This Is The Best Store-Bought Pasta Brand According To Shoppers

It's an understandable, if rookie, mistake to think that all dried pasta brands at the supermarket are the same. Just like any other store-bought ingredient, recipes and preparation methods vary, and all these differences can show in your final product. This can be especially true of simple pasta dishes like cacio e pepe, where there's little room for cut corners to hide. When it comes to common boxed pasta brands, shoppers often reach for De Cecco. 

A top-ranked Reddit comment sums up much of the appeal: "I don't think it's considered the 'highest quality,' but it's more than adequate." Others in the thread mirrored the sentiment, noting that the brand markedly improved their dinner outcomes. De Cecco is so reliably good, it's one of Ina Garten's two favorite brands of store-bought pasta. For more luxurious plates, the Barefoot Contessa prefers Cipriani, an artisanal brand from Venice. But for less-frilly plates, she prefers De Cecco for the simple reason that it's a high-quality dry pasta that doesn't cost much.

De Cecco's accessible brand of quality pasta has rich roots in the heart of pre-unification Italy. In 1831, Nicola Antonio De Cecco began making exceptionally good pasta in Faro San Martino, a commune in Abruzzo, a region to the west of Rome. After teaching the craft to his son, Filippo founded the family pasta factory in 1886. Among the innovations that would help De Cecco grow to where it is today was Filippo De Cecco's new method to dry pasta within 24 hours, faster than the traditional sun-dried method. This would enable much faster production and distribution to markets around the world.

In World War II, the factory was destroyed by Nazi airstrikes, but the De Cecco family built a new, larger factory in Faro San Martino, which is still key to company operations. De Cecco has production facilities in other locations, but the company headquarters is still where it all began in Abruzzo.

When Daily Meal compared Barilla to De Cecco to see which brand is the better buy, one of the big reasons we selected De Cecco is its bronze cutting method. Each piece of pasta is cut with bronze-tipped tools, a technique known in Italian as trafilata al bronzo. The metal makes microtears on the pasta surface, allowing the sauce to adhere better. A telltale sign of this technique is dry pasta that appears somewhat dusty, from the rougher cuts. When we ranked 16 brands of boxed penne, though, De Cecco came second to Barilla, for the only reason you might think twice about this Abruzzo classic: it's roughly a dollar more expensive per box than the competition. However, some Redditors would say the quality is worth the price.

Surprisingly, one area where you can probably do better than De Cecco is pasta sauces. Daily Meal ranked 12 store-bought pestos, and De Cecco placed a disappointing 9th thanks to what some customers say is a dry, grainy texture. De Cecco's excellent dry pasta deserves better than a mediocre sauce.