AT TABLE, our motto may as well be “Italians do it better.” We love Italian food, Italian wines, Italian vacations, and Italian people. One of the best Italian inventions is pasta, the versatile, delicious, and forever-relevant dish that can be an easy weeknight meal or a gourmet banquet. Like Italy itself, pasta is complex, ancient, and multifaceted, but also deeply enjoyable and satisfying. We have quite the lineup of pasta recipes, and in this ultimate guide to pasta, you’ve got ‘em all.
If there’s one bit of pasta wisdom we can impart on you, though, it’s learn to make your own. Maybe you won’t end up with some Julia Child-esque European fantasy where you fall in love with food and the simple life, but realizing how easy it is to make something you typically buy at the store changes your relationship to eating. With that said, the ultimate guide to pasta gives you the sauces, shapes, and modifications you need for pasta progress across-the-board. Buon appetito!
TABLE Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pasta
Stanley Tucci’s Travel Recipes
Some of our (and your) favorite pasta recipes come from our series inspired by Stanley Tucci’s culinary adventures in Searching for Italy. Tucci found himself asking questions many of us have asked: How can food help me connect with where I come from and who I am?
This was one of our most popular pasta recipes of 2024—and it’s easy to see why. Cacio e Pepe requires technical mastery to cook, but once you do it a few times, you get the rhythm and proportions of cheese sauce down.
Americans have turned Carbonara into a creamy pasta dish, but that was not its original intention. We’ve gone back to basics with real, authentic Carbonara. Guanciale, pork jowl, is part of what gives it its full-bodied flavor.
The defining feature of ragù sauce is the tender, slow-cooked meat in it. Malleable, rich Tagliatelle is the perfect pasta to soak up the sauce in our recipe inspired by the Italian chefs that Tucci visited in Searching for Italy.
This Spaghetti alla Nerano draws inspiration from southern Italian island cuisine, where spaghetti dotted with fresh zucchini slices along with a glass of refreshing white wine is an ideal dinner.
Bucatini is one of the best sauce-absorption pasta shapes. Its tiny hollow center allows sauce to get inside of it, where spaghetti or linguine just get soaked in it. Velvety sauces like Carbonara or this Amatriciana really get to shine when bucatini is the vehicle.
Arrabbiata means “angry” in Italian, but the only thing you’ll be angry about in this pasta dish is if you can’t have seconds. It gets its name from the abundance of spices in it that give it a harsh, red color but a delicious taste.
Lightly fried eggplant combines with this al dente pasta dish for a well-rounded combination. We recommend pairing this pasta with a Cerasuolo di Vittoria, a dry Sicilian red, or a fruit-forward Etna Rosso.
Tucci’s mother became good friends with one of his Italian childhood friends’ Mirca’s mother, Maria Rosa. This shows that one of the best ways to get an Italian recipe is to find something word-of-mouth from somebody in your life. But if you’re not lucky enough to have an Italian neighbor, try this sauce out.
Use the Maria Rosa sauce you make above for this Rigatoni with Salsiccia. Rigatoni is a big, thick pasta shape that works nicely with a thick sauce like the Maria Rosa sauce or something like Amatriciana.
Pasta Tips from Victoria Sande
While Tucci is a celebrity, sometimes it’s not celebrities, but real people in your community who have the best culinary tips. We asked Victoria Sande, an Uruguayan-born Italian matriarch just outside of our home city of Pittsburgh, for her pasta and sauce recipes to get these techniques down for your own home kitchen.
Don’t be a chicken! Victoria says she can’t believe anyone is intimidated by making pasta. For her, pasta is like fast food. This spicy chicken sauce goes great with any pasta shape, and one of the best things about homemaking pasta is that you get to make whatever shape you want.
Pesto is truly the GOAT of pasta sauces, in my opinion. When it’s good, it’s great, and homemaking it makes it fresher, with more of the herbaceous spice of basil coming out on the palate. This creamy pesto sauce is a heavier version that makes for a good aperitivo before a bigger meal, but you can also definitely eat it on its own.
Pasta with marinara sauce is one of the easiest Italian dishes to master. Hint: The garlic is an integral part of marinara sauce. Otherwise, you’re just getting tomato slop. If you learn nothing else from this ultimate guide to pasta, let it just be that a little onions and garlic go a long way to turning something boring and bland into something scrumptious.
The food snobs reading may cry out in horror that a Fettuccine Alfredo recipe is included here. But this pasta meal is actually Italian, from a Roman restauranteur trying to make an easily digestible meal for his wife’s postpartum sickness. So, take that, Alfredo haters. Don’t you feel bad that you derided it now? Just kidding. But it’s a good dish to know how to make!
Can only six ingredients make an amazing, delicious pasta? With Victoria’s Italian Sausage Sauce, you can impress friends and family with a world-class pasta dinner. Gourmet doesn’t have to mean overly complicated.
Who says red sauce needs to be the star of the show? If you want a creamy texture, a white sauce will be better than red sauce, and the addition of white wine or lemon can make a white sauce a little bit airier and zestier.
Pasta Galore
Beyond consulting experts near and far, we’ve also just made a lot of pasta ourselves and collected recipes from chefs and cookbooks we like. If you’re looking for some relatively easy, inventive weeknight meals, these pastas can class up any table. Pasta is also a great vehicle for those of us that love presentation through sauce and garnish, so feel free to have some fun with these recipes!
Spaghettini is a more delicate version of the spaghetti noodles you know and love. We infused our own olive oil for this recipe, which is a fun project to enhance your seasoning game, but you can also make it with regular, extra virgin olive oil. Whatever you do, just don’t cheap out on olive oil.
Just like the time the U.S. government declared pizza a vegetable, delighting kids everywhere with a new piece of ammunition to wield against eating real veggies, it turns out you can turn pasta into a vegetable. Chef Jennifer Girasole’s Spinach Spaghetti is a beautiful green plate that makes eating spinach into something decadent.
Here’s a break from Italy! We head north of the Alps for this recipe for Cavatelli and wurst, a filling combination from chef Rafe Vencio. We prefer smoked wurst with pork and spices like fennel. This pasta bowl also features butternut squash and chicken stock, a perfect winter meal to warm your palate and your soul.
Make the most of farmer’s market bounties with this ravioli recipe. You can pick your favorite ravioli brand to make a healthy, nourishing vegetable sauté that everyone will love.
Squash blossoms grow most commonly in the Southwest. Pecorino and guanciale keep it classic Italian, and if you don’t have squash blossoms, you can substitute butternut squash or another fragrant legume.
Ashley Rodriguez’s cookbook Rooted Kitchen: Seasonal Recipes, Stories, and Ways to Connect to the Natural World was one of our favorite cookbooks of 2024. This Smoked Clam Carbonara is an unconventional way to make Carbonara, but the smoked clams add a new dimension.
Craving some spice? Green chile brings the bold heat over fresh, creamy Parmesan cheese. Gnocchi is an often-overlooked pasta, but it’s another one that’s easy to make yourself to customize the filling to your liking.
Another one of the pasta-vegetable cheat codes, using colorful rainbow carrots in tortellini to add a dash of festivity to the table. This is a perfect recipe for Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day—the homemade tortellini are an extra touch of care.
This is a vegetarian spin on the classic broccolini with sausage. Broccolini adds a crunch that pairs well with the softness of penne. Penne is a great pasta for vegetable sauté or mixing other ingredients into because of its versatile texture and relative hardiness compared to pastas that go better with sauce.
When the sun comes back out again and the layers come off, it’s time to ditch the soups and stews and bring out the refreshing salad. This summer pasta salad is portable for picnics.
The culinary team at Italian restaurant Vallozzi’s shared a comfort food staple from their menu: Tortellini with a tender, juicy lamb sauce with red wine and rosemary.
All About the Sauce
Pasta by itself is good, but sauce makes it even better. Along with the sauces above from Victoria Sande and Veda Sankaran’s take on Stanley Tucci’s Maria Rosa sauce, try some of our inventive sauce recipes to take your pasta game to the next level.
This take on pesto uses bitter, peppery nasturtium leaves for a cleaner, sharper pesto that’s perfect for summer picnics. Try it with a pasta salad or over some bucatini noodles with a healthy drizzle of olive oil.
Maybe you think “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it” about pesto. The word word pesto itself comes from the Genovese word pestâ, which means “to grind basil leaves with other ingredients.” This classic Pesto alla Genovese is just like they do it in Liguria!
Italian tradition is to get together on Sunday for a family meal, but anyone, any day of the week, can appreciate this Bolognese sauce. We served it with Bucatini or Tagliatelle for maximum flavor absorption.
This Zucchini pasta sauce is magical because with one fell swoop, complaints about vegetables will disappear. This dish shares some similarities with Tucci’s Spaghetti alla Nerano, but unlike that pasta, the zucchini is mashed into the sauce rather than sliced in the spaghetti.
Lemon and white wine sauce pairs excellently with seafood, and our recipe uses all-organic ingredients. Pasta doesn’t have to be heavy—with white sauce and seafood, it can actually be refreshing and light.
Gluten Free and Allergy-Friendly
We know that gluten free pasta isn’t as easily available as the ordinary wheat pasta. But allergy-friendly ingredients are a recent food industry trend, and a welcome one at that. Anything that helps more people enjoy pasta is good in our book!
Liz Fetchin’s allergy-friendly pasta recipe proves that taking gluten out of pasta doesn’t mean a compromise in quality. It’s now easy to find many varieties of gluten free pasta including lentils, beans, quinoa, and even charcoal based noodles. This one uses pea noodles for their beautiful color.
Harissa adds an extra bit of spice to this chicken pasta sauce recipe. You could even combine these ingredients with the Spicy Chicken Sauce from Victoria Sande above. Pasta options abound!
Story by Emma Riva
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