DINING
Pasta
PERSPICACIOUS PURVEYOR
AN EPIPHANY LEADS TO LEAH FERRAZZANI’S SEMOLINA BY FRIER MCCOLLISTER
O
Leah Ferrazzani owns Semolina Artisanal Pasta.
Subtle beginnings Her pasta career started in the laundry room of her Mount Washington home. In 2013, while she was on maternity leave with her second child, she noted to her husband, Neal, a software engineer, that she could not find decent, organically sourced dried pasta in local supermarkets. After months of trying to figure out what she was going to do, she had an epiphany. “I came down from taking a shower one morning, while I was on maternity leave,” Ferrazzani says. “I told my husband that I was going to start a business making dried pasta because I couldn’t find any locally made organic dried pasta. He basically said, ‘What do you know about making dried pasta?’ I said, ‘Absolutely nothing!’” Eighteen months of research and development ensued, including the obligatory trip to Italy. Her destination was Gragnano on the Amalfi coast, south of Naples on the Mediterranean. “I stayed for about 10 days. It’s one of the only D.O.P. (Denominazione d’Origine Protetta) regions for pasta in Italy,” she said. The D.O.P. is the national certification of regional authenticity, granted to maintain traditional culinary methods for Italian cuisine. The designation applies to everything from Italian wine making to pizza preparation. Back home, Ferrazzani rehabbed the family’s laundry room for the project. “I tiled the wall, floor and ceiling and brought in a hydrostat and a Vicks vaporizer,” she says. She positioned box fans around the rooms and her husband figured out how to electrically rewire the room to accommodate the power needs of an industrial extruder. Ferrazzani checked weather conditions in Gragnano. “I modeled the climate in my drying room after the weather on the coast of Naples,” she explains. While monitoring temperature, humidity and wind velocity data from the coastal Italian town, she worked to duplicate the same conditions in the laundry room. continued on page 20
Photo by Luis Chavez
n a placid and warm Tuesday afternoon, the tiny Semolina Artisanal Pasta showroom is well stocked. It was June 15, and master pasta maker and owner, Leah Ferrazzani, returned to produce fresh batches of her locally renowned pasta. She boasts an impressive list of wholesale clients — all chefs and restaurants revving back up to life at full capacity in their dining rooms. She had more to celebrate: She returned after recovering from a herniated disk in her neck. Ferrazzani and her two new assistants, Samuel Schiffer and Noah Sonnenburg, bustled about the gleaming, industrial pasta extruder in lab coats, hairnets, gloves and masks like engineers in a clean room at JPL. For Ferrazzani, her masterful pasta is the result of a subtle alchemical calibration of art and science.
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