The Best Spaghetti You Can Buy at the Store

Here's the good news: After tasting 15 brands of store-bought spaghetti, we can safely say that most of the dry spaghetti out there is...pretty good! The majority of noodles we tested were perfectly acceptable: they were tasty (or at least as tasty as plain, unsalted pasta can be) and, when cooked with care, had a nice al dente bite.

The problem: It was extremely difficult to differentiate between them. There were a couple of outliers that either had a funky taste or texture, but, when served plain, the majority of the pastas tasted remarkably similar. It was our hardesttaste testto date.

And then we sauced them.

Once prepared in alemony, kale-flecked light tomato sauce, our top two pastas were clear. And after a bit of back and forth,Rao's Homemadeslid into the top spot. For our methodology and the full list of pastas we tasted, scroll to the bottom of the page. First up, more on the rankings!

Our Favorite Brand of Spaghetti:Rao's Homemade

If you're accustomed to the majority of commercial American pastas, you'll notice the difference in Rao's the minute you take the pasta out of the package. Instead of the glossy smooth surface you may be used to, Rao's spaghetti has a matte appearance and a rough texture. If you pinch a dry noodle and try to run your fingers down the length of it, you'll meet some resistance. This is due to the pasta being formed with a bronze die rather than a teflon one, which is the material used in most pasta-making machines (more on that here). What that means in terms of plain, cooked pasta isn't much—as I said above, we liked 80% of the pastas we tasted. Yet somehow these noodles stood out as having a bit more flavor than most of the pastas on our roster.

Once I cooked them with a sauce, however, it was clear that these noodles were a step above. The sauce clung to these noodles more acutely than to the other brands in our top four—we could actually see bits of tomato stuck to the long strands like a bur on a staticky pant leg. They also had a wonderful toothsome texture; deputy editorAnya Hoffman将他们描述为“弹性和咀嚼乐趣。”

BUY IT:Rao's Homemade Spaghetti, $3 for a 16-ounce package at Raos.com

For a simple bowl of pasta, you're going to want the best noodle you can get.

Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Prop Styling by Beatrice Chastka, Food Styling by Frances Boswell

The Runner-Up:Garofalo

我们喜欢Garofalo一样的我们喜欢饶. While they didn't have quite the same sauce-sticking power, the noodles seemed to absorb the flavor of sauce more so than any of the other top-four contenders. The texture is what put Rao's over the top—but that doesn't mean Garofalo's hadbadtexture (it's also made with a bronze die and has that same rough exterior when dry). Emily called it "springy" and Anya said it had "good bite." All in all, we'd be happy with either of these spaghetti brands on our plate come dinnertime.

BUY IT:Garofalo Spaghetti No. 9, $3 for a 16-ounce package at Jet.com

Our Favorite Organic Spaghetti:Thrive

Thrive makes a smoother noodle, but it still had great springy texture and absorbed the flavor of the sauce I cooked it in. It retained good chew in each round of tasting and had distinct, wheaty flavor even when cooked in unsalted boiling water and eaten totally plain.

BUY IT:Thrive Organic Spaghetti, $2 for a 16-ounce package at Thrive.com

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What We Were Looking For

We set out to find a plain semolina-flour spaghetti—no whole wheat or gluten-free versions allowed (but check out our collective favorite gluten-free pastahere). The best spaghetti had to have great, springy texture with that elusive al dente bite and had to become one with the sauce I tossed it with during the final round of testing.

Among the contenders, some products were die-cut and some were extruded with an industrial machine; some products were imported from Italy and some were domestically grown. All factors were allowed, as long as the pasta was easily accessible for a majority of the U.S. and the ingredients listed nothing more than semolina flour and water. A few pasta brands were made withenriched flourand while those brands did trend toward the bottom of our rankings, we found most of them to taste fine when eaten plain. One brand's noodles, however, began to break apart while boiling, before the noodles had even fully softened. Clearly, it didn't make the cut.

How We Tested

With 15 brands and only two hands, I broke the initial round of spaghetti tasting into a two-day period. On the first day, I cooked each batch of pasta in well-salted water, tasting each periodically after 10 minutes until they were al dente. (Informed by ourtortellini taste test, we decided that we wouldn't cook the pastas for a set amount of time, since they weren't all the same thickness, and that we couldn't really rely on the suggested cooking times on the packages, but would need to just taste periodically.) We often advise to cook pasta just shy of al dente so that it can finish cooking in the sauce, but since these pastas weren't being sauced, I cooked them completely in boiling water. I tossed the spaghetti in just enough olive oil so that the noodles wouldn't stick and brought them to a panel of Epicurious editors and staff to sample.

That first round of testing proved so difficult—the pastas really all tasted the same—that I eliminated external factors by cooking the second round in boiling water thathadn'tbeen salted. I did toss the cooked noodles in a bit of unsalted butter (less flavorful than olive oil) to avoid clumping. As unenjoyable as it is to eat plain, unsalted, unsauced spaghetti, that second test was more informative than the first. The true flavor of some of the noodles came through and we were able to more easily suss out what we did and didn't like about each brand.

My final test was to cook the top four spaghetti brands usingAnna Jones'skale, lemon, and tomato"magic" pasta, in which the pasta cooks in just the right amount of water to become a sauce, no big boiling pot required. That final test proved which pastas could really hold their sauce and which were insipid and a little boring.

All products were tasted blind with no distinction made between organic and non-organic brands during testing.

The Other Spaghetti Brands We Tasted

In alphabetical order:

• 365 Everyday Value Spaghetti
• 365 Everyday Value Organic Spaghetti
• Barilla Spaghetti
• Barilla Collezione Artisanal Selection Spaghetti
• Bionature 100% Organic Durum Semolina Spaghetti
• DeCecco No. 12 Spaghetti
• 路易吉Vitelli Spaghetti
• Montebello Organic Spaghetti
• Mueller's Spaghetti
• Ronzoni No. 8 Spaghetti
• Simply Balanced Organic Spaghetti
• Trader Joe's

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