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There’s a long-established tradition of Italians being horrified at the ways in which Americans mistreat their beloved food traditions.
“You break spaghetti, you break my heart,” reads a T-shirt for sale by an entity called Italians Mad at Food, which documents Italians mocking people for committing culinary sins that range from referring to “Italian dressing” to cooking pasta beyond the al dente stage to putting pineapple on pizza.
And so the latest violence against pasta — revealed in a TikTok video of a woman shown grinding up boxed angel hair noodles in a blender and mixing them into a dough from which she proceeds to make “fresh pasta” — was bound to stir up an international conflict.
The video, which was shared by an account called Foodsfuns3 (though the original creator isn’t clear), has been viewed nearly 40 thousand times — and other accounts reacting to the original have garnered hundreds of thousands combined.
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Reaction was, understandably, primarily one of bafflement. Why, wondered anyone with a passing understanding of how pasta is made, would someone pulverize a thing and then remake it into the very same thing? Well, to be fair, the woman in the video did take angel hair pasta and turn it into a far wider cut, which she likened to fettuccine, or possibly linguine.
A controversial cooking TikTok replaces flour with dry, boxed pasta. Washington Post food writer Aaron Hutcherson tried the viral recipe. (Video: Julie Yoon, Hadley Green, Jackson Barton/The Washington Post)
But that’s being generous — and it gets us to the other reason the video sparked so much revulsion. The bizarrely made pasta? Well, it just didn’t look so good, despite the cook’s insistence otherwise. (“Perfect texture!” she said enthusiastically, which might have been a clue that she was actually pranking all of us.) Once she made a dough using the pasta dust and eggs, then rolled it out and cut it, the noodles wound up super-thick and appeared gummy. The finishing touches didn’t help — the pasta was topped with a jarred sauce (Newman’s Own, which didn’t fare very well in our recent ranking of store-bought marinara sauces) and garnished with dried oregano and shredded mozzarella cheese. In other words, no grazie.
“Italy is going to invade aren’t they,” wrote Reuters reporter Chris Taylor on Twitter, where the video was drawing attention — and not the good kind. “My Nonna would have killed her,” wrote one critic. “LINGUINE ?!?!?! Ma’am those are softened bread sticks,” ranted another.
Katie Parla, a pasta aficionado and the author of cookbooks including “Food of the Italian Islands,” had a similar reaction. “WHAT IS HAPPENING?” she wrote in an email. “CANNOT UNSEE.”
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Parla noted that many people — Italians, even! — have used something other than wheat, such as chickpeas or chestnuts, to make flour. But those nontraditional ingredients “also impart flavor and have a logical reason to exist,” she wrote. “This video, on the other hand, produces thick and flaccid noodles, which is never my vibe, seemingly just to end up as an ‘Italians mad at food’ meme.”
Many people speculated that the video’s creator was aware of the clutched-pearl reactions it would garner and was just doing it for shock value. If so: Mission accomplished. We couldn’t reach her to ask, but at one point in the video, she did reveal the anarchical nature of the enterprise. As she cut the ribbons of pasta, she encouraged viewers to make them into whatever thickness they wanted. “There’s no rules with making pasta this way,” she said enthusiastically. Clearly.
And in a perfectly TikTok-ian twist on a platform known for remixes and idea-sharing, it turns out that she wasn’t the first (or second) person to have attempted the feat — though she’s taking the heat for it, at least for the moment.
So many people hate-watching the video pointed out the same thing: It doesn’t take any more effort to actually make pasta from scratch, using flour instead of ground-up pasta. In fact, it might take less time, since you’re saving the blender step. To confirm that hypothesis, we decided to take a super-simple pasta recipe from our archives and test it against the TikToker’s.
Make the recipe pictured above: Spaghetti Alla Chitarra
My colleague Aaron Hutcherson did the honors, and first tried following the instructions from the original video. To put it mildly, things did not go well. For starters, the signature part of the recipe — blitzing dry noodles into a flourlike consistency — was not the breeze that it seemed on screen. It took a switch to a high-powered Vitamix and a lot of canister-shaking to get the job done. (Remember, kids: It’s not safe to stick your hand or a fork into a running blender, as the TikToker did.)
Rolling out the tough, dry dough was a strenuous upper-body workout; it was all but impossible to get it to a thin enough sheet to make a noodle you’d want to eat. And the seven-minute cooking time prescribed by our guide left the thick, rubbery strands uncooked in the center.
We’d also caution against some of the other instructions in the video, such as dumping sauce on top of a pile of noodles. (Dropping the cooked pasta into the pot of sauce and tossing before serving ensures an even coating.) And garnishing a plate of pasta with dried oregano and mozzarella cheese, as the original cook did, isn’t going to improve your final dish — it’s better to use fresh herbs if you have them (or none!) and top it with parmesan, which adds a salty, more flavorful component.
Just to show us that it really is easier (and tastier) to truly make pasta from scratch, Aaron also tried our traditional recipe. Instead of post-blender boxed pasta, he used a mix of semolina and regular all-purpose flour (I’ve made pasta using only all-purpose flour, too, so you don’t need a specialty ingredient). This produced a far softer dough that he was able to roll into a nice, thin sheet — thanks also to a 30-minute rest before rolling.
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The end result was a dish of silky noodles that the sauce clung to. It wasn’t even a contest — after we stopped rolling the cameras, the TikTok pasta went straight into the trash, while my colleagues and I eagerly swirled every last one of the (real) homemade noodles.
Some TikTok hacks can be fun and useful, but this one? Well, it just proves the adage (which, we should note, rarely applies to Fiats) that if something isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it.
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