The best shapes for garlic and oil
Garlic sliced thin and warmed gently in olive oil with dried chilli, then loosened with a ladle of the starchy water the pasta cooked in. No tomato, no cream, no cheese. The whole dish is an emulsion of oil and water that should not hold together and does, and how well it holds depends almost entirely on how much starch comes across from the pot.
Oil loosened with pasta water into a light emulsion. Nothing to lodge, everything to coat, it belongs on strands, the thinner the strand the better the oil-to-bite ratio.
Canonical: spaghetti.
A strand under a millimeter wide is nearly all surface.
A solid round strand offers modest surface area for its weight, so it favors sauces that coat rather than chunk.
Spaghettini runs thinner than spaghetti, so it boils faster and asks for sauces that stay light.
A long strand with a squarish, slightly rough section holds a clinging sauce along its length.
Which sauce fits depends on which vermicelli is in the box.
What we would not put it on
Short shapes with bores and cups. There are no solids here for a cavity to catch, so a hollow just collects oil that never reaches the bite, and the dish arrives greasy in one mouthful and bare in the next.
Want it the other way around? Start from a shape in the Pairing Finder.
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