Yeah, bucatini is like a thick spaghetti with the pin hole through the middle of it. I dunno, I just like the texture of it when you bite into it better than spaghetti.
We eat mostly penne closely followed by bow tie and spaghetti. I’m not a big fan of rotinni although my husband loves it. We are pretty much equal opportunity pasta eaters around here, though. Even the least favorites get eaten well and often.
I would like to try orecchiette sometime though. No one around me carries it. The fun of living in a rural area, I guess.
Elbow macaroni is really all I use. I use it for both macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti. (Though we call it scattabuchi when it’s made with mac noodles.)
I just did an image search… and they still look the same to me. Flat spaghetti.
For long pastas, my preference is angel hair. The higher surface area helps it hold the sauce better.
But my absolute favorite pasta dish is my grandmother’s cavatini (oddly enough, the German grandmother, not the Italian one). The recipe for it calls for “pasta of four different shapes”. I have no idea why that’s important, but I know that it is: The dish just wouldn’t be the same without it. In practice, that’s usually shells, rotini, wagon wheels, and bowties, but it has to be four different ones.
Knowing how these things go, it’s probably just that, way back when, she made it when she had the dregs of four different boxes that she needed to use up, and it became a tradition. But I’m not going to fight it.
I prefer angel hair/vermicelli for marinara and fettuccine for a cream sauce such as Alfredo.
For Mac and cheese, I like cavatappi (corkscrews) and penne for most baked dishes. Tripollini is a good substitute for farfalle as a shaped pasta with marinara as it has little wells in its arms rather than the pleats farfalle has. It is much better if you want a nice hit of sauce with each bite.
I also love to stuff manicotti tube with ricotta and spinach and cover with sauce. It is a little extra labor, but so worth it.
I prefer shorter, non-whiplashy pastas. Spaghetti is possibly my least favorite–it’s just uncooperative. (Mind you, I still like spaghetti. I just find it messier and more awkward than other pastas.) Penne rigate may be my favorite; it’s a convenient size, it holds sauce well, and it’s heavy enough to be slightly chewy and substantial.
Orzo cooks more simply and quickly than rice, and like rice gives that grain/carb boost that soup sometimes needs. (As well as a completely different flavor from rice.)
Make soup, throw in some orzo, and it’ll be done in a couple of minutes - rice tends to be trickier (though maybe minute rice is as easy as orzo, idk).
For what it’s worth, they’re pretty similar to me, too. I just think of linguini as being thinner than fettucine. I never even realized they are slightly ovular. When cooked up, they look like flat spaghetti noodles to me.
As others have mentioned, different kinds of pasta go well with different sauces, and I like EVERY noodle (love that stuff), but the best and IMHO most versatile still is good old spaghetti, you can throw almost any sauce on it and it tastes well. But don’t overcook them for even one minute, then they become boring mush, the bite is crucial.
To me, the long stuff is unmanageable to eat. I always break 'em up into shorter segments.
My fave is rotini.
I can’t stand farfalle but really just because it’s a PITA to cook. I’ve heard so many people talk about how much they love bucatini, that I finally tried some a while back. Now, I don’t like long pastas in general, just because they’re kind of messy to eat, but this stuff…this was like eating worms.
The only other one that ever really got to me was tortellini. It was served to me in grade school, I thought it looked like ears, it was a long long long time before I could go back to it.
Now, I’m generally a ‘pasta is pasta, it’s just different shapes’ type person. There’s different shapes for different places, yes, but other then a few that have very specific texture issues, like farfalle that tends to stay hard in the middle or bucatini that gets really big and kind of squishy, I’m pretty open.
Having said that, when it comes to my favorite, no question, rigatoni (or some other big round noodle with lines), cooked just like my nana cooked it…for way the hell to long, so over cooked it’s falls flat and a good chunk of them are split.
I’m not sure this article will help you get back to eating them, then. (According to legend, they are modeled after Venus’s navel.)
A very similar pasta shape exists in Poland, where it goes by the name uszka, which does mean “little ears.”
Spaghetti is my favorite, with rigatoni a close second.
Farfalle is my least favorite. I don’t think it delivers the sauce effectively.
Funny enough, that’s the pasta shape I’m eating right now, although in some homemade chicken broth, where I think it works really well. Otherwise, yeah, I tend not to use that shape so much.
A dish like that is a regular around here. The wife calls it “screwball pasta.” Leftover dry pasta goes in a container. When it has enough in it, it goes on the menu.
Shells are a favorite, angel hair is not.
OK, so I like most pastas when used in specific dishes. Penne is my pasta of choice when I make Pasta Arrabbiata. Mmmmmm
There’s not a single pasta I dislike; even the little tiny pasta is nice in a soup.
Spaghetti is hands down the best.
Lots of stuff at the other end. For small types it’s that curlicue stuff. Won’t stay on the fork and going “stab-stab-stab” gets tiring (and then all you have is pasta on the fork). All of the large types are total crap. Don’t cook well and have a slimy feel.
Nobody has mentioned Scooby-Doo shaped Kraft Macaroni and Cheese yet…