Recently, The New York Times came out with an article titled “The 25 Essential Pasta Dishes to Eat in Italy”. We see you, we love you, and we respect you (and your team of panelists), but frankly, a lot of the choices were just too ~Michelin for our tastes–and so we present to you our essential pastas. While it does seem like an impossible feat to narrow down the country’s infinite amount of pasta dishes to just 25, there are some that we, as a team with all different palates and based across the boot, keep coming back to over and over again. 

Pasta is, as NYT wrote, “just flour, water or sometimes eggs,” but that makes it the perfect blank canvas. Historically, it was a food of southern Italy, the poorer half of the country, who would air dry the noodles in the salty sea breeze and top it with any cheap ingredient they could get their hands on. You might’ve heard us talk about Italy’s cucina povera traditions, and there’s almost nothing that applies to this more than pasta.