Bucatini

Bucatini is a dried durum wheat pasta, semolina and water and nothing else, extruded as a hollow tube. It is about 3mm across on the outside with a narrow channel down the centre, which makes it noticeably thicker and chewier than spaghetti while cooking in roughly the same time.

The name comes from buco, Italian for hole. That channel does real work. During cooking, water enters it and cooks the strand from the inside as well as the outside, so the pasta can be thick without a raw core. On the plate, the channel fills with sauce and delivers it into your mouth in a way solid strands cannot.

In Naples and much of southern Italy the identical shape is called perciatelli, from perciare, to pierce. If you have seen both names on a shelf and wondered what the difference was, the answer is: the region of the person who named it.

Pasta is a texture argument more than a flavour one, and bucatini wins that argument on chew. The strand has real resistance: a springy, slightly rubbery bite that spaghetti does not have, because there is more material between your teeth. Cooked properly it should still have a faint chalky line at the centre of the wall.

Flavour depends entirely on how it was made. Slow-dried bronze-cut bucatini from a serious producer tastes of wheat: nutty, faintly sweet, sometimes almost of toast. Fast-dried supermarket pasta tastes of very little and mostly carries whatever sauce is on it.

The practical consequence people always mention is that bucatini is aggressive to eat. Twirl it and hot sauce shoots out of the tube. Bite it and the same thing happens. Roman trattorie tuck the napkin into your collar for a reason.

Do not break the strands. Drop them into hard-boiling water at full length and push them under as they soften: it takes about fifteen seconds. Use more water than you would for spaghetti, at least four quarts per pound, because the shape takes up more room and sticks if crowded.

Salt the water properly once it boils. Cook a minute and a half short of the box time, then finish in the pan with the sauce and a ladle of pasta water. Bucatini absolutely needs this finishing step: the interior channel takes on sauce during that last minute, which is where the format earns its reputation.

The canonical dish is amatriciana: guanciale rendered in a cold dry pan, tomato, pecorino romano, no onion and no garlic. Then gricia, which is amatriciana without the tomato. In Sicily, pasta con le sarde uses bucatini for the same reason: it stands up to sardines, wild fennel and toasted breadcrumbs.

One warning worth taking seriously. Bucatini traps hot sauce inside the tube and releases it when you twirl or bite. Wear something you do not care about, or do what Roman trattorie do and tuck the napkin in.

Sealed, dried bucatini sits in a cool dark cupboard for two to three years, and the date printed on the box is the reference point, not the look of the pasta. What changes across that time is aroma: the smell of wheat is strongest in slow-dried bronze-cut brands when the box is new and grows fainter month by month. Keep it away from the hob and the kettle, since heat and steam are what alter the surface.

Once the packet is open, tip the strands into an airtight jar or clip the bag shut. Pasta pulls moisture out of humid air, and strands that have taken it up cook unevenly and go soft on the outside before the centre is done; open bags left in a warm kitchen over summer are also where pantry moths appear, and a bay leaf in the jar is the old Italian habit. Cooked and sauced, bucatini goes in the fridge in a sealed box for a couple of days. Reheat it in a pan with a spoonful of water rather than the microwave, which dries the channel and leaves the strand papery.

Bucatini is the long strand with a hole running through it. Hold a piece up to the light and you should see a pinprick of daylight down the middle, centred and the same size along the whole length; in cheap production the pin wanders and the wall thickness varies. The strand measures around three millimetres across, clearly thicker than spaghetti. Colour tells you how it was made: bronze-cut pasta looks pale, matte and almost chalky, and leaves a dusting of semolina at the bottom of the bag, while bright yellow and glossy means a Teflon die and fast drying.

American and British shelves often file the same shape under perciatelli, so check both words before deciding a shop does not stock it. It is not long macaroni or ziti, which are cut into short lengths and have a much wider bore, and it is not thick spaghetti, which is solid all the way through. Price is a fair guide: the cheapest supermarket boxes are industrial, and the Gragnano artisan tier costs three to five times as much.

In the US, De Cecco and Barilla bucatini are in almost every supermarket at $2 to $4 a pound and are perfectly serviceable. The step up is worth taking: Rummo, Garofalo and Montebello sit around $4 to $6, and true artisanal bronze-cut brands (Rustichella d'Abruzzo, Setaro, Faella, Martelli, Mancini, Afeltra) run $7 to $12 a pound through Eataly, Gustiamo, Market Hall Foods and Amazon. Note that American brands often label the shape perciatelli, so check both words.

In the UK, Waitrose, Ocado and Sainsbury's carry De Cecco and Garofalo bucatini at £2 to £4 for 500g. For the artisanal tier, Natoora, Vorrei, Vallebona and Seggiano ship bronze-cut Gragnano pasta nationwide at £6 to £14 per kilo.

What to look for on the pack: 'bronze cut' or 'trafilata al bronzo', a slow-drying claim, and Italian durum wheat. Bronze-cut pasta looks pale, matte and slightly dusty; if the strands are glossy and bright yellow, it was extruded through Teflon and dried fast, and sauce will slide off it.

Rome is the place, specifically the trattorie of Testaccio and Pigneto, where bucatini all'amatriciana is a default rather than a statement. The old-guard restaurants around Prati and San Giovanni serve it the same way.

Amatrice, in the province of Rieti two hours northeast of Rome, gave the sauce its name and holds a festival for it on the last weekend of August. The town's own registered recipe specifies spaghetti, not bucatini, which is a running argument with Roman cooks and part of the fun of going.

For the pasta itself rather than the dish, Gragnano near Naples is the pilgrimage. The historic pasta factories along Via Roma run tours and sell direct, and the local perciatelli is the same format under its southern name.

In New York, bucatini has become a signature of the city's Italian-American revival, and several Manhattan and Brooklyn kitchens make their own fresh, a very different and softer object from the dried Italian version, and worth trying as its own thing.