If you’re still trying to remember your pasta shapes bucatini may be a less common but no less delicious pasta. Bucatini noodles are long enough to resemble spaghetti but they also have holes in the middle like penne or macaroni. It may not seem like much but that hole changes how you prepare the pasta and there are specific strategies for perfecting a bucatini dish.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Food Network | 2018-02-18 11:00:02 |  22,138 Views |
How to Make Anne's Bucatini All'Amatriciana | Food Network
Chowhound spoke exclusively with Chef Jasper J. Mirabile Jr. owner of Jasper's Restaurant in Kansas City Missouri and host of Live! From Jasper's Kitchen Radio about his strategies for working with bucatini pasta dishes and he puts the sauce first: "I always want to make sure that my sauce isn't too thin. It shouldn't be too thick but there's a great balance that can be easily achieved when making a sauce for bucatini." This is because of that hole in the middle of bucatini where sauce tends to pool — this is a good thing and you want a good homemade pasta sauce to coat both the inside and outside of the pasta. Sauce that's not too thin or too thick will build up more evenly.
If your goal is a long strand of bucatini pasta with a perfect coating of sauce inside and out it’s not just the sauce itself that needs tweaking. You also need to make sure that there’s no extra water left in the noodles after you cook them. According to Chef Mirabile that means doing an extra straining to clear the way for that sauce: “If there’s one lesson to be learned when using this cut of pasta it’s that it needs to be strained really well so that there’s no water left in the holes which could really ruin the sauce and the flavor of the dish.”
There’s another reason not to skimp on the water. If you’re making a dish like bucatini cacio e pepe which has a lot of cheese and black pepper that leftover pasta water is actually an ingredient you can add to the sauce (which you make separately). Unlike fresh water pasta water is starchy and can help emulsify the cheese in your sauce. Just don’t add too much to your sauce and make sure the pasta water cooks into the sauce rather than interferes with it.
