La Pasta di Aldo

La Pasta di Aldo was created in the town of Monte San Giusto, a charming spot in the inland of the Marches region that straddles the Adriatic Sea and Sibylline Mountains. Embodied within the pasta are the glistening golden hues of the wheat fields that submerge their hills in summer. With a perfect roughness that tickles the taste buds, Mia Emilia’s La Pasta di Aldo pasta is redolent of the authentic taste of yesteryear, when our grandmothers would prepare the dough while singing, as if to instill their harmonies and joy into it's very fabric. 

Our cutting method uses a common medium-sized cutter, slightly larger than the classic models designed for domestic use. Ours is an automated cut, but not industrialized like that of pasta factories that prefer extruders instead of cutters, machines that inevitably end up conditioning the final product. By extruding the pasta, the dough undergoes a forced friction inside dies, which are generally made of Teflon. This certainly allows reducing the time (therefore the costs) of production, but this is also to the detriment of the quality. In fact, the dough hydration percentage required at the extruder intake, the high temperatures reached, as well as the applied cutting stress can cause a noticeable qualitative decay and a worse cooking performance of the pasta thus obtained. Our pasta flows gently between the cutter blades, then handpicked and hung on the appropriate frames to dry.

The pasta is taken out of the cutter with particular sticks; the diameter of these sticks is specifically designed to hang the pasta threads whilst offering them the right support in order to prevent any breakage. In this way, the pasta threads are placed at an adequate distance from each other and the air of the drying room circulates all around giving rise to a perfect drying that affects every single millimeter of the pasta. This result is rather difficult to achieve for those who prefer laying the pasta flat to dry. The pasta curled in nests opposes a sort of barrier to the drying air preventing it from reaching all points in a uniform manner. In these cases, the only way to ensure a complete drying is setting a higher drying temperature, with consequent modification of the organoleptic and chemical-physical properties of the product.

Our drying phase consists of a natural process that reaches 113°F - as a wheat field under the summer sun. This is to safeguard flavor, color, texture, nutrients, shape, etc. The result is this authentic pasta from Mia Emilia. Mangia bene!