Mancini Mezze Maniche Pasta

Almost always folks assume fresh pasta is better.

They assume if you had the time you should use fresh pasta over dried 100% of the time. Maybe that’s because it’s more work to make (if you make the pasta at home). Maybe it’s because fresh pasta is more fragile, more perishable. Maybe it’s because dried seems more industrial, more like a commodity, and it can sell for so much less.

Fresh pasta is not better than dried. It’s just different.

There are many times when dried pasta is preferable. Probably the most concise way to think of the tradeoff is this: use dried pasta when you want to enjoy noodles with a lot of texture and flavor; use fresh when you want a softer, subtler dish.

Dried and fresh pasta are made very differently.

Hence the different results and different uses in the kitchen. Traditional dried pasta is made by extruding durum semolina dough through bronze dies. It’s dried at relatively low temperatures for a couple days. The bronze die extrusion leaves the pasta with a rough hewn texture. You can feel it in your mouth and the sauce really grips to it. The slow drying ferments the flour a bit. It transforms the dough from tasting like raw flour to something more like bread.

In contrast, fresh pasta is usually rolled and cut and there is no fermentation. The texture is much softer, smoother, and the flavor is much less intense, much more like flour.

Not all dried pasta is equal.

It’s important to note when I talk about dried pasta I’m not talking about any old dried pastas. Most dried pasta is industrially made with exasperating shortcuts that leave it tasting unexceptional. In particular, they employ hot, short drying times so there is no transformation of the dough’s flavor. It tastes like flour. Worse, it’s flour with a burnt edge to the flavor. The extra hot ovens singe the surface in a way the slow, low drying methods do not.

To see what I mean, taste a piece of uncooked commercially made DeCecco pasta (one of the better industrial companies, dried at 80° Celsius for 10 hours) and a piece of Rustichella pasta (one of our favorites, dried at 45° Celsius for about 40 hours) next to each other. The flavor is remarkably different.

The Mancini family has been farming their land in Marche, Italy, for almost ninety years. Mariano Mancini began growing wheat in 1938, right before World War II. About 20 years ago, the family built a pastificio (pasta factory) right in the middle of the wheat fields.

Mancini is unique as the only farmstead pasta maker in Italy, where the pasta is made in the same place that the wheat is grown. Four varieties of wheat go into their pasta: Maestà, Nazareno, Farah, and Nonno Mariano. The latter was specially developed by Massimo Mancini with an agronomist to honor grandfather Mariano. If you go on their website, you can see an aerial map of the fields.

They keep the grain in cold storage at 18° Celsius and blends the various wheat varietals each year to get the flavor they’re looking for in the finished pasta. Each year’s pasta will be slightly different in flavor, just as one would expect with an estate olive oil or wine. The aromas of the grain will fill your kitchen while you’re cooking, and the perfume of the pasta will peak if you pour out the pasta water (be sure to use a bit of it to thicken your sauce first). The pasta really is fantastic. Great chewy texture (be sure to cook very al dente) and great flavor. The Mezze Maniche are are short and stubby, 1 inch or so long and nearly as wide, “tubettes” of pasta, and their name means “short sleeves.”