Bolognese sauce tagliatelle made with eggs and northern Italy’s soft wheat flour. Acceptable alternatives to fresh tagliatelle include other broad flat pasta shapes, such as pappardelle or fettuccine, and tube shapes, such as rigatoni and penne. While the main complaint of traditionalists is against the use of spaghetti rather than fresh tagliatelle for the pasta, native Bolognese Piero Valdiserra has argued that "spaghetti could be considered traditional in Bologna", even though tagliatelle is the "most suitable" pasta. "Ragù alla bolognese" along with "béchamel" is also used by many Italian chefs to prepare traditional baked lasagna in Bolognese style. Gruppo Virtuale Cuochi Italiani
Pasta (3.4 million tonnes), followed by United States (2 million tonnes) and 3 countries in the one million tonnes range: Brazil, Turkey, and Russia. The largest per capita consumers of pasta in 2015 were Italy (23.5 kg/person), Tunisia (16.0 kg/person), Venezuela (12.0 kg/person) and Greece (11.2 kg/person). Nationally, the United States is the largest consumer of pasta with 2.7 million tons consumed in 2017. In the European Union, total pasta sales in 2008 were US $8.361 billion, of which $5.722 billion was for dried pasta, $2.244 billion was for fresh or chilled pasta, and $395 million was for canned or preserved