According to Ina Garten, Pasta Shapes Can—And Should—Mix (2024)

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The more pasta, the better: This is a motto any foodie is happy to live by—including the Barefoot Contessa queen herself, Ina Garten. As she points out in her cookbook Cook Like a Pro, you don't have to limit yourself to one specific noodle per meal. Garten often uses more than one type of noodle in her pasta dishes, and there are various benefits to this technique.

Some pastas certainly aren’t designed to mix. It’s not worth the trouble to get a forkful of both thin angel hair pasta and mini macaroni, for example. According to Garten, as long as you mix pasta by length—short pasta with short pasta and long pasta with long pasta—the end result works. So feel free to toss that farfalle in with the shells, or spaghetti with bucatini.

In her book, Garten explains she likes mixing leftover bags of pasta pieces because it limits your amount of food waste and results in an original dish. The technique also gives you an opportunity to experiment and get creative with your pairings.

"I love using two different kinds of pasta, not only because they add great texture but because you use up the leftover boxes of pasta in your pantry,” she wrote, according to Tasting Table.

Garten didn’t invent this kind of noodle mingling. In Italian, it's called pasta mista, which translates to “mixed." You can buy packages of pasta mista in stores, which include an assortment of different pasta shapes.

According to Italian chef Giada De Laurentiis, the concept of selling bags of pasta mista originates from Naples, where factories would produce a random assortment of leftover pasta cuts. “These pasta odds and ends were still good to eat, so why not sell them?” De Laurentiis writes in her blog. “The result is a bag of random short-cuts of pasta—a piece of fettuccine here, a fusilli there.”

As the weather begins to chill and you consider bringing soups back into your cooking routine, the shorter pasta mistas make for more texturally interesting, enjoyable additions.Plus, noodles should reach al dente at about the same time when they're a similar size.