I didn’t know I was writing a trilogy, but here we are.

After finding the mysterious pasta shape last weekend, having learned about it in early 2021 from an article by Rachel Handler in New York Magazine, we finally tried it last night.

Rachel believes bucatini is ‘the only noodle worth eating; all other dry pastas might as well be firewood.’ And she describes it as:

spaghetti but thicker and with a hole in it, meaning it absorbs 200 percent more sauce than its thinner, hole-free brethren, due to math.

Rereading the article now, I had forgotten that she did a whole investigation about the shortage, writing it as if it were about a grave conspiracy, and hoping she might be called ‘the Bernstein of Bucatini’.

So what of it?

It was… fine, I guess? Like spaghetti, but thicker.

But I fear we might not be getting the real thing. From the photograph accompanying the article, the hole through the noodles looks quite substantial. Whereas in the packet we have — the brand being Tesco Finest — the hole is quite narrow. The New York photo might be exaggerating the holiness, but I suspect we’re being fobbed off over here, with fakeatini.

Certainly there’s no way it collected three times the sauce that standard spaghetti does.

Of course, if you go back to my picture from the other day you’ll see that the packet describes it as ‘Spaghetti’ in big letters, with ‘bucatini’ underneath, in much smaller type, like a subtitle.

Maybe, rather than a fake, we have a hybrid.