Best Pasta Shape

Same dough, same ingredients, wildly incompatible opinions. Sauce adhesion is a legitimate argument in this bracket and will be treated as one. There is real engineering underneath the disagreement. Ridged tubes hold considerably more sauce than smooth ones, which is why rigatoni beats penne lisce for anything heavy. Orecchiette exist to catch small pieces — broccoli, sausage, breadcrumbs — in a way that no long shape manages. Fusilli is a mechanism for carrying thin sauce that would otherwise pool uselessly at the bottom of the bowl. Spaghetti is the default and it is the default for a good reason, which is that it does the one thing it does better than anything else on the list.

The field here is thirty-two shapes, photographed dry rather than plated, so the geometry is the thing being judged.

Gnocchi and ravioli are on the list and their inclusion is arguable, since neither is really a shape so much as a different food wearing one. They stay because removing them would settle an argument that is more enjoyable left open.