Most of us will take a “use whatever is in the cupboard” approach when matching our pasta shapes with sauce. But pasta comes in over 600 different shapes and sizes, and each one has a perfect sauce pairing! In fact, according to the experts, the most famous pasta pairing - spaghetti bolognese - shouldn’t exist. The meat-based sauce is actually a ragu alla bolognese and is meant to be paired with gnocchi, tortellini or tagliatelle.
Our in-house pasta expert, Emma Dimento says that when choosing dried pasta, the trick is to look for a shape that has lots of little ridges on the surface. These will act as tiny crevices for your flavoursome sauce to cling to.
Emma is a product developer in our Macro food brand team, as well as a trained chef and pasta lover! Her favourite pasta dish is Frutti di Mare, which translates to 'fruit of the sea' in Italian. It consists of spaghetti or linguine in a tomato & chilli sauce made with fresh seafood such as mussels, prawns, clams & squid. The long thin pasta pairs perfectly with the seafood sauce because it contains a thin sauce with larger prices of seafood that you can pick up with your fork, before twirling to wrap around in spaghetti for a taste of all the flavours.
