For many people, pasta is the ultimate comfort food and the go-to dinner food. It serves as the base for various flavors that work for different tastes and preferences in Italian pasta.
Many common pasta types are categorized according to shapes with different sauces and ingredients to make the best pasta dishes. One type of pasta is the long pasta, the most common kind of pasta in the market. Some of the best dishes with this pasta shape are spaghetti, the flat and thick fettuccine, and the ribbon-like linguine.
Aside from long pasta, there are also tubes and short pasta that is hollow through the center. Popularly used in salads and casseroles with heavy sauce, some examples include the round tube-like penne pasta, the c-shaped macaroni, cylinder-shaped rigatoni, spiral, and corkscrew pasta fusilli, and bow-tie pasta farfalle.
Another type of pasta is sheet pasta, a thin and flat kind of noodle similar to a sheet of paper. The most common type of sheet pasta is Lasagne that you can find in oven-baked dishes like Lasagne al Forno or commonly known worldwide as Lasagna.
Lastly, another kind of pasta is filled pasta, such as ravioli that can hold meat-based, cheese, or vegetable filling. Ravioli is square-shaped and has varied sizes. Typically, an Italian restaurant serves bigger ravioli than the store-bought kind.
If you want to learn more about the different pasta types, here is an infographic by Cirelli & Co.