Orecchiette
oh-rek-ee-ET-teh
Also known as recchie, recchietedde, chiancaredde, strascicati, strasc'nat.
What it is
Orecchiette belong to Puglia, where an ear-shaped dragged pasta has been documented around Bari since roughly the twelfth or thirteenth century. One tradition, repeated on Garofalo's product page, traces the design to Provencal pasta brought south by the Angevins, and another sees the dome of a trullo roof in it. Both are attributions, not settled fact. The living tradition is easier to check. On Via dell'Arco Basso in Bari Vecchia, women roll, cut, and drag orecchiette at tables outside their doors and sell bags to passersby. The street keeps making news. In October 2019 police fined a Bari restaurant for serving undocumented orecchiette, and a December 2019 New York Times story described the vendors' worry about receipts, hairnets, and taxes. In November 2024 the women paused work after a viral video alleged industrial pasta was being sold as handmade, and in August 2025 police fined three sellers 5,000 euros each for that practice. The women answered by blocking their own street with pasta tables.
Italian for little ears. Treccani derives orecchietta as a diminutive of orecchia, ear, and defines the plural as the flattened, ear-like pasta traditional in Puglian cooking.
What sauce it wants, and why
Each piece is a small cup with a thin center and a thicker rim, so one bite carries two textures. The hollow scoops up whatever is loose in the pan, crumbled sausage, chopped greens, beans. The rough face, scraped by a knife in handmade versions and bronze-drawn in dried ones, grips oily condiments that slide off smooth pasta. That is why the canonical match is cime di rapa wilted with garlic, anchovy, and chili. Chunky vegetable sauces and loose ragus work for the same reason. Skip smooth strand sauces, there is nothing for them to hold.
Classic plates: orecchiette con le cime di rapa.
No orecchiette? Use these
Closest swaps by sauce behavior, not by looks. The ones most easily confused with orecchiette, and how they read.
Orecchiette vs Cavatelli·Orecchiette vs Conchiglie·Orecchiette vs Lumache·Orecchiette vs Strascinati
Easy to confuse with
Cupped or dragged. Conchiglie is a ridged shell, lumache a snail with one opening, orecchiette a smooth concave ear, cavatelli a small rolled hull with a hollow, capunti a longer open pod dragged with several fingers, and strascinati a flat dragged oval.
- Pasta shapes for cold salad: which hold, which fall apartA 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 doughsAlmost every pasta is one of two recipes. The dough tells you the region, the texture, and the sauce.
- The hand-formed shapes of the SouthSome pasta needs a thumb, a board, or a knitting needle. These are the shapes a machine cannot quite fake.
Stay in the loop
From the Almanac
Updates from Pasta Almanac, when there is something worth sharing.