Guides
The big ideas behind all the shapes. How a shape picks its sauce, fresh vs dried, and the handful of things that explain most of Italian pasta.
How to read a pasta shape
Every shape is a machine for holding sauce. Learn the four things to look at and you can predict what any pasta wants.
Fresh vs dried pasta: when each wins
One is not better than the other. They are two different materials, and each was built for different sauces.
The four Roman pasta sauces
Cacio e pepe, gricia, amatriciana, carbonara. Four dishes built on the same two ingredients, and the shapes they ride.
Pasta for soup: the smallest shapes
Why broth calls for the tiny pasta, and which one to drop in.
Pasta shapes for cold salad: which hold, which fall apart
A cold bowl flips the rules. With no heat to make the dressing cling, the shape does all the work, and not every shape can.
Egg vs semolina: the two doughs
Almost every pasta is one of two recipes. The dough tells you the region, the texture, and the sauce.
What bronze-die pasta means
Two words on a box, trafilata al bronzo, tell you how the pasta will hold its sauce. Here is why they matter.
Pasta for baking: the al forno shapes
Not every shape survives the oven. The ones that do are big, sturdy, and built to hold a filling or a sauce.
The hand-formed shapes of the South
Some pasta needs a thumb, a board, or a knitting needle. These are the shapes a machine cannot quite fake.
Why durum: the wheat that holds its bite
The gold color is the first clue. Durum is a different wheat from the one in bread, the hardest grown, and it is the reason good dried pasta keeps its bite in the water instead of going soft.
Pasta myths, settled
Six things everyone repeats about pasta, checked against the record. The pattern, once you see it, is that almost every myth gets the cause and effect backwards.
A short history of pasta
Pasta is older than Marco Polo, Italian before it was American, and vegetarian before tomato ever touched it. The real timeline, in six turns.