For The Best Store-Bought Spaghetti, Look To A Classic Brand

We live in a time of infinite pasta choices, from angel hair to rigatoni. But even though we can choose from hundreds of different shapes of noodles these days, nothing can ever beat a bowl of classic spaghetti. We love the stringy stuff at Daily Meal so much that we have at least 25 different recipes that will remind you of your childhood, but please make sure you're buying a quality box of spaghetti before you start cooking. For our money, Al Bronzo Barilla Spaghetti is the best store-bought dried pasta you can get.

Barilla's premium pasta managed to beat out several other impressive contenders in our ultimate ranking of boxed spaghetti brands, including De Cecco, Dreamfields, and even Barilla's own regular spaghetti (in the blue box). While the ingredients aren't wildly different from brand to brand, the difference comes down to texture and sauce-ability. "The texture was where this pasta really hit it out of the ballpark," said Daily Meal writer Monika Sudakov, who performed the spaghetti tasting for our ranking. What's Barilla's secret? The winning noodles are made using bronze metal plates called "dies," which create a rough, raggedy texture on the pasta that grabs onto sauce and won't let go.

Now, you might be under the impression that all dried pasta is pretty much the same except for the price. After all, nearly every brand on grocery store shelves is made with a simple ingredients list of semolina wheat flour, sometimes egg, salt, and occasionally water. So the real difference between store-bought spaghetti brands is how they're shaped. If you're not familiar with what bronze-cut pasta actually is, here are the basics.

A very long time ago, pasta was limited to a few shapes because it was simply rolled out flat and cut into strands like linguini. Eventually, people figured out how to make pasta using machines equipped with bronze metal plates called "dies," which shape the noodles or pasta pieces as the dough is forced against the plates through a tube. We actually still use that same technology to make pasta today, except at some point we switched from bronze plates to Teflon-coated dies, which are cheaper and more durable, but give pasta a super smooth surface. There's been a resurgence of pasta makers turning to bronze dies lately, because the metal creates more friction when the dough passes through the die, which results in a rougher surface on the pasta. When the noodles are cooked, that porous texture is better able to grab on to sauce.

As you might have guessed, Al Bronzo Barilla Spaghetti is not the cheapest brand of pasta you can buy at the store. A 14.1-oz. box can cost anywhere from $3 to $5 depending on where you shop, which is as much as triple the cost of most generic, store-brand spaghetti. This is because bronze dies are more expensive than Teflon dies. Not only that, a bronze die creates more friction for a pasta machine, which is how they create that tacky surface, and the downside is that all that heat can take a toll on expensive machinery.

Equipment isn't the whole story, however. Pasta makers also use higher-quality ingredients for bronze-cut varieties because they can command a more premium price. Barilla's Al Bronzo Spaghetti, for instance, uses a combination of finely ground durum wheat flour and semolina flour so the texture of the cooked pasta is more refined than cheaper spaghetti. You can notice the difference in the color of bronze-cut varieties like Barilla's, which has a distinctly darker color than the standard yellow of regular pasta.

So while Barilla's Al Bronzo Spaghetti is a bit more expensive than the average box of store-bought pasta, we think it's definitely worth the splurge. You'll get better texture, tastier ingredients, and best of all, more sauce in every bite.