Pasta to sing home about
Premium estate pasta is a glorious thing
There is such a thing as perfect pasta, the kind your sauce sticks to and that has flavour even before the sauce reaches it, the kind that takes a year’s gestation and 36 hours compared to the 2 hours to make even the best of large commercial pastas. If I were a composer I would be writing an aria for this pasta from Le Marche, praising it in all its positive declensions.
Mancini Pastificio Agricolo is the name of the producer. I tripped over their magnificent specimen of one of Italy’s most basic foods while I was on a wine trip to the Le Marche region last October. A small group of us, hosted by the region’s independent winemakers body, FIVI, was invited to a pasta blind tasting, which sounded intriguing. We were all familiar with blind tasting wines, where you’re either looking to identify wines (Merlot? Syrah upper or lower Rhone? Chasselas from which village?) or, more usually, to assess the quality. But pasta? Close your eyes and guess the shape?
By the time we did the tasting, which simply asked us to identify this finely crafted pasta compared to two others from well-known quality brands , we knew what to look for.
We’d seen the fresh semolina and the bronze dies for fine-tuning the rough texture and the shapes, and the drying racks where low heat is used to very slowly remove humidity, for a start. Mancini’s cooked pasta in a little dish was a warm mustard colour, compared to the paleness of supermarket pastas, due to drying at low temperatures: hot drying is faster but the colour of the wheat fades. Another clue: the Mancini pasta tastes distinctly of wheat, in the way that a good bread does. The easiest indication that we were right, though, was that the sauce stuck to the pasta instead of slipping and sliding around because the pasta is significantly rougher on the surface than the big commercial brands. A desirable trait, an Italian chef will tell you.
The farm and factory in Monte San Pietrangeli, halfway between the Adriatic Sea and the Sibillini mountains, is not a tiny operation artisanal operation, however. It was created in 2010 by Massimo Mancini, the son of a grower who always sold his wheat to pasta-making companies. The son studied agronomy at university and founded the company. “Our idea is to use high tech with very old techniques” to make excellent pasta and “to leave the land better than we found it.” They began exporting in 2018. Today the Italian market accounts for 75% and exports 50% of sales, with plans to raise this to 50–50 within five years, if nature cooperates. But the Italian market is crucial, given that Italians eat 23–24 kg/person a year compared to Americans who eat 7 kg of pasta/year.
The farm grows 680 hectares of three varieties of durum wheat. In a normal year they expect to harvest 5T per hectare —in a poor year like 2023 the yield can drop to 4T.
Each wheat variety is suited to a particular type of soil. Their production cycles vary. They also grow Linea Grand Turanici, a low gluten ancient subspecies of durum wheat. The company’s web site has excellent educational pages that explain their wheats and the growing plus production cycles.
One of the ambitions of Massimo Mancini is to see other farmers convert to his approach and grow their own good wheat for pasta — even set up competitive operations. “There are 175 small pasta makers in Italy and they all buy their semolina!” More premium estate pasta producers would be good because it would help chefs and consumers appreciate what pasta at its best looks, feels and tastes like. “In 10 years I would like to see 100 small producers making their own wheat pasta. I hope the market changes. Maybe durum wheat can become like grapes and wine.”
The wheat itself and the terroir is key, just as with wine. “We use only fresh semolina. Each wheat is different every year,” says he says. “So we have to adjust for stability and the pasta-maker has to decide on the gluten — soft, medium or hard — and on the texture, very elastic or not. Balance is very important.” The company’s digital management of the entire process makes it possible for each package leaving the factory to bear a QR code that allows the buyer to trace the vintage, including harvest and milling dates. Mancini’s web site publishes its annual harvest report with greater detail.
Tips for pasta lovers, using his pasta:
The semolina must have a strong smell and taste of wheat; the pasta should reflect this. Use 1 litre of water for 1 kg of pasta and no more than 4 g of salt per litre — restaurants sometimes use as much as 10–12 g. When shopping for pasta note that the paler ones have been dried quickly using high heat, which eliminates much of the goodness. And yes, the price is higher, of course, three times that of Barilla brand pasta, for example, but a serving of very good Mancini pasta is the cost of a cup of coffee. And probably less because 100 g of this pasta is more of a meal than supermarket pastas, so it might really be half price! But surely at least double the gastronomic pleasure.
