Select The Correct Pasta To Suit The Dish
There is a fine art to selecting the most appropriate pasta for a dish. Matching the most suitable pasta at your disposal to the sauce in a recipe takes some understanding of what's readily available and how the flavors and textures blend. Let's take a look at how pastas stack up.
Choose the Size
If every pasta was small like ditali, how would you be able to pick up large amounts of creamy, cheesy goodness with every single bite? You would have a lot of little noodles sunk inside a sea of ricotta and Parmesan. Size is very important when it concerns pairing pasta with a sauce or filling. Some pastas are small and delicate, not necessarily meant to pick up heavy sauce. Other pasta, like jumbo shells or manicotti are large and open so they can either be stuffed or the sauce will naturally fill the hollows.
In a world where pasta is all the same, it would all be spaghetti and it would always be served with a simple tomato sauce. That does not sound very exciting. Matching a variety of pastas to a variety of sauces is how meals stay interesting, and tasty.
Small pastas are supposed to be light in their 'bite' and delicate, and dished up with light, fresh sauces. Ingredients should all be small and light in weight, such as freshly grated Parmesan cheese as opposed to chunks of Cheddar or melted mozzarella. Larger pasta is heavier and firm, suitable for big pieces of meat, vegetables, and heavy cheese, and can stand up to more flavorful, sturdy sauces.
Choose the Texture
If your pasta has a heavy sauce it will need to 'grab' and hold, you want to think about texture. With just a change in the variety of pasta you use, you can make a big difference in how your meal turns out. Ridges, holes, openings, cups, spirals, bumps, waves, and whole grains are all ways that pasta hangs onto sauce to create a dish which is richer and deeper in flavor.
A delicate, slippery pasta, like angel hair, won't stand up if you serve it with a chunky tomato sauce. Your dinner guests will wind up eating the pasta separately from the sauce, since the heavy chunks of tomatoes will slide right off the pasta. Choosing a heavier textured pasta, such as corzetti, orecchiette, or even rotini will grab the larger pieces and let your fork hold onto everything with greater success.
If you are trying to figure out what pasta would go best with your sauce, consider texture as a starting point. Find a texture that will do what you want with the sauce and then work from there to start narrowing down the pasta you choose.
Choose the Function
After size and texture, function is a key to picking the right pasta for your dish. If you have big chunks of meat and veggies in your dish, you will need a pasta that won't disappear under the weight and be useless. So, consider what you want your pasta to do.
If you need a pasta that just sucks sauce to it like a magnet, you might think about quadrefiore or fusilli. Then again, soups generally contain small hollow pasta like trottoli or tubetti rigati, such as pasta fagioli at an Italian restaurant.
You have pasta intended to stuff and pasta intended to form a large pasta layer. You have very, very tiny pasta that is used to make light fluffy salads that look more like rice than pasta salads. If you want a big, heavy, hearty dish, you need to choose a big, heavy, hearty pasta.
Pick the best pasta to go with your dish to get the best results. Look at the size you will need, the texture the pasta has, and even the function the pasta should serve. By comparing these three elements, you can pick out a great style of pasta for your dish and impress everyone at the table with your perfectly executed pasta dish, at every layer.
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