How To Pick the Right Pasta for Your Sauce | Nico Boston (2024)

FAQs

How To Pick the Right Pasta for Your Sauce | Nico Boston? ›

The creamier and cheesier and decadent pasta sauces call for sturdier pasta, sauce-capturing noodles that will hold in the rich taste. Pasta with hollows and scoopable shapes, such as cavatappi, elbows, farfalle, fettuccine, shells, and linguine, to experience the creamy, cheesy sauces.

Serve twist pasta shapes such as fusilli, trofie, strozzapreti, caserecce and gemelli with lighter, smoother sauces which will cling to the twists, such as pesto. Serve tube pasta shapes such as penne, rigatoni, macaroni and paccheri with hearty vegetable sauces, or baked cheese dishes.

As a general rule, pair the heartier sauces with the wider noodles: Wide ribbons like pappardelle pair well with rich, meaty sauces while the thinner flat noodles, like fettuccine or linguine, are best paired with simple cream sauces like Alfredo or delicate proteins like seafood.

As for picking the perfect pasta shape, we recommend choosing a short cut—like Penne, Shells or Rigatoni—with hollow middles, twists or scoop-like shapes to capture all the goodness of your baked pasta: sauces, small ingredients and melty cheeses galore.

Pesto, on the other hand, flourishes best when paired with thinner noodles, such as spaghetti and linguine, and with shapes that have plenty of twists, grooves, curls, and troughs. Fusilli is not only one of the most well-known pasta shapes; it's also the UK's most popular and our ultimate shape to use with pesto.

pappardelle and tagliatelle are great options, as the long and wide strips are perfect for catching tender morsels of sauce. Though slightly harder to come by, mafalde is a great choice too - the long, wavy strands deft at capturing larger shreds of meat.

For tomato-based sauces, a good rule of thumb to follow is to use one jar of 24-ounce pasta sauce for every 16-ounce package of pasta. When calculating how much sauce for pasta per person, generally about 2 to 4 ounces (1/4 to 1/2 cup) of sauce for each 2 ounce (about 1 cup cooked) serving of pasta would be needed.

Many people have a go-to pasta depending on the dish they are making. It's not the cut or shape of the pasta that makes the dish taste different, but rather the ingredients you are pairing with it. As a general rule, you want to choose a pasta shape that allows every bite to include plenty of sauce.

The most popular pasta shapes worldwide

It's no great surprise that spaghetti tops the list of favourite pasta shapes.

Rigate, the ridged ones, capture even more sauce. Wide, flat pastas like pappardelle are ideal for sopping up creamy sauces. Generally, the wider the noodle, the heavier the sauce. Long, round pastas like spaghetti are best with olive oil- and tomato-based sauces, which coat each strand evenly.

What do Italians eat pesto with? ›

Italian Tradition

Pesto is the perfect sauce to enjoy with a dish of trofie (the traditional Ligurian short pasta), lasagna, potato gnocchi or as a topping for a bowl of minestrone. It can be mixed into tomato sauce to enhance the flavor of pasta dishes or used with fish fillets to make them more appetizing.

Mix pesto into creamy dips, use it as a pizza sauce, spread it on sandwiches, add it to your favorite salads, toss it with roasted summer vegetables, and use it as a sauce for grilled chicken or grilled fish. From pastas and salads to pizzas and savory tarts, here are 23 ways to use pesto this summer.

That means pasta shapes like spaghetti, angel hair, and capellini shouldn't be served with heavy sauces like ragú or creamy mushroom or you risk noodle breakage. Instead, they go well with thin tomato-based sauces like marinara, simple cacio e pepe, or oil and brown butter sauces.

Answer: Pasta shapes with holes or ridges, such as wagon wheels or rotini, are perfect for chunkier sauces. Thin, delicate pastas, such as angel hair or vermicelli, are better served with light, thin sauces. Thicker pasta shapes, such as fettuccine, work well with heavier sauces.

First, in authentic Italian cuisine, the sauce is always tossed with the pasta before it ever hits the plate. Just before the sauce is done cooking, the hot pasta is added to the saucepan. Generally speaking, we recommend cooking the pasta in the sauce together for about 1-2 minutes.

On the other hand, red sauce has less calories. It is also a great source of vitamins A and C, calcium and iron. Red sauce is easily the healthiest option, but that doesn't mean that you should avoid white sauce; it has its health benefits, too!