La Pasta di Aldo

Luigi Donnari is a flour artist.  He and his wife are pasta makers, largely self-taught, but he’s more than that really—there are no aspects of the art of pasta that Luigi hasn’t carefully considered, deconstructed, reviewed, deliberated, tweaked, and ultimately changed in the service of quality.  All of his flour is stone ground to his specifications.  Some is as coarse as cornmeal; some is as fine as powder.  He uses only free-range eggs from chickens that are fed non-gmo feed.  Eggs and flour are the only ingredients in his pasta.

When we tasted his pasta, it was so deliciously chewy, so flavorful with egg—and it didn’t stick together at all! The Italians used the term “carnosa”—“meaty”—to describe the texture of the pasta, and I found the description to be apt.  Luigi told us that his product is especially easy to digest because of the way it is produced, and he promised that we would not feel overly full at the end of the meal.  Purist that he is he normally eats his pasta simply dressed with olive oil, and accompanied by a glass of wine.  If he wants to be extravagant, he said, he tops it with a little cheese.
“My goal,” he told us, “is to be sure that after a person invests in my pasta, prepares and eats it, he becomes emotional.”  Even weeks later, as I relive the meal in my mind, I remain emotional about Pasta di Aldo. 

Size: 250g