Beginning culinary students understand wildly popular and basic pasta cuts such as spaghetti and elbows. They know at a simplistic level that marinara goes with the straight spaghetti noodle and a cheese sauce complements the curved elbow noodle. But do students know how many spaghetti noodle cuts exist? (The answer is four.) Or that in traditional Italian cooking, the elbow is often paired with chunky fish or meat-based sauce? There is much more to pasta instruction than American-inspired macaroni and cheese. 

There are more than 40 pasta cuts available to choose from, according to pasta maker Barilla. These shapes perfectly pair with dishes that contain a light tomato sauce (with or without vegetables), dairy-based sauces, oil-based sauces and pastas that are good without sauces. And, for your students’ next pasta quiz, which noodle cut would be perfect for all the aforementioned sauces and no-sauce option? Answer: Gemelli. 

Click here for a downloadable glossary of pasta cuts complete with pictures of each noodle, the sauces that pair well with the cut and brief Italian region or best-known dish associated with the noodle. After studying the guide, students will understand the two types of linguine and the difference between penne lisce, rigate and mezze penne.

To further your culinary students’ pasta knowledge, re-read the Gold Medal Classroom story, “Bronze Die-Cut Pasta Worth the Groove: Shaping the perfect pasta from mouthfeel to texture to taste” for the benefits of die-cut texture on all the various pasta shapes. It includes resources such as a New York Times article discussing the problems with Teflon-cut slippery noodles and a science paper featuring the impact of extrusion on pasta’s density.