Translating literally as ‘little ears’ in Italian, orecchiette are extremely typical of Puglia. The pugliese dish of orecchiette alle cime di rapa is a regional classic, and undoubtedly the first thing you should look out for on your travels, but you’ll often see orecchiette served with tomato al sugo – a fresh tomato sauce. Orecchiette is hand-shaped so it’s really simple to make at home – just make your pasta dough, take a small marble-sized ball of it, and then roll it against a flat surface with your thumb to create that recognisable dimple shape.

Troccoli is very recognisable to the English eye – we likely would mistake it for spaghetti if we didn’t read the menu. The two are very similar, but troccoli is generally a little thicker, and has a square cross-section due to the way that it is made – more like spaghetti alla chitarra. Instead of using a chitarra to cut the strands, troccoli is made using a troccolo – a grooved rolling pin that cuts the pasta into strips. Troccoli in Puglia is often served with a good meat ragù, pesto, or with the ever popular cime di rapa.

Cavatelli are not all that different to orecchiette – they’re almost used interchangeably throughout Puglia, but the former are a slightly different shape. Cavatelli translates as ‘little hollows’, and whilst the ‘little ears’ of orecchiette are more delicate, cavatelli tend to be a little more puffy, almost like a gnocchi, but with a hollow made from the side. Sometimes pugliese will make cavatelli dough with ricotta, effectively making these into hollowed-out gnudi. Again, they’re often served with garlic and cime di rapa, broccolini or tomato.

If you see sagne a bit further north, it sometimes refers to a flat pasta – almost like a lasagne sheet, but cut into squares. To make sagne in Puglia, they cut strips of rolled pasta dough into fettuccine, and then wrap them around a thin dowel into a spiral, creating a rolled ribbon of pasta. Typically in Puglia this is served as ‘sagne ‘ncannulate’ – the pasta is boiled, and tossed in a sauce of tomato and garlic, with plenty of ricotta strewn over the top.

Capunti is often said to resemble an open pea pod – think a conchiglie pasta shell, but stretched longways. Again, these are popular all over Italy, but you’ll see them more commonly in the south along with variations like capuntini – a smaller version – and fricelli – where the pasta is rolled all the way around into a loose tube. Capunti suits meat and fish-based sauces very well as the concave pasta holds chunkier fillings very well, but it’s served in all sorts of different ways in Puglia.