What to use when?
In case you aren't familiar with the terminology, long pasta refers to spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine, angel hair, etc. Short pasta refers to farfalle, shells, rigatoni, penne, so on and so forth...
The rule is simple but not necessarily intuitive:
Long pasta for creamy, more fluid sauces. Short pasta for chunkier sauces.
For example: meat sauce, which has chunks of ground beef, goes well with short pasta. Pesto, which is made of finely chopped bits of basil, goes well with long pasta.
How about a sauce made with chopped spinach? Depends on how you prepare the sauce. If you simply saute` the spinach with some garlic and olive oil, then you'd want to use short pasta. If you decide to put the cooked spinach through a food processor, thus making it creamy, then you could use long pasta instead.
The best way to understand how the consistency of the sauce decides the pasta is to try it out. I am confident you'll pick it up right away.
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I've always had problems with seafood particularly shrimp. I tend to like short pasta but I've noticed that every time I make a short pasta shrimp dish, I feel like it should be a cold dish.
ReplyDeleteHi Patrick,
ReplyDeleteI share your liking for short pasta when using shrimp. I find that, when I use seafood in a pasta dish, there is a heterogeneity between the sauce and the pasta itself. This means that the seafood usually has to be picked out separately from the pasta to be eaten. I'll post a recipe for "Spaghetti allo scoglio" soon, which incorporates various seafood into a warm sauce.
I can't say I share the same feeling regarding shrimp and cold pasta, but I am familiar with some cold pasta dishes involving shrimp.
I like food.
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