August 18, 2022 Food & Drink » General Food & Drink

For devotees of the local food movement, dried pasta has long been thought of as a last resort—relegated to the back of the pantry in favor of its showier cousin fresh pasta. While there’s a lot to be said for the “fresh-is-best” mentality, ultimately, a lot of this ill will can be traced back to the historically dismal state of the grocery store pasta aisle, with plastic packaging boasting dubious qualities like “enriched wheat.” Even in the hands of the culinarily gifted, a box of mass-produced spaghetti, penne, or rigatoni too often produces a lackluster pile of noodles—devoid of the toothsome texture and delicately nutty flavor that has made dried pasta, or pasta secca as it’s known in Italy, a lovable workhorse of the Mediterranean larder for centuries. Until relatively recently, artisanal food lovers had almost no options for sourcing good, domestically made, dried pasta. Instead, they had to make pilgrimages to natural foods stores or gourmet shops just to hunt down bags of the imported stuff from a top-shelf Italian producer. Step into many of the same shops known for selling high-quality provisions throughout the Hudson Valley today, however, and you’ll likely find sturdy, brown-and-white boxes of Coxsackie-made Sfoglini pasta (pronounced sfo-lee-nee) sitting right next to those highfalutin imports.

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Sfoglini was founded in Brooklyn in 2012 by Scott Ketchum and Steve Gonzalez. Ketchum was a creative director and graphic designer specializing in brand development who had 18 years of experience working in New York and San Francisco and had studied brewing and management at the Siebel Institute in Chicago. The pasta expertise came from Gonzalez, a chef who had spent much of his 14-year-career immersed in the art of pasta making at acclaimed restaurants throughout Western Europe and the US. (His resume includes time at the three-Michelin-starred El Raco de Can Fabes in Sant Celoni, Spain, and beloved New York City spots such as Hearth, Roberta’s, and Frankies Spuntino.)

The major thing that sets Sfoglini’s dried pasta apart from mainstream brands is its adherence to old-world techniques. Ketchum and Gonzalez worked with a 100-year-old, family-owned manufacturer in Brooklyn and another company in Boston to custom make their traditional bronze dies and plates.

Today, Sfoglini makes dozens of varieties of pasta in an array of long-lost Italian shapes and adventurous flavors, whose whimsical grooves are made for holding hearty sauces. “It was part of our mission to bring back excitement and innovation to the pasta section,” says Ketchum. “We’ve helped reintroduce shapes that had fallen out of fashion.”

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A post shared by Sfoglini (@sfoglini)

A few years after Sfoglini’s founding, the pasta company had become a prominent presence in the New York City food scene, thanks to mom-and-pop shops like Bedford Cheese that began carrying its products. And through its partnership with the New York City Greenmarket Grain Program, a project to establish a market for Northeast-grown and -milled grains, market-goers were introduced to the brand through its line of pastas that featured lesser known ancient grains such as einkorn, emmer, and spelt. “We were steadily growing year over year until about 2016,” says Ketchum. “The thing holding us back was that we couldn’t increase our growth with our existing capacity.” So the company began looking for new production space where it could scale operations in support of a plan to distribute its pasta more widely.

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Tags: General Food & Drink, Sfoglini, pasta, dried pasta, local food, farms, wheat, grains, ancient grains, Coxsackie, manufacturing, Italian pasta, farm-to-table, Scott Ketchum, Steve Gonzalez, chef, graphic design, packaging, Web Only

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