Wet Noodle
Courtesy of Tom Fitzmorris, “New Orleans Menu”
MENU has been noting with delight an emerging trend to New Orleans food merchandising: an emphasis, such as we’ve never seen before, on freshness and quality of raw food materials. This is apparent both in restaurants and food stores. It’s not a new movement nationwide – it’s been present in New York and the West Coast for years.
But that it should gain a toehold where – where a major restaurant like Galatoire’s can get away with serving canned fruit cocktail and canned mushrooms – is noteworthy.
Who would have thought a few years ago that anyone could possibly make a go in New Orleans of the business of making a pasta that needs to be refrigerated until use – and that has to be used within a month after its manufacture? Now that freshness is a big deal, the product is not merely selling but selling extremely well.
Pasta Fresca is the name of the product, made in Kenner by the Kajun Kettle Food Corp., owned by 30-year-old Orleanian Pete Hilzim. You’ve probably seen his pasta by now, if not in your supermarket, then at least in the wine shop or specialty food store. If you’ve gotten around to cooking with it, you know the stuff is hardly a gimmick to sell spaghetti at an inflated price.
And with pasts becoming an indispensable gourmet staple (we see it in all kinds of restaurants, not just the Italian ones), it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Pasta Fresca’s principal pedigree is that it is sold still moist from its manufacture. It’s flexible even before it touches the water in your pot. This has a singular merit, as Hilzim explains:
“When you cook dehydrated pasta, it’s impossible to get it al dente unless you’re some kind of genius. You have to cook it, say, seven minutes for the water to penetrate through to the core and remove the stiffness. At seven minutes it might be just perfect. But at seven and a half minutes, you might have garbage.
“Fresh pasta [which Hilzim points out is the English translation of “Pasta Fresca”] gives you much more margin for error and flexibility. You can completely control the cooking. You can cook it one minute if you want. We recommend three minutes, but if it cooks four minutes it’s not going to make that much of a difference in flavor and texture.”
MENU’s experiments with Pasta Fresca bear this claim out. Al dente is very easy to
achieve. We found also that something like the extra-thin angel hair pasta can be cooked for a half-minute in boiling water, then tossed about with the boiling sauce for a completely cook, yet very firm and flavorful dish.
Pasta Fresca’s line is growing, but currently includes an impressive variety: fettucine,
noodles, sfoglia (like egg roll wrappers), shells, linguine, rigatoni, elbows, angel hair, and, of course, spaghetti. There are also spinach versions of the first five. “We’re about to start making carrot fettucine,” says Hilzim, then responding to our raised eye-brows by explaining, “You can make pasta with all kinds of thing: beets, herbs, even chocolate pasta.”
The better part of the production, however, involves just three ingredients: eggs (fresh brown jumbos), semolina flour (a texture and hardness of granulated sugar, a golden color, and an origin in the winter wheat of the Great Plains), and water (purified to remove anything bigger than a micron across). “We use abut 20 pounds of eggs to 100 pounds of flour,” says Hilzim. “And there’s about 31 percent moisture in the finished product. We use as much egg as you possibly could. Any more and the stuff would be too stiff to extrude.”
Extrusion is the method by which Pasta Fresca comes into the world. In that it differs from home-made and restaurant-made pasta, which is made by the other method: rolling and cutting. “Less than 19 percent of the pasta in Italy is rolled now, even though that is the original way it was produced,” says Hilzim. “Theirs is a lot of controversy as to whether rolled or extruded pasta is better. I don’t think there’s a big taste difference, although the appearances are very different. And you can’t make spaghetti by rolling.”
Kajun Kettle’s pasta machine is small by industry standards. So small, in fact, that
Hilzim has to do a lot of his own machining. Nevertheless, it’s a ten-foot gadget with a set of stairs leading to the upper hopper, where the flour, eggs, and water are initially mixed. The dough-which looks more like a bunch of gravel-sized golden nuggets than the actual dough – is dumped into the lower hopper. From here it is pushed at the aforementioned 500 pounds of pressure through a die, perforated in the shape of the pasta being made. It’s sort of gigantic frosting bag with as many variations in the nozzles.
The long pastas are squeezed out at the rate of about an inch per second. It is lopped off at about the right length, cut again to make strands of uniform size, and then it is hung up to dry for about an hour. Finally, it’s parceled in half-pound portions, vacuum-sealed and brought into refrigeration. It will have to stay cold from then until the moment it is lowered into your pot.
Incidentally, the length of the spaghetti strands is about 15 inches – extra long by commercial standards. The noodles are three and four times as long as the ones you get in bags. “If somebody wants it shorter, they an cut it themselves,” says Hilzim.
We wondered how they makes shells. “The back of the hole in the die is wider than the front of the hold.” says Hilzim. “There’s more pressure along the outside of the shell than inside, so it curls. Then a knife comes along and cuts it off.
“I’m laughed at by everybody else in the business,” he boasts. “They say that I’m crazy for not using powered eggs, powdered spinach, preservatives, and things like that. I could make a lot more money if I put just a little preservative in – not even enough to have to list it on the label. That would extend the shelf life to four months and I wouldn’t have to take so much back. But then K-Paul’s would stop buying it, the Whole Food Company would stop buying it, and the word would get out.
“I don’t even think that I’m in the same business with the big producers. I make a refrigerated fresh gourmet pasta. Right now I can make 150 pounds an hour. National Foods – which makes the Luxury brand here – can make over 3000 pounds per hour. Creamettes has a 1000 pound per hour machine – I’m hoping to get one of those soon – in their test kitchen!”
Pasta Fresca is being used by more restaurants than we had imagined, including K-Paul’s, Commander’s, the Hyatt, the Hilton, the Homes Furnishings Store (which had a “fettucine festival” in their café with it that was quite good), among others. “If a restaurant isn’t using it yet, they will be,” says Hilzim. “Look. They can take my pasta, cook for two minutes, dump it into some cold water to stop the cooking, and hold it all night. When they serve it, they just toss it in some hot sauce and it’s ready to go. It gives them total consistency all night. A lot better than having a big pot of spaghetti turning to mush.”
Why Pasta? we asked Hilzim concerning his career. It seems that he when to San Francisco right after graduating from UNO and a stint at the Pontchartrain and worked in a restaurant experimenting with pasta manufacture. “ Carlo Rossi – not the guy with the cheap winery – told me. ‘Watch pasta!’”
Well, pasta consumption has increased dramatically, and it’s expected to grow 125 percent in the next five years. And New Orleans always has been one of the biggest consumers of pasta in the country. Did you know we had 20 spaghetti companies here
at one time?
We wonder how this jibes with the current high consciousness of overweight and physical fitness. “Pasta has only 80 calories per portion,” Hilzim rejoins. “It’s all the other stuff that makes it fattening. Pasta is extremely healthful. It has all the right kinds of carbohydrates and proteins, and it’s very digestible.
“And if you ate pasta every day for the rest of your life you wouldn’t have to make it the same way twice. It’s the most flexible food there is.”
- Posted May 1, 1982
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