While I love making and eating a bowl of fresh pasta, I’d be amazed if anyone felt it necessary to start mixing, kneading and rolling their own after a day in the office. Even Italians call the handmade fresh variety “Sunday pasta” because it was traditionally made at the weekend.

Although fresh is often considered superior to dried pasta, this isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, both types play very different roles in an Italian kitchen, as do their shape and size – and they aren’t as interchangeable as you may think. Fresh pasta should always be made with eggs and good-quality Italian 00 flour. Egg-enriched pasta has a softer, more absorbent texture, making it ideal to serve with buttery or creamy sauces and delicate flavours such as saffron and truffle. It also makes absolutely superb tortellini and ravioli with a shellfish filling. The best dried pasta is made with 100 per cent durum wheat, mixed with either eggs or water. Dried pasta has a firmer texture when cooked, with more of a bite, which makes it more suitable to serve with chunky, meaty, oily and quite robust sauces.

When it comes to shapes, some are more suited to certain dishes than others. Long pasta, such as spaghetti, tagliatelle and bucatini, works best with sauces that coat each strand, like the roasted red pepper and tomato sauce below. Linguine (little tongues) or its wider relation, fettuccine (small ribbons), are flat versions of spaghetti and good at catching smoother or more minimal sauces, particularly creamy, cheesy and oily ones. Pesto al Genovese, made with basil, pine nuts, pecorino, garlic and extra virgin olive oil, is a popular choice for linguine, as are peas, prosciutto and cream. It therefore seemed an obvious choice to go with the goat’s cheese, lemon and broccoli dish here.

Shorter, hollow, ridged or spiral shapes are good for trapping ingredients. Fusilli (little spindles), farfalle (butterflies) and macaroni are best for cream and cheese sauces that are on the runnier side, whereas penne (quills), conchiglie (shells), orecchiette (little ears), cellentani (corkscrews) and campanelle (bells) would all be suitable to serve with a chunky vegetable or a drier meaty sauce such as ragù. Pappardelle and tagliatelle may be a more obvious choice, but why be a stickler for tradition?

Recipes

Slow-braised ragu Bolognese

Bucatini with roasted red pepper, ginger and coriander sauce

Linguine with goat's cheese, lemon and purple sprouting broccoli

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