Would you be willing to spend $2.25 for a serving of the very best Italian pasta? I recommend you give it a try because I believe you’ll be able to taste the difference. You can buy a pair of black lace-ups for $39 or $390 or $1390, all depending on the craft and materials from which the shoes are made. What excites me about great food is that the very best, in this case a 500-gram bag of pasta, can be yours for $8.99. That’s more than double the optical price of a pound of dried pasta, but that’s what it costs to make the best pasta.

Martelli is the authentic article, made by the Martelli family in the Tuscan town of Lari since 1924. Martelli only has 4 cuts of pasta, which is unheard of today. Each of the 4 days in their workweek is devoted to producing one of the cuts (spaghetti, spaghettini, penne, and maccheroni). They use traditional equipment, the most important being the bronze dies to extrude the dough into shapes.

It takes about 50 hours to dry their pasta in their low-temp closets, which gives the pasta an unbeatable texture and mouthfeel. Industrial pasta dries in 5 hours in the equivalent of huge ovens and is extruded using Teflon dies. This combination "cooks" the pasta, giving it a shiny exterior which does not "hold" the sauce and is almost impossible to cook to al dente...one minute, the pasta is hard, the next it is mushy! I've got my favorite recipe for Pasta Fagioli printed up for you here at the shop, so make sure to grab one with your Martelli

Traditional foods like Martelli need their stories told to sell and therefore sustain their traditions for the future!