How Do I…

…know what pasta to use in my recipe?

Many of us have a love affair with pasta, usually dating back to childhood.  Whether you liked your spaghetti slathered in tomato sauce or your noodles tossed with just a bit of butter and parmesan cheese, pasta is a universal comfort food. 

While pasta recipes may seem like a no-brainer, there is actually a bit of science behind what type of pasta you should use in a particular dish. You may not have thought about it, but there’s a reason you don’t see fettuccine in a pasta salad and gnocchi in a platter of macaroni and cheese.  The type of pasta you use in your recipe can make all the difference in the success of your dish.   

Pasta is defined as an unleavened dough of wheat or buckwheat, flour and water.  Additional ingredients may include eggs and vegetable extracts. There are two styles of pasta – dried and fresh.  Dried pasta made without eggs will keep for up to two years in the pantry (though you might not want to keep it that long) while fresh pasta will last in the fridge for a few days.  Under Italian law, dry pasta (pasta secca) can only be made from durum sticks wheat flour or durum wheat semolina.  Durum flour and durum semolina have a yellow tinge in color. Italian pasta is traditionally cooked al dente (“firm to the bite.”) Outside Italy, dry pasta is made from other types of flour (such as wheat flour), which produces a softer product that won’t be al dente.  

While there are hundreds of types of pastas, they fall into one of two categories; long or short.  Long form or strand pasta is any type of pasta you can twirl around your fork and varies in length and thickness. Examples include angel hair, spaghetti and vermicelli. A subset of long-form pasta is ribbon pasta which includes fettuccine, linguine and lasagna.  Ribbon pastas are distinguished because they are flat instead of cyclical like most long-form pastas. Long pastas are best suited for seafood recipes.  The oil in these dishes help move long pasta and make it easier to twist around your fork.

Short pastas boast several subcategories including tubular, shaped and stuffed. Tubular pastas include elbows, penne, manicotti and rigatoni; common shaped pastas are fusilli (corkscrews) and farfelle (bow ties); stuffed varieties of pasta are tortellini, ravioli and gnocchi.  Use meat and ricotta sauces with short pastas. Their uneven surfaces can withstand heavier, more substantive sauces.   

Here are a few cooking tips to keep in mind when preparing pasta, no matter the recipe:

• Don’t mix different types of pasta shapes in the same dish.  Not only is this a no-no according to Italian tradition, doing so can affect the taste and texture of the recipe.
• Always salt your water and don’t skimp.  Salt will add flavor to the pasta. And don’t rinse your pasta after cooking.  The starch in the water will help your sauce cling to the pasta, as opposed to sliding off onto the plate.
• To test whether your pasta is ‘al dente,’ take a piece out of the pot and break it. It its white inside, it’s not quite done. Fresh pasta doesn’t require as much cooking time as dried pasta – three to five minutes at the most.

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