Corn Pasta Archives

ARTISANAL PASTA PRODUCTION REQUIRES EXTRA CARE

Anyone who has purchased pasta either online or from a specialty food store probably noticed a wide gap in pricing between pastas sold at those outlets as opposed to supermarket pasta. There is a good reason for this. For the most part pasta sold online or from a specialty store is probably artisanal pasta. What does that mean exactly? For starts this pasta is probably produced using bronze extruders as opposed to Teflon. So what is the big deal? Pasta extruded through bronze has a much rougher surface allowing sauces to cling to them. Also, manufacturers of artisanal pasta generally use the finest durum wheat available. Teflon produced pasta is generally very smooth so the sauce slides off easily. The cost of manufacturing pasta using bronze extruders is much higher since it is much more labor-intensive to clean the extruders and more attention must be paid to the entire process. Another important point is that artisanal pasta makers use a much slower drying process at temperatures of anywhere between 105 to 115 degrees requiring almost two days to completely dry the pasta. On the other hand mass produced pasta is generally dried rather quickly at 185 degrees. So treat yourself, buy some really good artisanal pasta and make an outstanding sauce to accompany. You and your guests will definitely note the difference.

Nutritional content of Corn Pasta and Rice Pasta

I looked up the nutritional content written on the packages of the Andriani and Le Veneziane pasta:

All nutritional content information is for a 500gm package of pasta:

Andriani Corn Pasta: Protein – 7.5 gms, Carb – 78.6 gms, Fat 0.7 gms

Andriani Rice Pasta: – Protein – 7.0 gms, Carb – 79.6 gms, Fat 0.7 gms

Le Veneziane Corn Pasta: Protein – 7.59 gms, Carb – 77.84 gms, Fat 0.69 gms

Please note that the Italian packaging states the actual weights and not the % per serving size like the US made products.

I was surprised to see how low the fat content is of all these corn and rice pasta. I think I will have more types of corn pasta in the future. I always read the literature and knew that corn pasta and rice pasta were healthier than regular durum wheat pasta. The  stats above are hard to ignore. Now, if I could only keep the oil and butter to a minimum when making the pasta sauce…

Coming Soon! Andriani Corn Pasta

In addition to our Le Veneziane Corn Pasta we will also have corn pasta from Andriani (Puglia, Italy). They offer 15 corn pasta shapes as well as 10 kinds of rice pasta. We tasted their pasta and liked it immediately. Both the corn pasta and the rice pasta should be in stock from beginning of June. We are very happy because we wanted to offer a slightly lower priced corn pasta compared to the Le Veneziane without sacrificing quality. We think we found it.

Difficulty in getting the Italian Corn Pasta

We have had a lot of customers call us about why we went from offering 4 shapes of corn pasta to only 1 corn spaghetti. We were not expecting the overwhelming response to our Le Veneziane Corn Pasta and so ran out of it. The corn pasta is coming from Italy to our warehouse in Boston as fast as possible (8 weeks, however). Sorry folks! We will send an email out as soon as it is back in stock.