Food - Drink
The Best Type Of Pasta To Serve With A Meat Sauce
By EMILY BOYETTE
When it comes to pairing pasta with sauce, spaghetti isn't as all-purpose as you think, since pasta comes in over 600 shapes that are suited to specific purposes. You should consider the consistency of your sauce and how it will cling to each kind of pasta; for instance, meaty sauces like bolognese and ragu need an equally robust noodle.
Bolognese and other ground meat sauces perform great with rigatoni and tagliatelle. Rigatoni are shaped like large tubes, and chunks of meat fit right into the openings on each end of the noodle, while long ribbons of flat tagliatelle behave similarly to lasagna noodles; you can use your fork to fold them around the meat and lift it up to your mouth.
Rigatoni is indeed a great choice, but generally speaking, wide and flat noodles are the best vehicle to carry a hearty, meaty sauce. Tagliatelle is not only the best choice for Bolognese and ragu, but it also works well with vodka sauces or creamier dressings such as alfredo.