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 best pasta for lighter sauces is thin and delicate long cuts of pasta capellini, thin spaghetti, linguine, Fusilli, lunghi, bucatini, and vermicelli. Sticking to thinner longer cuts of pasta complement the sauce or toss of garlicky olive oil.

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.

Cascatelli (Italian: [kaskaˈtɛlli]) are a short pasta shape with a flat strip and a pair of ruffles parallel to each other, each of which sticks out at a 90-degree angle from the strip. The ruffles give the shape texture and create a "sauce trough".

The Italian rule – which pasta shapes go with which sauces

A general guide is that lighter, more delicate sauces of thinner, more liquid consistency are best suited to thinner pasta shapes or filled pasta, stuffed with gently-flavoured ingredients.

Tubular Pasta With Ridges Is The Best Option

If you want to grab as much sauce as possible, you should go with tubular pasta with ridges. Two of the most common examples include penne pasta and ziti. The sauce can fill the tubular shape, allowing you to capture a tremendous amount of sauce with each bite.

You can use ANY pasta you want - that's how versatile the sauce is. Choose long strands of spaghetti, linguine, or fettuccine, or shorter shapes like penne, rigatoni, elbows, and shells. The sauce is the star attraction, any pasta works!

Serve shell pasta shapes such as conchiglie and lumache with heavy cream or meat sauces; large ones can be stuffed. 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.

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.

Cook sauce first.

Waiting will lead to overcooked, overly starchy pasta.

Briny ingredients like olives or capers are another way to brighten up your pasta sauce while also introducing texture and depth of flavor.

What is the golden rule for pasta? ›

In Italy, the golden rule for cooking pasta is 1, 10, 100 or 1 liter of water, 10 grams of salt for every 100 grams of pasta. Converted for American cooks, the rule should be 1/3, 3, 30, referring to 1/3 oz of salt, 3 oz of pasta and 30 oz of water.

When you cook pasta, 2 ounces of dry pasta per person is a good rule of thumb to follow.

Ravioli. This is the most well-known stuffed pasta. The singular form is “raviolo” and they are usually made by putting the filling between two sheets of pasta (versus using one piece of pasta and folding it over). The most traditional filling is cheese-based, and it varies in its specifics from region to region.

Serve long ribbon pasta shapes such as tagliatelle, pappardelle, fettuccine, mafaldine with rich, meaty sauces. Serve shell pasta shapes such as conchiglie and lumache with heavy cream or meat sauces; large ones can be stuffed.

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.

For bolognese or ragu...

The meaty chunks in these sauces are easily mopped up by tube-shaped pastas like penne, bucatini, tubini, and tortiglioni. “The meat can enter the tubes and the pasta acts as a great vehicle to carry the sauce,” Tonkinson says.