Ziti
ZEE-tee
Also known as zite, maccheroni della zita.
What it is
Zita means bride in the dialects of southern Italy, and ziti were the wedding pasta. The older name was maccheroni della zita, the bride's macaroni. Garofalo records the tradition that the bride herself prepared this pasta for the wedding dinner, and in Sicily ziti with stewed pork fed wedding guests of every class. The shape is a long smooth tube sold in rods of about 25 to 26 cm. Cooks snap the rods by hand over the pot into irregular pieces, a ritual De Cecco and Rummo still describe on their product pages. Producers also sell a pre-cut version, zita tagliata, roughly 4 to 5 cm long, which is the ziti most Americans know. The shape belongs to a family of long Neapolitan tubes that includes the wider zitoni and the still longer candele, named for candles. In Naples the broken tubes carry ragu and Genovese. In the United States they became the base of baked ziti.
From the southern Italian zita, a girl of marrying age or a bride. Treccani marks the derivation as probable rather than certain, and Wiktionary traces the word through Neapolitan or Sicilian usage, possibly from Vulgar Latin pittitus.
What sauce it wants, and why
Ziti is a smooth, even-walled tube, so it slips past thin sauces and asks for ones with real body. Naples pairs it with the city's two great slow-cooked sauces, ragu napoletano and the onion and beef Genovese, both dense enough to coat the outside and creep inside the tube. The shape does its best work in the oven. The hollow center traps sauce and melting cheese, the thick wall keeps a firm bite through a long bake, and the straight-cut ends pack tightly into timballi and casseroles.
Classic plates: ziti al ragu, baked ziti, pasta alla genovese, ziti alla sorrentina.
No ziti? Use these
Closest swaps by sauce behavior, not by looks. The ones most easily confused with ziti, and how they read.
Ziti vs Penne·Ziti vs Rigatoni·Ziti vs Macaroni·Ziti vs Candele
Stay in the loop
From the Almanac
Updates from Pasta Almanac, when there is something worth sharing.