Serious eats pasta

These are the Italian pasta sauces you'll come back to again and again. When it comes to pasta, size and shape matter.

From fettuccine Alfredo to stovetop ziti, every one of these pasta recipes can be made in 30 minutes or less. There's a recipe for every mood. Sure, sometimes I want to spend hours lingering over a perfect slow-cooked red sauce or hearty lasagna Napoletana , but there are also days when I get home late and just need to get a filling dinner on the table, fast. Pasta is a natural solution on those occasions, and luckily, we have lots of pasta recipes that can be prepared in 30 minutes or less, from Italian classics like cacio e pepe and spaghetti puttanesca to stovetop baked ziti and a fresh take on tuna noodle casserole. For a delicious pasta dinner that's doable on a weeknight, check out 27 of our favorite quick and easy pasta recipes, below.

Serious eats pasta

Light, springy, and delicate dough perfect for slicing into noodles or making into stuffed pastas. She's pretty big into oysters, offal, and most edible things. Guess what? If you have flour in your kitchen, you can make pasta. Right now. Got eggs, too? You have everything you need to whip up a batch of silky-smooth fettuccine. Have some cheese or vegetables lying around? You could be sitting down to fresh ravioli , tortellini , or a hearty lasagna in under two hours. And yet, if you do a quick search for pasta recipes, chances are you'll walk away more confused than confident.

If we were working with rolling pins only, that would probably be true—the dough would just keep snapping back. Get the recipe for Pasta With Beans and Greens. You make batch after batch—dozens and dozens of batches, serious eats pasta, in fact—to find out.

There's no denying the pleasure of dropping a handful of dried pasta into boiling water and producing dinner in mere minutes. But equally satisfying—and really, not much more difficult—is making pasta from scratch. Making pasta isn't just a matter of impressing your dinner guests—though it definitely will. As we explain in our guide to making fresh pasta , dried and fresh pasta are entirely different products. Dried pastas tend to be denser and more heavy, which makes them ideal for standing up to rich sauces. Fresh pasta, on the other hand, is often lighter and more tender. For those nights when you have just a tiny bit more time, these are our eight favorite fresh pasta recipes.

From fettuccine Alfredo to stovetop ziti, every one of these pasta recipes can be made in 30 minutes or less. There's a recipe for every mood. Sure, sometimes I want to spend hours lingering over a perfect slow-cooked red sauce or hearty lasagna Napoletana , but there are also days when I get home late and just need to get a filling dinner on the table, fast. Pasta is a natural solution on those occasions, and luckily, we have lots of pasta recipes that can be prepared in 30 minutes or less, from Italian classics like cacio e pepe and spaghetti puttanesca to stovetop baked ziti and a fresh take on tuna noodle casserole. For a delicious pasta dinner that's doable on a weeknight, check out 27 of our favorite quick and easy pasta recipes, below. Here's a pro tip for those who want to get the job done even sooner: You don't have to heat up a huge pot of water. Using a skillet and just enough water to cover the noodles is a better way to get water boiling fast, while the extra starchiness in a smaller volume of pasta water will help you achieve a more emulsified sauce. Pasta doesn't get much quicker or easier than this—the sauce requires four ingredients and is ready in the same amount of time it takes to cook the noodles. Because cherry tomatoes have lots of pectin, their juice easily emulsifies with olive oil and pasta water to form a light sauce.

Serious eats pasta

Fresh sea urchin, Mexican crema, and Calabrian chile join forces in this quick and creamy pasta. Making sea urchin pasta is a lot like a toddler playing with Play-Doh: There are a million right ways to do it, and most of them are salty and delicious. The effort-to-reward ratio of uni pasta is off the charts.

Burns vs masvidal

Laminating is basically a process of folding the dough into a smaller package and feeding it back into the pasta maker. Continue to 37 of 46 below. But at its core, the meaty, filling sauce is all about comfort, and it's frequently served one of two ways: either intermingling with long ribbons of fresh tagliatelle or layered into a classic lasagna Bolognese. While the meatless version of this dish skips out on the dairy, this recipe makes an exception with a small handful of grated salty cheese like Pecorino Romano. By the end, there was very little visual difference between the two. But—since I don't really like to exercise—I use a pasta maker. Though we normally recommend using dried beans, we found that canned chickpeas worked quite well in this recipe—just make sure to blend some of the cooked beans with the broth to create a creamy base to substitute for the cooking liquid that comes from making dried beans. It's important to add the pesto to the other ingredients off the heat in order to retain its bright, fresh flavors. Continue to 13 of 46 below. Using a bench knife, scrape excess dough from fork and fingers. What you don't want to do is forget to turn it back to the widest setting when you put the laminated dough back in. While the sauce simmers, we stir starchy pasta water with a mixture of egg yolks and Pecorino Romano to help temper the eggs. This is what I wound up with; you can probably tell which is which. Homemade Ricotta Ravioli.

The Roman pasta dish cacio e pepe is as easy to make as it is delicious. When I get home after a late night out, with a craving for something starch- and fat-heavy to help put me to sleep and stave off the inevitable morning-after hangover, my go-to used to be to raid the fridge and shove whatever I could find into corn tortillas for some impromptu tacos.

It comes together slowly to give the beef and pork time to cook in the tomato sauce until they achieve fork-tender perfection. This is the pasta dough we'll put to use in many of the following variations, so make a double batch. The swordfish is complemented by velvety eggplant and tomatoes simmered in white wine, along with a mixture of fresh mint and oregano. Gnocchi alla bava's rich and creamy sauce leans on the earthy, nutty, and buttery flavor of Fontina cheese. With its emphasis on heavy cream, traditionally made fettuccine Alfredo tends to be a bit of a guilty pleasure for many of us. Prescribed kneading and resting times often contradicted each other. Press the heel of your hand into the ball of dough, pushing forward and down. Guanciale pork jowl or cheek is our meat of choice here, but it can be hard to find, and pancetta is a great substitute. Cooking the mushrooms in sausage fat and finishing them with soy sauce and lemon juice gives them a big umami punch. Instead of leaving whole shells in the dish, we remove most of the clams from their shells and add the meat back to the pasta at the end, leaving just a few clams in their shells for garnish. The pasta is finished with salt, pepper, and big chunks of optional—but highly recommended—canned tuna.