“I think that there are dishes that are WAY better, when made with high quality dried pasta. Often, handmade pasta doesn’t have the right chew to complement a sauce.”
This is the opening line of our friends Sasha Marx and Ed Levine’s rant on Everything you’d want to know about pasta. We loved every minute of this podcast.
In the US, we constantly see a “romanticizing of HM pasta, pasta fatta a mano,” but Italians totally agree with Sasha: nothing compares to dried pasta, when it comes to texture.
At Pastificio Faella, they’re obsessed with the perfect pasta mouthfeel. Each shape is extruded with bronze dies and dried at a super low temperature.
We just spent the day with the Faella fam. Yesterday, they were making the Bucatini that you see in the video above; it will take 68 hours before these Bucatini are ready to be bagged. That’s why their al dente bite has no equals.
“The key thing about extruded pasta is the rate at which you dry your pasta. High quality dried pasta is dried very slowly at low temperatures, whereas commercial brands are drying a batch of pasta in under 20 minutes. That is super, super fast!”
SASHA’S FAVORITE PASTA RECIPE
“A pasta that I really, really love is called Pasta c’anciuova e muddica atturata. It’s super savory from the anchovies and tomato paste, slightly sweet from the raisin and the onion. It’s just so, so good.” This Sicilian Pasta With Anchovies and Toasted Breadcrumbs is a traditional recipe from Palermo and it’s the most flavorful pantry pasta we’ve ever tasted. Plus, we have all the ingredients to make it!
Read RECIPE + get INGREDIENTS here