Sorpresine (aka Sorprese) - Temporary Score: 12
Description: "little surprise"; small bell shaped (???) pasta with a ruffled edge (nope) and a crease on one side (uh....); like a little package; like fortune cookies
well, i cobbled this description together from various interwebs pages, and this is one of those cases where a picture really is worth a throusand words. the upper left image is from an internet search. the other three are my (humbly: successful!) attempt to make them for myself because of all the pastas that were difficult to soure for this challenge, this one proved absolutely and stubbornly impossible. but be honest, if you read that description without the aid of images, would the pasta in your mind look like this???
First Take Points: 5 - i am so happy about this pasta. as noted above, i could not get this pasta anywhere. if i recall correctly, i found a company in italy, and got halfway through the checkout process before i realized that tariffs and associated shipping fees from small town italy were going to be like a week's salary... and then also discovered that they wouldn't ship outside the EU ANYWAY. (side whinge on why people set up websites that allow you to make selections that you're not allowed to make.) it was getting on towards the end of 2025 and i was in desperate straits. i had two or three replacement pasta shapes on my list, but the whole reason they were replacement shapes is because they were already incredibly similar to other shapes i had already done, and i really really really wanted sorpresine. so i decided to do what i swore i would not do for this challenge: make my own pasta.
now, a disclaimer: i did not make the actual pasta. it was holiday times and things were rushy, and i just did not have the spoons, but luckily, i have a great italian joint in my neighborhood that does some "cook at home" stuff, including fresh pasta sheets. but i DID make the actual sorpresine shapes myself, cutting and folding and pinching the fresh pasta into these reverse-fortune-cookie-torture-shapes.
and then i made a rich bone broth with finely diced (not quite minced, but almost) potatoes and scallions and chives, and dropped the pastas in for the last few minutes. do i think that being fresh pasta made it taste better? sure, but i've decided to give myself and my funky pasta origami the majority of the credit for this being an awesome dish.
Remix Bonus Points: 4 - soups and sauces for days, but i don't think this would be a good cold-pasta-salad pasta shape. maybe if you could make them extra mini (there is no way i could), but the strength of these little surprises is where the sauce and the soup can hide, and i just don't think they would be that fun in a cold/sauce-light application.
Amusement Points: 4 - it's origami pasta, for gluten's sake! and once i got the hang of it, they were really fun to make. i also - amusingly - discovered that i am incapable of squaring a rectangle. logically (and intuitively) i know that if your design relies on the meeting up of opposite corners, you need equal sides. you need a square. i had large pasta sheets, a pizza cutter, and a mat with a ruler BUILT IN. do you think that i was able to create pasta squares? dear reader, i was not. but i make excellent pasta rectangles and got very good at twisting my folds just enough to make up for the short sides.
Annoyance Deductions: -1 - i got a little frustrated with various descriptions feeling quite inadequate, so i challenged myself to come up with a better description, and then i got very frustrated with myself because the majority of my "description" was making weird wavy pinching motions with my hands and saying "you know, like".
Alternative Uses: boss-level bonus questions for IQ tests, geometry finals, pub quizzes, and first year engineering students who think they can come up with an AI prompt for any scenario.
