Spring 2020 Issue
FOOD & COMMUNITY IN PHILADELPHIA AND BEYOND
2020 Edible Philly Local Hero - Food Artisan: Pasta Lab
HAVING WORKED IN CATERING for more than a decade, Chris Wright and Gina Rubinetti are into food. The couple has always shared their passion by cooking for friends, but recently they decided to take things a step further.
They bought a grain mill and started baking sourdough and making pasta from flour they milled at home. “Grain started taking over our apartment,” Wright recalls. “We hadn’t really tasted pasta made with freshly milled flour before, and it was eye opening.”
In 2018 they launched the Pasta Lab, and they now sell a couple hundred pounds of fresh pasta each week at farmers’ markets (including Headhouse and Clark Park). Using freshly milled flour from Small Valley Milling in Halifax, Pa., Rubinetti and Wright create handformed pasta (such as garganelli, lasagna and tagliatelle), extruded pasta (including rigatoni and bucatini) and filled pasta (like ravioli, the customer favorite, stuffed with rotating fillings). Rubinetti and Wright recommend boiling their pasta for just 2 to 4 minutes in heavily salted water and finishing it with a light sauce in a skillet.
Why is freshly milled flour so important? “Most grain is processed in a way that the most delicious and nutritious parts (wheat germ and bran) are stripped away to make it shelf stable,” Wright says. “Ours has an amazing aroma, color and flavor.”
The Pasta Lab’s grain is milled just a few days before each farmers’ market, resulting in “a flavor that’s surprisingly sweet and a little nutty with a pleasant bitterness from the bran,” according to Wright. “It’s more robust than plain white flour [pasta].”
Next up: “Wholesale to specialty retailers in Philadelphia to make it more widely available.”
PASTA LAB
thepastalab.com
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