I'd never heard of it bucatini either. It is a good article though.
Possibly related: Growing up we mostly ate mostaccioli or spaghetti. But mostaccioli does not exist in stores here. There's penne and zitti, which are more or less the same, but I don't remember of those were in the store when I was a kid.
Mostaccioli would make a really stupid straw, but better than penne.
I also had never heard of bucatini.
My initial reaction was my standard smug Philistine response -- isn't it great that I'm the kind of uncultured ignoramus happy to eat any kind of pasta with tomato sauce?
But then she described the joys of bucatini, and now I want to try it, but apparently I won't be able to find it.
Misery.
Bucatini is a top five worst pasta shape, up there with wagon wheels. The idea that sauce gets inside of it is largely a myth. It's also too thick and becomes unwieldy--as an Italian friend remarked, "The sauce won't get inside the bucatini, but it will get on you." The article is amusing but the author's reliability on any aspect of pasta may be judged by her suggestion that cooking it for half the time on the box provides "perfectly al dente" results.
bucatini's propensity to fight back is great with some sauces*, not so great with others, jeez folks calm down and eat the pasta that works for your sauce and you! have not noticed any bucatini shortage out here.
ex.: easy friday night pasta when little juliette romas are in the market mid-summer through late fall, crank the oven to 425 f, roll the tomatoes in enough olive oil in a roasting tin big enough to hold them all in pretty much one layer, no salt at this point, roast until a good proportion of their tops are blackened and they are generally mmmmmm, meanwhile boil the water add salt cook pasta per usual, while that's going on grate romano, have pepper grinder, salt and something to scoop out pasta water at the ready, fish out the bucatini into the roasting tin, ladle some pasta cooking water around the edges, lots of tossing and jostling, adding in the cheese, salt and pepper, and enough more water so that it slips properly, plus torn up basil leaves if you've got them. mmmmmmm so good.
sub in cream for the olive oil for the last couple of editions, late in the season - it's getting cold, you need to protect your bioprene!
and just have to add a salad bc the tomatoes count as the cooked veg, ahhh friday night easy dinner i love you.
I've never had bucatini but the physics of it just seem unlikely to result in tiny pasta straws filled with sauce. Even ziti don't end up uniformly filled with sauce.
jeez folks calm down and eat the pasta that works for your sauce and you!
What fun would that be? No shortage of the stuff noted here. I also find the author's contempt for orecchiette coupled with her love of De Cecco to be suspect. Orecchiette is their best pasta!
You have to fill them up one at a time.
Anyway, I'm making meatballs and sauce.
the point of bucatini is their tensile strength, their just-on-the-verge-of-whiplash-ness. they don't get sauce inside & are not meant to. i mean fine if they do, but that's not the point.
anyways we had papperadelle with fennel, orage-saffron sauce & dungenesse crab on nye, it was ace.
We're using a thinner bucatini with no hole in the middle.
14: it has been said of buttermilk. Not before or after, instead of.
We had spaghetti and meatballs tonight, as well. It was fine.
The meatballs I made were not my best.
bucatini are fucking brilliant; basically all pasta shapes are brilliant when used with the correct sauce, as you sorry-ass haters would know if you had paid more attention to Marcella Hazan before it was too late...
I refuse to believe there's a perfect sauce for wagon wheels unless it's chunks of meat that fit into the wheels like the pieces in trivial pursuit.
t's also too thick and becomes unwieldy--as an Italian friend remarked, "The sauce won't get inside the bucatini, but it will get on you."
Yeah, this. Whenever I've had bucatini, I've wished it was some other pasta.
the point of bucatini is their tensile strength, their just-on-the-verge-of-whiplash-ness
So the point is to be annoying to eat?
I've seen bucatini, or something nearly like it, sold here under the brand San Remo under the name "tubular spaghetti" it's great.
I haven't seen rigatoni here in Arrakis for months and it's bumming me out.
I've bucatinied, but I've never buca'd me.
The meatballs I made were not my best.
The frozen turkey meatballs I thawed were the best I was willing to do.
If bucatini is the same as tubular spaghetti, isn't it the stuff that way back in the 1950s was the default base for mac and cheese. In this septic isle it was always just referred to as macaroni. Other shapes were encountered only if you were posh and eating out and most people didn't know they existed.
But those are short- I've never seen macaroni the length of spaghetti.
If you accelerate bucatini to near the speed of light, it turns into macaroni except straighter.
Which is the same as a cylindrical elevator moving through space which means we can use Special Relativity to show the pasta will get shorter as it approaches the speed of light.
Honestly, if you need to use General Relativity when cooking pasta, you've overcomplicated your meal.
if you spin a sufficiently massive strand of bucatini you'll be able to navigate closed timelike paths around it, see Thorne (1987).