Armando Italian Pasta Is Incredible: Why & My Faves

We eat quite a lot of pasta at home in this family.

And when I mean quite a lot, I mean that pasta is basically the default option for dinners, everything else is secondary.

Since moving to Portugal, my husband Thomas and I have had access to quite a lot of grocery store options we could never access in Canada.

While we had more European options we could conveniently buy in grocery stores when we moved to the UK, we still had nothing like the type of access we have to variety here in Portugal.

Grocery stores in Portugal have got a slew of different options offered, and while we can conveniently buy a plethora of products made in Portugal, Spain, Italy, or France, there are times where we just can't help ourselves and decide to go out of our way to import some of our ingredients instead.

And while I'm a sucker for Alsace pasta, sometimes also called "Alsatian egg noodles" (Nouilles à l'Alsacienne) because I love the texture and fullness that the eggs bring, our local Auchan grocery store used to offer these in a number of different shapes, while now they either offer it in spaghetti only, if they carry it at all.

Thomas and I are not very big fans of spaghetti. We prefer linguine over it, and our ultimate "can't go wrong" is a very traditional penne. Bronze extruded over all else. Both these options were never offered in Alsace pasta by our local Auchan, but we made do with the fusilli and farfalle while they were still available.

Once they were no longer, it was time to try out other brands, and we just couldn't find the perfect one.

Rummo pastas are widely available in grocery stores here, and they make absolutely perfect gluten-free pasta. The best gluten-free I've ever had.

For a time I had a gluten-free diet while I was determining whether I had Celiac or gluten intolerance issues, but when I discovered my issue was whey instead (which is in a lot of carbohydrate-rich foods here in Europe to boost the nutrition scores), I went happily back to my gluten-rich diet, and Rummo just wasn't the perfect pasta for that.

So we kept looking. Try as we might, we kept coming back to the Armando bucatini pasta Thomas' uncle Gary had introduced us to.

He'd imported it from Italy via Amazon.it, as it was one of the best options for bucatini he could find on Amazon, and after years of using it as our only bucatini (delicious by the way, if you haven't tried it!), we thought we'd pull the trigger and grab the penne to see if it could be our "one pasta to rule them all."

It was. It so was. The perfect texture, the perfect taste, easy to cook without overcooking some parts and undercooking others because it is not long, it's flawless.

Would I try other shapes by Armando? Absolutely. The brand has a consistency and quality so perfect, I can't imagine any of their shapes would be in any way disappointing. But for me, penne is the epitome of perfection, and I'd be happy to just have that.

Bucatini is the perfect second, interesting in it's shape - like a tube that's hollow on the inside, it allows for quite a lot of surface area for the pasta sauce to spread over.

And it's got a texture that's so delicious in how chewy it is in only the right ways, that it's pretty damn perfect.

Were these easy to get and affordable, I'd try them in every shape. But because it's still fairly expensive to import them from Italy, even through Amazon (pasta's heavy so I understand why), I'll stick to our favourite (penne) for now, and might mix things up later if we can get smaller portions more affordably.

I don't think we'll be trying out other pastas any time soon. Based on how many we've tried over the years, this taking the cake in comparison to all so far, I will happily accept the inconvenience and extra cost to import this pasta over trying others.

And I'll end this in saying - I'm sorry, but I don't have any pictures of the penne. Not because we haven't used it enough - we've made countless dinners with it since it arrived on our doorstep about a month ago...

But upon seeing this delicious pasta cooked up with any sauce we threw at it, no thoughts crossed my mind to take a picture - my only thought was to gobble it up. And I always managed to clear my plate before I even began to remember that taking a picture might be a good idea.

Make of that what you will - and if you're considering trying this not-so-well-known brand, know that if you do, you may never want another brand of pasta in your pantry again.

You've been warned.