The right sauces for wholewheat pasta

Wholewheat pasta just doesn’t work with all sauces. Its nutty, somewhat assertive flavour can overpower a subtle sauce, and its texture, which can be granular, doesn’t work with others.

But wholewheat pasta has other virtues, and so I decided to look more closely into which sauces to pair it with. I organised a dinner party so friends and I could taste four classic pasta-and-sauce combinations, substituting wholewheat pasta for traditional noodles.

The pasta shapes chosen to go with the sauces follow a long history of Italian gastronomy: marinara with penne, Bolognese with tagliatelle and with fusilli, pesto Genovese with spaghetti and with fettuccine, and carbonara with spaghetti. In addition, my friend Clifford Wright, a cookbook author, served whole-wheat pappardelle with puréed fava beans and baby arugula.

We consistently found that wholewheat pastas are best with robust sauces. The sweet flavours in the marinara were overwhelmed by the nutty, grainy penne. But chewy, meaty Bolognese ragù and garlicky, nutty pesto worked with wholewheat fusilli, tagliatelle and spaghetti. Carbonara sauce failed with wholewheat spaghetti. The sauce didn’t adhere to the pasta, slipping off before the heat of the noodles had time to cook the eggs.

The pappardelle dish that Clifford Wright made, which I have adapted here, is a traditional pasta from the Salento region of Apulia, where puréed legumes are often used with pasta. He used splitdried yellow fava beans puréed with olive oil and garlic. You can find yellow favas at Middle Eastern markets.

Make sure that you serve the pasta right away once you toss it with the sauce. The purée will stiffen as it sits. If it does seem stodgy, moisten with hot broth from the beans or with pasta cooking water.