasta deeper pockets. “We decided not to do it, but a lot of my staff was really passionate about it.”
More realistically though, bad pasta may be one of those curious wrinkles of being human.
“There are a lot of things in this world that I think are bad that millions of people love,” said Roman, the chef, author, and pasta truthteller. “I’m really confident in my taste, but I have been proven wrong countless times. So many things are successful that I think are atrocious. So who’s to say? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, I guess.”
Well, well, well, if it’s not farfalle in a pasta salad! Deb Lindsey/For the Washington Post/Getty Images
For Roman, that treasure is my trash: farfalle.
Where some people (me) see an overly playful noodle with a glaring functional failure, Roman sees a misunderstood heroine.
“To me, they’re almost dumpling-ish. They’re kind of big and meaty, and on the outside, they’ve got nice little ridges. They’re sweet,” she said, noting that in Something From Nothing, there’s a ginger and greens soup recipe that spotlights the photogenic pasta.
“If you can accept joy into your heart, if you cannot take yourself so seriously, then you can accept that bow ties are actually quite nice,” Roman said.
There’s hope in the idea that changing perspective could be all that separates bad from good. Perhaps a misfit pasta like angel hair could improve its status if served as part of a thinly dressed bowl, like we do vermicelli. (Possibly with a new name that doesn’t include the word “hair.”) Maybe wagon wheels wouldn’t be so detested if we found a place for them, perhaps in a reinvented casserole. The most atrocious pasta just needs a fresh opportunity to be splendid.
If only the worst things in our lives could be changed so easily.
