Matching Sauce and Shape of Pasta

Each pasta family is suited to a particular type of sauce. Most spaghetti goes well with butter and cream-based sauces, or tomato sauces, while the thinner string shapes like vermicelli and linguine are best with seafood, or sauces based on olive oil. Both thin and thick string shapes go well with strongly flavored tomato sauces containing garlic, anchovy or chili pepper.

Shorter dried pastas are good with meat sauce, in particular hollow tubes like ziti and rigatoni, and shapes like conchiglie, that catch plenty of sauce. Particularly well-suited are Italian meat sauce and fresh egg ribbon pasta.