Pizzoccheri: Italy's debated buckwheat pasta recipe

Busiate is still a homemade shape, one which varies according to the cook. At the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school, for example, rather than a pierced rope busiate is more like a ringlet or a ribbon round a maypole. It is also a factory-made shape and one worth seeking out, the long spiral the most magnificent sauce-catcher imaginable, especially wi

Which brings us to cappellacci, big hats, the big brothers of cappelletti (little hats). This plump and generous shape is typical of the city of Ferrara, where the filling is a velvet purée of pumpkin and cheese, the sauce butter and sage. Just writing their name makes me want to jump on a train and spend the day in Ferrara, half red-brick Renaissa

Pasta, from the word impasto – a magma of flour and liquid – can be made from any flour; the Italian pasta lexicon includes shapes made from chestnut flour, acorn flour, rice flour, corn flour, broad bean flour and buckwheat. The hard king and tender queen, though, are hard or durum wheat semolina flour and soft wheat 00 flour.