The Culinary Faux Pas Stanley Tucci Commits

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When it comes to committing a culinary faux pas, actor-turned-chef and Italian cuisine connoisseur Stanley Tucci might not be the first name you think of. When Tucci isn't reprising his role in "The Devil Wears Prada 2," he's posting incredible videos of himself cooking to his social media accounts and weighing in on the mystery of Italy's many food rules. While he's crafting incredible dishes inspired by his Italian heritage, he actually commits a surprising no-no when it comes to pasta-making: breaking the dry noodles.

In a recently posted TikTok video, Tucci shares a recipe for warm and cozy winter pasta with lentils with his followers. The video starts off fairly typically, with Tucci cooking down some veggies as the base for the dish. But when he takes out the pasta, that's where things take a turn. Instead of boiling the noodles as one would think, Tucci wraps the spaghetti grossi (aka, thicker spaghetti) in a towel and rolls the uncooked pasta, breaking it into smaller pieces. As if already anticipating the reaction to his pasta-breaking, Tucci remarks, "This is the traditional way to make this dish. This is the way my grandparents always did it." Beyond the tradition, Tucci says the broken pasta bits pair well with the lentils because they're small and add a nice texture to the dish. The pasta gets cooked as it normally would, "al dente, of course," according to Tucci, and then acts as the bed for the cooked lentils.

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Breaking pasta noodles is likely something you've been told never to do — the one spaghetti rule you should never break. In the comments on Tucci's TikTok video, fans are pushing back on this step of his cooking process. One wrote, "every Italian I've ever known Clutches their pearls when you breaka [sic] the pasta." But some users chimed in in agreement with Tucci's assertion that this is a traditional practice. So which is it?

One of the cons of breaking pasta seems obvious: it's meant to be in the shape that it was created in. Spaghetti, for example, is meant to be long and thin to allow for sauce to stick more easily — a key part of the Stanley Tucci pasta rule you should never break. Additionally, according to pasta brand Barilla's Chef Lorenzo, "One of the reasons why people love spaghetti so much is because once twirled around the fork, it offers a very satisfying 'dense' bite, something you can't replicate with short pieces of pasta that won't allow you to create a tight nest with the fork" (via Barilla).

But, Tucci mentions that his seemingly illegal pasta-breaking practice is the way of his ancestors. And he's not alone. There are recipes for similar pasta e lenticchie dishes, that call for broken pasta (linguine or spaghetti). Pasta mista (or mixed pasta), is even a common recipe item in Italian dishes, and is essentially a mixture of random or broken bits of pasta.