Leah Ferrazzani: pasta maker in L.A. using the authentic Italian technique

Semolina Artisanal Pasta, located in Los Angeles, has an authentic fresh wheat flavor that founder Leah Ferrazzani’s traditional methods accomplish in order to keep the Italian heritage alive. One woman’s insistent passion on making pasta the old-fashioned Italian way, in small carefully dried batches, is what sets her ridged rigatoni, culturally interesting strozzapreti, curved seashell-shaped ‘conchiglie’ and extra-long looped spaghetti apart from the more common mass-produced, machine made brands we’re used to. Her pasta has a purity of flavor hard to find 6,500 miles from Italy, and yet here it is, stealing from the past to discover the pasta of the future, brought to life in her LA-based mini-factory.

 

Having been in the food business since when she was 15 years old, as soon as Ferrazzani discovered that there were only about half a dozen small artisanal pasta producers in the Country, she decided to start her own with a trip to Gragnano – a hill town south of Naples, Italy – for traditional pasta making lessons. Beginning this endeavor in her own kitchen, she transformed her laundry room into a pasta dryer that took about 24-36 hours for her pasta to fully dry. As she explains, “I was trying to recreate the Bay of Naples in my laundry room,” because both the Bay of Naples and Gragnano are the historic heart for dried pasta. After a successful start in her home business, Leah decided to expand her capacity and was the first signed tenant to a brand new micro-manufacturing facility for commercial food, LA Prep, which now houses 54 individual kitchens, all driven to better the community through better food choices. In January, she got on Kickstarter in order to raise funds for a professional pasta dryer the size of a large walk-in closet. She raised $25,000 from 350 investors, dramatically increasing her production by now being able to dry large quantities of pasta in about 18-24 hours. With this new space and new equipment, Ferrazzani estimates that she will be producing about 750 lbs. of pasta a week. 

 

Leah has many secrets up her sleeve to make her pasta stand out. Three main factors that set Semolina Artisanal Pasta apart from a lot of the commercial pasta producers in the U.S. and keep the Italian heritage alive are the hand-tooled bronze pasta dies that give the pasta their shape, the 100% semolina from durum wheat grown in North Dakota and Montana, and also Ferrazzani’s slow pasta drying process. She is definitely an adamant traditionalist and has incorporated authentic Italian methods for her pasta making.

 

Leah is also an advocate in the Slow Food Movement for about 9 years now. In this framework, she promotes “healthy eating but mindful eating” and most importantly preserving flavor and heritage that are both intertwined with quality ingredients. This includes a type of durum wheat called Senatore Cappelli that is only grown in a small area of Italy and is on the verge of extinction. 

 

“When I conceived of the company, I really wanted to do Italian pasta made in California,” says Leah Ferrazzani, and so she does. Semolina Artisanal Pasta originated in Los Angeles and represents an authentic change throughout the food industry by preserving the traditional Italian methods of pasta making. You can taste and buy her pasta products at the LA Italian Cultural Institute on the occasion of the screening of Slow Food Story on Tuesday, May 19th.

 

I love pasta and I love making things from scratch. I started making fresh pasta when I first moved to Los Angeles and began working as the front of the house manager at Pizzeria Mozza. The first batch I ever made was with my father-in-law back in Massachusetts on a hand-crank machine. We made ravioli that were a bit thick but really, really good. I eventually dialed that in and made fresh pasta of some kind or another about once a week until my son was born in 2011. Then all that free time I had went out the window. By the time I got pregnant with my daughter, I realized that I was relying on the dried pasta in my pantry way more than ever, but I wasn’t really loving what I was buying. First I started looking for really good imported pasta, and then I started looking for really good, dried, locally made pasta. But there was none of the latter. At the time I had started to think that I wanted to get out of the wine business—I was writing and editing for a local wine retailer—and so I started doing a little research. When I discovered that we export a large percentage of our durum flour to Italy for them to make into pasta to send back to us, I got really frustrated. I started wondering what the Italians knew about making pasta that we didn’t. And so I set out to learn.

 

Like I said, I relate to the world through food, and so my relationship to the Italian community has predominantly been as an eater and cook, whether its in restaurants or seeking out specific ingredients at the area’s Italian markets. Outside of Los Angeles, my passion for food is a huge part of my relationship with my father-in-law, whose family hails from Gaeta. We bonded instantly over Italian food. I got to reintroduce him to ingredients he hadn’t seen since he was a kid. 

 

I love the Italian relationship to food, it’s so much less fraught and complicated, and I think it’s something we could all learn from here in America. Obviously an important distinction is portion size—whether with pasta or anything else—Italians just don’t eat as much as frequently as we do. And they don’t snack incessantly. But I’ve never heard an Italian agonize over the calories in a dessert or tell me they were gluten free (unless of course they had celiac disease). They eat a ton of vegetables, some pasta, far less meat than we do, and they walk everywhere. 

 

Absolutely! I’d wanted to be Italian since I was five years old. My best friend growing up was Italian. Most of my friends at school were Italian, and I couldn’t really understand why I wasn’t. I didn’t marry my husband because I wanted to be Italian, but his father’s cannolis didn’t hurt! 

That said, I think my passion for Italian culture has helped him get in better touch with his Italian roots. We went to Gaeta, where his family is from, on our honeymoon. We talk about how his family had to assimilate based on when they arrived and how Italians were treated at that time. It was definitely my idea to give our children Italian names, to preserve some of that family heritage that seems to have been lost a little. And of course, I celebrate it every day when I cook.