While spaghetti and sauce might seem like the simplest dish to whip up—and it certainly can be—it can also be elevated to a nuanced, dynamic dish that highlights seasonal ingredients and brings simplicity to an art form. Chefs who cook Italian cuisine in New York will always have stiff competition, thanks to the proliferation of Italian restaurants in the city. What makes a restaurant stand out can often be the way it treats classic dishes—like pasta carbonara, vodka sauce, cacio e pepe. What’s the consistency like? How’s the seasoning? And is the pasta the right shape and texture for the sauce?
Why the Right Pasta Matters
That last one might seem like an afterthought, but for many high-level chefs, it’s actually front and center. “Pasta shape is everything,” says third-generation Italian-American chef Joe Isidori, who owns Arthur & Sons, which has locations in the West Village and Murray Hill. “Without the right pasta shape, the sauce is never going to taste right.”
If you’re wondering how that could be, you’re not alone. There are hundreds of pasta shapes, ranging from long, silky strands to short, rough-cut pieces to ridged tubes—and everything in between. And beyond just the shape, there is the process. Pasta can either be cut or extruded, and each of those options has several tools and techniques that create different results. Extrusion means that dough is pushed through a mold, which can be smooth or rough. Smooth, often Teflon-coated molds produce flat-surfaced, shiny pasta, while bronze dies create textured, rough pastas.
“The texture of bronze-cut pasta is perfect for a nice, hearty sauce like a sugo,” explains Isidori. “The rough surface gives the sauce something to cling to, so you get more sauce with every bite. That texture is a big part of what makes bronze-cut pasta so good.”
Crafted in Italy with bronze-cut dies, Barilla Al Bronzo® pasta is made using traditional methods of pasta-making that reach back to 1877, when Barilla was first founded in Parma. Al Bronzo pasta is extruded through micro-engraved bronze dies that give the pasta a rough, textured, and porous pasta surface that chefs are looking for when they want to highlight a sauce.
Matteo Bergamini, the Italian chef at Piccolo Cucina restaurants in Soho and Lenox Hill, agrees that bronze-cut pastas hold onto sauce better. “Rich sauces like a short pasta, such as mezzi rigatoni, fusilli, or conchiglie, because they grab the sauce, and it sticks in there, especially with the trafilata al bronzo (bronze-cut) that makes more coarseness on the pasta,” he says. “And it’s also more porous—this pasta releases more starch into the sauce, which also helps with the mantecatura (Note: mantecatura is the final step in Italian cooking when you vigorously stir fats, starches, and cooking liquid to create a smooth, glossy emulsion), so when the sauce combines with pasta, then it won’t separate.”
Bronze-cut dies are also slower and more hands-on, allowing for a more artisanal product.
“You’re drying [bronze-cut pasta] at a slow and low pace” says Joe Vigorito, executive chef and partner of L’Artusi in the West Village. “That’s what Italian food is; it’s about taking your time, bringing the family to the table, and really creating something out of love. If you’re getting into a bronze-cut pasta like Barilla Al Bronzo, it gives a true expression to the original meaning of the dish.”
Seasonal Sauces
While the Italian classics will always remain, sauces do have a trend cycle—think about the explosion in popularity of spicy vodka sauce when Carbone released their spicy rigatoni into the world. A trend might pop because of social media or press, but seasonality and ingredient availability also play a role, and they’re a chance for chefs to offer twists on the classics.
“Vegetables are very trendy right now, including fava beans, peas, eggplant, and peppers, which offer a great variety of colors,” says Bergamini. “So, if you want to get a twist on a carbonara, you can do an asparagus or truffle carbonara.”
Isidori agrees that while the base sauce remains the same, a vegetable addition or garnish will often be where seasonality can come into play. “You can have homemade pici with a cream sauce, but what you put with it can change depending on the season,” he says. “In the fall, it could be roasted butternut squash. In the spring, sweet peas. In the summer, fresh cherry tomatoes. The sauce can stay the same while the ingredients around it change.”
That versatility is also where the pasta itself comes into play. With its rough, porous surface, Barilla Al Bronzo is designed to hold onto everything from lighter, vegetable-driven sauces to richer, slow-cooked preparations—giving chefs room to change what’s on the plate with the seasons while maintaining the connection between pasta and sauce.
Going outside the box can be more interesting for a chef though, and sometimes it’s those unexpected combinations that strike the viral jackpot. “I like to make a pasta with melon—cantaloupe,” says Bergamini. “I make a puree of the melon with a little spice, and sometimes some fresh basil, and comes out as a pretty good sauce.”
Is Zozzona the New Amatriciana?
Vigorito shares that he has been seeing pasta alla zozzona a lot around the city, and he’s started serving it at L’Artusi as well. It’s one of their most popular orders right now.
“Zozzona is kind of like a greatest hits of all the Roman sauces. It’s a mix of an amatriciana, carbonara, and cacio e pepe, all mixed together. You have guanciale, you have sausage ragu, you have onion, you have tomato, you have black pepper, you have pecorino, and then it gets finished with a little bit of egg,” he explains. “So you’re taking those elements from all of those Roman mother sauces and creating this kind of Frankenstein ragu, and that is selling very well for us right now.”
At L’Artusi, he uses a bronze-cut rigatoni with the zozzona sauce. “The rigatoni has the hole in the middle, and it kind of catches those bits of guanciale and onion, and the tomato sticks to the ridges of the pasta really well: it’s a hit.”
Whether the sauce is a Roman classic, a seasonal vegetable preparation, or something entirely unexpected, the principle remains the same: the pasta has to work with the sauce. With its micro-engraved bronze-die texture and range of shapes, Barilla Al Bronzo gives chefs a pasta designed to capture sauce and bring the two together in every bite.
