Pasta factory

We had our first field trip for school on Friday. It was all in Italian, like everything else, and I was exhausted mentally from dealing with so much language stuff, so I missed a lot of the presentation while I was just struggling to stay awake. We went to a small town called Strada in Chianti (the "in Chianti" is part of the name) and the factory was a small business which has been in the family for four generations.

The factory splits its time almost exactly 50/50 between making artisan pasta and commercially sold stuff. They do both pressed pasta (aka with rollers, and you can see an old one in the back on the right in this photo) and stamped pasta.

This is an old-fashioned pasta stamper, which is how you make pastas that aren't flat, generally with holes in the middle (such as macaroni, penne, and the little ones shaped like stars which go in soups). There is a disc at the bottom with the shape of the pasta, there is a hole in top, and then you press the pasta through by turning the crank at the top...just like I used to do with play-doh when I was little. And both are safe to eat!

Of course with commercial production the presses are much larger and don't need to be cranked by hand. The owner showed us a few stamps, but my favorite one was definitely the one in the very center: look carefully and you'll be able to see that it is a bunch of animals! Roosters, sheep, rabbits, birds, all in minuscule. The other stamps you see here are both for different sized spaghetti. The pasta gets made fresh and then air dried on racks. In the drying room so much pasta had fallen on the floor that we walked with a crunch because of all the pasta we were stepping on. It was a cool sensation,  to be treading on a carpet of food. A couple of us enjoyed the concept of it.

One very neat pasta that they do is a flavored one, and the pasta itself is a nice, dark brown. The flavoring they use is cacao, and while the pasta didn't have much of a different flavor, you could just barely smell the rich bitterness in it, and my mind instantly started imagining what sorts of richly flavored things you could use with the pasta....lamb, squash, cinnamon, anything rich and dark would work great. I think I might have to try making that on my own sometime!