The Shape of Pasta
Interview with Fred Scarpulla, Chief Culinary Officer for Amy’s Kitchen, Inc.
Pasta is a universal favorite, fulfilling multiple needs from flavor to economy to versatility. But for food product developers and manufacturers, pasta can also create unique challenges. Not only does the quality of the pasta itself depend on multiple factors such as the type and processing of flours used—such as from semolina, rice, legumes, roots, and even algae—but any combinations of such ingredients.
Then there are the multiple influences on pasta based on how it’s made—extruded, rolled and cut, etc.—and its shape (long or short, thick or thin, textured or smooth). And all this before we get to the how and where the pasta is being used, whether in a main dish, a soup, a side, a salad, or a baked dish, or with a tomato sauce, a dairy-based sauce, or a pesto. Once these questions are addressed, there are the challenges of the final format, that is whether it is frozen, canned, refrigerated, dehydrated, or shelf-stable.
Although prized for being inexpensive and filling, all these challenges in using pasta in formulation can increase costs of production to a point where, in order to make the final product meet consumer expectations, product makers may opt for various cost-cutting measures that diverge from a home-made method of processing.
One company that has not deviated from its mission to stick to the “home made” paradigm is Amy’s Kitchen, Inc. The family-owned organic food company’s impressive line of products includes some two dozen or more items that use pastas of all sizes and and shapes—long cuts, short cuts, filled, semolina-based, rice-based, and others. They also cover a spectrum of formats and styles, appearing in tomato -based sauces, dairy -based sauces, pesto sauces, and in soups, frozen foods, canned products, and main dishes (Italian style, Asian style, and global fusions).
What all these products have in common is, they’re made just as a home cook would. According to Fred Scarpulla, Chief Culinary Officer for Amy’s Kitchen, the products developed by the culinary team that meet their exacting criteria and are able to be scaled up are all made from scratch. And that includes the pasta itself. Scarpulla shares that they make all but one of their noodle types fresh in-house because, “we just find that fresh is much better than dried product.” Only the pad thai noodles are purchased, but even those are made to Amy’s specifications.
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Scarpulla’s team not only makes its pastas on site but does so in very traditional ways. “On our wheat line we’re using, depending on the product, either an all-purpose flour or a semolina flour and occasionally we’re adding a little bit of a whole durum wheat to a few of our products,” he explains. “Depending on the product, it’s either one or a combination of those. And then on the gluten -free side, by and large, it’s just straight organic rice flour [although] we do have a couple of products that we use organic rice flour with some potato flour and soy flour. Pasta’s so delicate, it has to be very specific to be consistent. And so you have to have very tight specifications both for the pastas and for the ingredients that you use to make your pasta.”
To control for the many variabilities involved in making pasta on a daily basis, Scarpulla’s team pays close attention to such details as moisture content, extrusion pressures, mixing times, and even ambient humidity and temperatures, not only for production but when it comes to storage. “It’s very specific, even how we store the flours,” he notes. “The temperature that [you store] flours in can really impact the process. So all these aspects are controlled and very specific [to] the product that we’re making.”
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