What sauce does spaghetti go with?

Are noodles really important? Or is this mainly a traditional practice? Isn't most pasta just the basis of starch and has no own flavor?

Yes, it is very important. However, allow me to point out a few things first.

Pasta is more than just tasteless starch. Even if we only make hard wheat pasta, you can taste different flavors and textures of pasta made of different wheat, as long as the quality of pasta is good. As different types of pasta enter the landscape, such as egg dough pasta, the taste becomes more different.

That is to say, for some non-Italians, the problem of pasta and sauce collocation is either completely ignored or exaggerated, and almost never considered correctly. In this sense, a core issue is tradition. Like other Italian foods, pasta is regional in nature, even local. This means that even in areas where spaghetti is traditionally made (hint: not all Italians traditionally eat spaghetti), only several shapes of spaghetti are made. Although the shape of macaroni is very popular now, traditionally, it is just a kind of Roman pasta. So, the first question you need to remember is regionality. Making spaghetti with macaroni is completely unconventional. Obviously, this is not just a superficial problem. You might say, "Who cares about tradition? Let's innovate ",which is good. However, the combination of sauce and spaghetti shape is very important in taste: for centuries, the development of traditional dishes has made spaghetti shape and sauce get the best combination, which is why this problem should be kept in mind.

This leads to the second question: texture. The texture of the sauce will be very different. Some of them are very light (think of pasta al limone), while others are high in fat and have a strong taste. Thin and light pasta like spaghetti is not suitable for old-fashioned recipes or recipes with large pieces of vegetables or meat. Too delicate pasta can't "cut" the sauce, and the two can't mix well. On the other hand, a bigger spaghetti will not absorb the delicate sauce correctly, and will lead to tasteless dishes.

Obviously, most of the time, we don't make traditional recipes. In fact, in most cases, we open the refrigerator to see which ones need to be used ("There are five soft asparagus and some spots left, I may probably take out a few tomatoes ..."), and we can imagine making a good sauce for spaghetti at home (orecchiette in this case). So, yes, we have done a lot of "experiments", but this is based on the above-mentioned texture problems and traditional knowledge. This is more like an educational way to break the traditional narrow boundaries. You can mix the traditional northern Italian ham (speck from Sudtirol) with the spaghetti from orecchiette to make totally unconventional dishes, but you should pay attention to the taste.