Bucatini,14

Bucatini: for jaded veterans of spaghetti
NB: The listing [ASIN B00YQ7CYWU] for Garofalo No 14 Bucatini Semolina Pasta (6 Pack) on Amazon.com is ambiguous, due to differing package sizes between the United States and the European markets. At the time of this writing, Amazon’s primary listing states that each of the units of the 6 pack of bucatini are 16 oz. (16 oz. = one pound); however, lower in this same listing, the packages are stated to be “Size: 1.1 Pound (Pack of 6).” If, as we did, one orders the 6 pack of Garofalo bucatini in the United States (one pound) packages, he or she will receive six 16 oz. packages, totaling 96 United States oz. (= 2,721.6 grams); but if one can order six 500 gram European packages, he or she will receive three kilograms (3,000 grams) of bucatini. That is, he or she will receive roughly one-half pound — 278.4 grams — more bucatini if he or she can order six 500 gram packages instead of six one pound packages. The photo of a Garofalo bucatini package that accompanies the Amazon listing shows a 500 gram (17.64 oz.) package.Our family tree reveals that no Italian blood flows in our veins. Be that as it may, in the past five decades our family has savored and devoured prodigious quantities of Italian-made pasta, which we have prepared following historic Italian recipes for accompanying sauces and condiments. During that span, we have refined our palates and have acquired preferences. While the town of Gragnano, a suburb of Naples, is regarded to be the informal capital of Italian pasta production, overall, we have acquired a taste for pasta that is produced in the Le Marche region of north-central Italy, south of the microstate of San Marino. Specifically, in the past couple decades, our taste has gravitated toward pasta fashioned by two Le Marche producers of superb pasta: Mancini and Montebello, whose products, also, are represented on Amazon.Artisanal pasta comprises only two ingredients: durum semolina wheat flour and pure water. Pasta makers in Le Marche source their wheat very differently than do the pasta makers of Gragnano. The Mancini processing facility, for example, is located in the the middle of the same plot of land in Le Marche where Mancini grows the wheat that will make its pasta; the wheat used to make Mancini pasta is intensely local. In contrast, Garofalo (located in Gragnano) imports its wheat from international sources, including from Arizona and Australia. Because our preferred Le Marche region pasta makers do not (yet) list bucatini pasta in their product lines, we turned to Garofalo for our taste test of bucatini pasta.Garofalo’s Arizona source for wheat is not a curious anomaly: the Garofalo company website notes that, “The semolina we use is largely made using ‘Desert Durum’ wheat from Arizona, considered one of the best in the world for its high protein content. . . . The Arizona desert climate, for example, guarantees protection from rain and temperatures that are too low, preventing the growth of weeds and rendering pesticides unnecessary.” Why is high protein content important? Because it provides structure to the pasta, keeping it from getting too swollen and soggy in boiling water, and preserving the pasta’s al dente character.The packages of Garofalo bucatini bear the IGP certificate of geographic origin, a mark the use of which is regulated by the European Union. But Garofalo goes far beyond that for extraordinary transparency. On the Garofalo website is a software utility into which one may enter the expiry date code printed on a package of Garofalo pasta, and the utility will return (in our case) a 55 (fifty-five!) page .pdf file report that details the physical, chemical, and nutritional characteristics of the *specific* batch of wheat that was incorporated to make the pasta.Never having previously partaken of bucatini ourselves, Garofalo became our test pasta for bucatini. This year, 2022, has been a sort of coming-out party for bucatini, a specific shape of skinny-tubular pasta that has been in production for decades, but was “discovered” (brought out of the shadows), ironically, by a scandal in 2020, when, at the beginning of the pandemic, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration temporarily banned imports of bucatini made by DeCecco, a brand with a major market share, because its iron content was slightly below the minimum iron content required by an FDA administrative rule. The FDA’s rationale for causing the ensuing Great Bucatini Shortage of 2020 has been roundly ridiculed in articles in the popular press, and its immediate aftermath was that major foodie publications such as Serious Eats, Bon Appetit, and Epicurious, as well as the New York Times, all have published feature articles in 2022 in which the once-again-available bucatini plays a starring role; and a respected food columnist, Maggie Hennessey, upped the game to another level in 2022 with a couple of articles — love letters to bucatini, actually — that she wrote for Salon.com and Gustiamo.com.But you are reading this review because you want to know more about Garofalo bucatini and how it performs on the plate, and, more importantly, how it tastes, right? Because, to date, we have cooked up only one meal with Garofalo bucatini, our observations are still preliminary; you may need to read other reviews under this listing to draw conclusions on your own. In appearance, cooked bucatini looks like spaghetti that is slightly -zoftig- or maybe has been cooked a couple of minutes past -al dente-. The cooking time for Garofalo bucatini is a couple of minutes shorter than the cooking time we have observed in preparing Montebello spaghetti, presumably because the hole down the center of the bucatini tube presents a greater surface area to the boiling water than the solid spaghetti noodle presents. Similarly, the hollow center of the bucatini works to give the cooked noodles a -skosh- of a mind of their own, and cooked bucatini behaves a bit like a fractious miniature garden hose when trying to keep it on the fork; it would be a good idea to wear an apron or a bib over your white shirt or blouse when eating bucatini with a tomato-based sauce.Based on our so-far only meal of bucatini, when the minimal topping that we applied was just freshly ground black pepper and extra virgin olive oil sourced from Siurana (in Catalunya), we are gratified that the taste of the Garofalo bucatini compared favorably to the taste of Montebello spaghetti that we had cooked and served in the same manner. We hope and expect that the taste of Garofalo bucatini will continue to stand up in further comparisons with the Marche region pasta varieties that have slightly different shapes and a different geographic provenance when we top the pasta with, say, alla’amatriciana sauce; we shall see.UPDATE, SPRING 2023: We have eaten our way through all six of our original packages of Garofalo Bucatini since posting the review above. For the five subsequent meals, we topped the bucatini with an all’Amatriciana sauce the recipe for which we compiled by “marrying” about a dozen recipes that we found on the Web (including two recipes from the official site of the commune of Amatrice) and in Marcela Hazan’s published writings. NB: in the process, we modified recipes that included onions and garlic: the weight of opinion regards those two ingredients as ahistorical anomalies, but onion and garlic do appear in some local (Roman) restaurant-supplied recipes.The ultimate verdict — your opinion may vary — is that Garafalo brand bucatini, properly cooked, is as delicious as we appreciated it to be on our first impression. AND that Salsa all’Amatriciana is a perfect match for Garafalo Bucatini; my spouse has declared it the best pasta topping EVER. Maggie Hennessey’s crowning of bucatini to be the perfect pasta shape was spot-on.

Good product
Good product

Good taste and texture
The noodles arrived unbroken and the thickness met my expectations for buccatini. If you haven’t had this style of pasta before, I definitely recommend it.

I like bucatini because it traps a lot of sauce inside the noodle and that it’s got good “chew.”
Garafolo is a good brand. I make all manner of pasta sauces with chunky ingredients (seafood, or meat with diced up veggies and/or with fresh spinach leaves that wilt into the sauce.