Nisha Vora’s creamy vegan cabbage pasta. Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
The best pasta shape(s)
In dating, there are a handful of questions I often rely on because I think the answers (or disdain for the inquiry) reveal a lot about a person. “What’s your karaoke song?” “What’s your sign?” “What’s your relationship with your mother like?”
But there’s one I’m eager to get into the rotation, and that’s a person’s favorite pasta shape. While I maintain there are a few right answers, there is one wrong one. My condolences to the fettuccine lovers out there. It was never going to work out.
The best pastas have a hole in them, allowing for more even cooking and extending the flavors of the sauce well into each noodle. In bucatini, it gives the noodles a welcome extra bite, and in rigatoni, it acts as a perfect trap for creamy sauces and bits of tender vegetables. And in ditalini, it’s just plain adorable.
Nisha Vora’s creamy vegan cabbage pasta calls for bucatini or rigatoni and, depending on which you use, the tender cabbage strands will either wrap themselves around the noodles, practically melting into them, or slip covertly into the tubes. Nisha achieves the familiar richness of a white sauce by emulsifying oat or cashew milk with olive oil, nutritional yeast and finely ground nuts.
Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta
Similarly silky and luxurious is Alexa Weibel’s vegan creamy leek pasta, which calls for only three ingredients, one of them being bucatini (or fettuccine or linguine — I won’t hold it against you). She brilliantly uses leeks three ways, frying some in oil for a crisp topping, reserving the flavored oil to season the sauce and using more blanched leek greens to give the sauce color and body.
If you cook with dairy, you might want to take a look at Eric Kim’s comforting cauliflower Alfredo pasta. “This was super easy and delicious,” a reader said in the comments. “My kids all had seconds and requested I make it again before they even finished their first bowl! Lots of cracked pepper on top was a must.”
Whenever a recipe calls for rigatoni, I like to reach for my favorite noodle, the stout mezzi rigatoni, or the larger, tubular paccheri. Any three would play well in this kale sauce pasta, adapted by Tejal Rao from Joshua McFadden, which calls for only four ingredients. (I’m not counting salt, pepper and olive oil, by the way. You’ve got those!)
Much like Alexa’s leek pasta, this recipe transforms a single vegetable and a couple of kitchen staples with blanching, blending and emulsifying, and the results are restaurant-worthy and excitedly green (St. Patrick’s Day is Tuesday, for what it’s worth). “Feel free to play with the pasta shape,” Tejal writes. And we will.
My dad recently sent me a post of Toni Chapman’s one-pot French onion rigatoni from the New York Times Cooking’s Instagram and remarked on how eager he was to make it. I’m with him, particularly because Toni favors my beloved mezzi rigatoni. Beef broth is often a linchpin of traditional French onion soup, which serves as inspiration for this five-star recipe. But she writes that the broth, which she uses to cook the pasta in, can be a vegetable one.
A few months ago, I bought a box of ditalini on a whim and have become a bit fixated. It’s the perfect shape for Ali Slagle’s one-pot creamy pasta and greens, the sort of noodle dish you want to eat with a spoon, not a fork, because of how evocative it is of soft creamed spinach. While she uses convenient frozen spinach, two cups of any chopped dark leafy greens you have, like Swiss chard or Tuscan kale, would be just divine.
And while we got a taste of fake spring here in New York this week, the weather is quickly careening back into the 30s. Soup is very much still on the menu for the foreseeable future, and Colu Henry’s five-star pasta e ceci, an Italian pasta and chickpea stew, should be on your radar. It’s a wholesome affair, teeming with escarole and tomatoes and fragrant with earthy rosemary. And the ditalini and the beans are nearly the same shape to boot — a perfect match.
Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Spencer Richards.
Kale Sauce Pasta
Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich.
One-Pot French Onion Rigatoni
Andrew Purcell for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
Pasta e Ceci (Italian Pasta and Chickpea Stew)
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One More Thing!
Noah Kalina for The New York Times
Long live the BOOK IT! club. I’d kill for a personal pan pizza right about now.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
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