23 Savory Italian Pasta Recipes for All Seasons

Italian carbonara is famously rich, combining pancetta or guanciale (cured pork jowl), egg yolks and cheese. At Holeman and Finch, Linton Hopkins adds his own Southern accent to the dish with house-cured pork and local eggs.

Chef Jenn Louis makes this version of pasta all'amatriciana with just a few flavor-packed ingredients. She likes to use traditional guanciale (cured pork jowl), which has a robust pork flavor. The sauce is also delicious with milder pancetta.

This simple dish is packed with garlic and a few dashes of crushed red pepper. If you prefer, shell the clams before tossing them with their juices in the pasta.

Andrew Carmellini serves fresh pappardelle with a ragù of house-ground lamb shoulder cooked in lamb stock. He finishes the dish with fresh ricotta and chopped mint. To simplify the recipe, use store-bought pappardelle, ground lamb and chicken stock, then top the dish with fresh ricotta and mint.

A trio of peppercorns gives this pasta a subtle, floral heat; if you like, spice it up, swapping the Szechuan pepper with a pinch of red pepper flake.

Pro tip: Frozen cavatelli is even better than dried. Since this shape is thick and doughy, the dried version tends to get overcooked on the outside before it's done inside. If you can't find cavatelli in the freezer section of your grocery store, a chunky dried pasta such as rigatoni will also be excellent here.

The pasta for this tortelli (a larger version of tortellini) is extremely silky and supple, which makes it excellent with the creamy ricotta-and-spinach filling. If there's any dough left over, cut it into noodles, as Marco Canora does, then dry it and store it in bags in the refrigerator to have on hand for last-minute dinners.

These tender gnudi, adapted from Nancy Silverton's Mozza Cookbook, are delicious with buttery chanterelles.

Chef Andrew Zimmern makes his velvety pasta sauce—a delectable Italian combination of sweet squash and veal—even more luscious with a touch of cream.

Anchovies please! Chef Sarah Grueneberg makes her amatriciana sauce with anchovies, so it's extra-savory.

It doesn't get more hearty than this pasta dish with lamb ragù. A soft, generous Montepulciano d'Abruzzo will combine well with the tangy lamb and caramelized carrots.

When Piero traveled to the Italian island of Pantelleria, he discovered pasta and capers topped with crushed toasted almonds and bread crumbs. "I thought the almond bread crumbs would be really cool to add to a bottarga dish," he says. Bottarga is cured roe from either mullet (which is slightly waxy and mildly fishy) or tuna (which has a pronounced anchovy flavor); it's sold at specialty food stores.

Puttanesca is a classic southern Italian pasta sauce made with tomatoes, capers, and olives. Here, it lends a ton of flavor to a hearty—but not heavy—eggplant lasagna layered with ricotta and mozzarella.

At Incanto, chef Chris Cosentino braises beef shank and oxtail in red wine to make a brasato he serves with house-made mint pappardelle. Instead of oxtail, the dish uses just beef shank. Fresh pappardelle from a store replaces the house-made kind.

One of the most popular cured meats on restaurant charcuterie boards, soppressata is a hard salami from southern Italy. Andrew Carmellini's family grinds their own meat to make it, but much easier is buying Italian sausages and removing their casings. To give the fresh soppressata extra spice, use hot sausages instead of sweet ones, or increase the amount of crushed red pepper.

Known in Italian as mandilli, this stuffed dish, from chef Tim Cushman of Manhattan's Covina, is crafted from sheets of pasta coated with pesto sauce, stuffed with ricotta and topped with tomato sauce. To save time, use store-bought pasta sheets.

In his gorgeous In.gredienti cookbook, Massimiliano Alajmo includes a dish called "pasta butter and smoke," made with smoked pasta and smoked butter and served with smoked hen broth. In this much-simplified version, the smoky flavor is all in the butter; it's mixed with cheese and chopped fresh herbs to make a rich sauce for silky pappardelle.

Chef and restaurateur Andrew Carmellini simmers ground veal and pork in white wine and half-and-half, creating a velvety cream sauce to toss with pappardelle.

This indulgent first course marries three of Italy's best ingredients: egg pasta, winter truffles and Robiola Rocchetta, a creamy cheese from northern Italy, which forms the base for an incredibly rich sauce.

Ken Vedrinski discovered the hand-coiled pasta called trofie and the super-minerally white-wine Vermentino while traveling in Liguria.

Chris Cosentino adds briny flavor to his pasta with cured tuna heart. He shaves it on right before serving. This simplified recipe calls for anchovies, rather than the tuna heart Cosentino uses. Egg yolks form a silky sauce.

At The Modern in New York City, chef Gabriel Kreuther makes gnocchi using fromage blanc, a fresh French cheese that creates a light texture and lovely tang; sour cream is a fine replacement. Snails add an earthy flavor to the dish (though the recipe is also delicious without them).