There are so many kinds of noodles you may need a to navigate them all. But what do you do with such variety? Well, with a great many pasta shapes comes a great responsibility: picking the right one. The form your pasta takes has a huge impact on your dish as a whole — so while you may be accustomed to focusing purely on the sauce, you can't make the right match without showing some love to the noodle itself.
Choosing the correct pasta doesn't have to be a complicated battle. The wrong noodle will leave your sauce swimming at the bottom of your bowl, while the right one will give you a bite full of flavor. When selecting your pasta, think of your sauce and how certain noodles are designed to trap ingredients within their twists and turns while others have a more open structure for catching sauce, and still others let the sauce stick more easily.
Turning your attention to the qualities of your pasta sauce will be the key to accompanying it with the right pasta shape. Match your pasta shape to the sauce you're using Nobody likes a bland bite of food, especially when pasta is designed to be the vessel for other ingredients in your dish. While pastas such as fusilli and wagon wheel have fun shapes, they also have a job to do: those shapes have crevices for sauces to sink into.
That's why curly noodles such as rotini or cavatappi are often served with a chunky meat or vegetable sauce — the bulkier ingredients have a place to nestle within the pasta's nooks. This can also be ap.