Courses & dish types
Pasta recipes
Sauce and shape, matched properly.
Pasta is a technique rather than an ingredient, and the technique is mostly about the water. It should be well salted, because that is the only chance the pasta itself has to be seasoned; it should not have oil in it; and a ladleful of it, cloudy with starch, is what turns a sauce and a drained pile into a single dish. Almost everything that goes wrong is a failure to finish the pasta in the sauce rather than under it. Shape matters and is not decoration — a ridged tube holds a meat sauce that would slide off a strand. The recipes here say why a shape was chosen and what to use instead.
10 recipes
Spaghetti Carbonara
Guanciale, egg yolk and pecorino brought together off the heat into a glossy sauce, with no cream anywhere near the pan.
Spaghetti alla Puttanesca
A store-cupboard sauce of anchovies, olives, capers and chilli melted into tomato, salty enough that it needs no cheese and barely any salt.
Spaghetti Aglio e Olio
Garlic sliced thin and taken slowly to pale gold in olive oil, emulsified with pasta water into a sauce that is nothing but those two things.
Slow-Cooked Beef Ragu
Coarse beef mince browned in batches then held at a bare simmer for three hours, finished in the pan with the pasta.
Pasta alla Norma
Fried aubergine folded through a simple tomato sauce with torn basil and salted ricotta, which is the ingredient the dish stands or falls on.
Cacio e Pepe
Spaghetti in a sauce of nothing but pecorino, black pepper and starchy pasta water, emulsified off the heat so it stays smooth.
Tagliatelle al Ragù
Bolognese ragù cooked for three hours with milk and a little wine, served on fresh tagliatelle rather than spaghetti, which is what Bologna actually does.
Pasta e Fagioli
Borlotti beans cooked down until half of them collapse, with small pasta cooked in the same pot so the starch thickens everything together.
Minestrone
A chunky vegetable soup built on a slow soffritto, with beans and small pasta simmered in the broth so it thickens as it stands.
Baked Lasagne
Ragu and béchamel layered thin between dried pasta sheets, baked until the top blisters and rested so it cuts into squares.