The Best Type of Pasta for Every Kind of Sauce

There’s an art to pairing pasta with the right sauce. Whether you’re blitzing handfuls of herbs into a quick pesto, or slowly simmering marinara on the stovetop, the size and shape of your pasta will affect the final dish. 

“It’s all about balance. The pasta shape should complement the sauce,” says Renato Poliafito, owner of New York City restaurants Pasta Night and Ciao, Gloria, and author of Dolci!. For instance, ridged rigatoni have nooks and crannies that capture the meaty morsels in a ragù, while delicate pastina would quite literally get lost in the sauce. 

Here’s how to choose the right pasta every time for any kind of dish.

When to use long, thin pasta

Long noodles like spaghetti or bucatini are best with “thinner, more ‘saucy’ sauces, like a simple marinara or an oil- or butter-based sauce,” says Poliafito. Silky sauces cling to the long strands and infuse them with flavor. That’s why you traditionally see passata, aglio e olio, or carbonara served with spaghetti, or amatriciana with bucatini. 

Thin strands aren’t best for dishes that contain mix-ins like beans or capers — those chunky items slide right off, making it difficult to get one perfect bite. They’re not the ideal type of pasta to serve with golf ball-sized meatballs, either, because of the disparity between the shapes and textures (more on that later). 

When to use long, thick pasta

Wide noodles like tagliatelle, fettuccine, and pappardelle are great matches for thicker, velvety sauces like Alfredo or Bolognese. They have enough heft to hold their own in all that creamy or meaty richness, and lots of surface area to soak up flavor.

When to use short pasta

Short pasta shapes like fusilli, farfalle, macaroni, and orecchiette are perfect foils for richly textured sauces or any dish studded with chunky items like shrimp, chopped vegetables, or olives.

“The shape catches all that sauce, so every bite is packed with flavor,” says Christopher Cipollone, chef-owner of Francie in Brooklyn, New York. 

At Francie, cooks top farfalle with a luscious short rib ragù so that the velvety sauce gets trapped in the bowties’ ridges. You can also pair farfalle with charred broccoli florets or crumbled sausages, or try orecchiette with veal and capers.

Thinner sauces like passata can be overpowered by short, stocky pasta shapes, however. Worst-case scenario, the pasta is so sturdy that all you taste is starch — not the delicate sauce you worked hard to prepare.

When to use pasta with holes in it

Pasta with holes are ideal for stuffing or serving with thick sauces, or for dishes with small or diced ingredients that can wedge into their interiors. That’s why we pair rigatoni with small cauliflower florets and crispy capers: the smaller ingredients get caught in the tubes of the pasta, so you aren’t stuck desperately trying to spearing a caper with your fork.

Mac and cheese is another great case study, as the rich béchamel coats each morsel of macaroni. Similarly, baked ziti has lots of holes and ridges for the cheese and ground beef to fill.

And, while large shells don’t technically have holes, they provide big, concave areas to fill with tender pork and melty cheese. 

When to use pastina

A loosely defined category of small pastas like ditalini and stelline, pastina is best with brothy dishes like pasta e ceci. Their tininess makes them easy to spoon up alongside similarly sized items like peas or beans, and the broth infuses them with flavor. 

Pastina isn’t ideal with hearty meat or cream sauces, however. You won’t be able to taste (or sometimes even see!) the tiny pasta within the thick, luscious sauce. 

The best pasta for meatballs

“Spaghetti and meatballs is an Italian-American invention, definitely not something you would find in Italy,” says Poliafito. He emphatically believes that “the combo does not work together.”

The problem is proportional: By the time you twirl a few long noodles onto your fork, you’ve already composed a decent-sized bite. Adding a big meatball onto the end overpowers the forkful and makes it hard to eat and enjoy. 

That’s why most chefs and traditionalists prefer to serve meatballs as a side dish or with pasta shapes that mirror their short, squat size.  “If I were putting them together, I’d go with paccheri or maccheroni,” Cipollone says. “They’ve got the right size and structure to hold up to the dish.” Other short, broad pasta shapes include calamari and small shells.

Alternatively, you could make smaller meatballs that are easier to spear onto the end of a forkful of spaghetti — or simply eat one bowl of pasta as if it were two courses. 

“We are in America, and spaghetti with large meatballs is an institution,” says Poliafito. “I would just approach it by eating the meatballs after I finish with the spaghetti.”