How to Make Pasta Shapes with Gennaro Contaldo

How Long Do You Cook Homemade Pasta For?

Homemade pasta cooks a lot faster than dry pasta you buy at the grocery store! The cook time will depend on how hydrated your dough is, the thickness of your noodles, and how you prefer your pasta. Typically this is in between 1-3 minutes — we recommend tasting your noodles in 1 minute increments, until you get the right level of doneness.

Oh — and don’t forget to salt your water! This is very important. 🧂

Pasta Sauce Inspiration + Recipes

So you’ve made homemade pasta — now you have to pair it with a really amazing homemade sauce! (Because you’re not going to make pasta from scratch and use jarred sauce — that would be lame.)

You really can’t go wrong pairing pasta shapes with pasta sauces, but there are some pasta shapes that hold different sauces better, making it easier to eat. For example, long and skinny pastas work well with light sauces, while long and thicker pasta noodles are better at delivering rich sauces into your mouth. But there are no hard and fast rules that like “you can’t eat fettuccine with a light sauce” or “spaghetti noodles can only be paired with a red sauce”. You do you.

🍅 Homemade Marinara Sauce

Now for recipe inspiration — we used San Marzano tomatoes for the first time making our homemade marinara sauce. And man, our sauce was mad delicious. MAD.

﻿All you need to make to make a simple homemade marinara sauce is olive oil, garlic (personal preference), a 28 oz can of tomatoes, a fresh sprig of basil, some crushed red pepper flakes, and salt. Slice your garlic super thin and add it to the hot oil to get soft (don’t let it brown). Crush your canned tomatoes by hand (real San Marzano tomatoes only come packed whole or filleted — more on that below), and add your tomatoes along with one cup of water to your skillet. Stir in your salt and red pepper flakes, and place a basil spring on top so the delicious herb gets infused into your sauce! Remove it before serving.