Pembroke 2021 Soft Red Winter Wheat

Most flour milled for pasta, whether fresh or dried, comes from hard wheat. However, in pasta making, exceptions prove the rule. Certain soft wheat varieties and even seeds (e.g., buckwheat) also make delicious pasta (e.g., Red Russian soft red wheat (here) and buckwheat (here)).

I recently received a large bag of Pembroke 2021 soft red winter wheat from my good friends at the Manley Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. Pembroke 2021 takes its name from the Pembroke silt loam soil series prevalent in the main wheat-producing area of Kentucky. Because regional farmers often grow wheat in rotation with corn and soybean, their wheat and corn crops become susceptible to Fusarium head blight (FHB), a disease that overwinters in corn stubble. Researchers developed Pembroke 2021 to resist FHB yet have high yield potential.

 

The Manley Farm’s Pembroke 2021 wheat berries make great flour for pasta. I milled 300 grams of Pembroke 2021 in my Komo mill set to fine. I then sifted the ground berries with a No. 40 and No. 50 screen producing approximately 100 grams of flour. I used a medium egg and a little milk to bring the dough together and kneaded by hand for 8 minutes. After resting at room temperature for 30 minutes, the soft wheat dough easily rolled out with a pin with no spring back.

 

I used my hand-cut noodles to make Chicken and Noodles based upon a recipe in Paul Fehribach’s new cookbook Midwestern Food (2023). The soft noodles had a yielding texture and mild wheat flavor in this homey, comforting dish.

 

Here’s Fehribach’s recipe that makes between 3 and 4 quarts serving 6 to 8.

 

1 medium fryer chicken, about 3½ pounds

2 to 3 quarts water

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 large eggs

2 tablespoons whole milk

3 teaspoons kosher salt, divided

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

 

1. Rinse the chicken under cold running water in a clean sink. [See note below.] Place in a 4-quart sauce pan or small stock pot and add enough water to just cover. Bring to a boil over high heat, skimming any foam or scum that rises. Once it boils, immediately reduce heat to medium or medium low to maintain a low boil. Cook for 1 hour or more, until the chicken is starting to fall apart. Remove from heat and use a spider to remove the chicken to a platter and allow to cool for a few minutes.

 

2. While the chicken is cooling, make the egg noodles. Place the flour in a medium mixing bowl, and make a little well in the center big enough to hold the eggs. Crack the eggs into the well, along with the milk and 1 teaspoon of salt. Using a fork, beat the eggs, then gradually begin pulling flour into them little by little. When the mixture becomes too thick to work with a fork, finish mixing with your hands. Continue mixing until all the flour is incorporated, then knead inside the bowl, adding small amounts of flour if need to prevent sticking, for a minute or two until you have a smooth ball. No need to knead any longer than that. Cover with plastic wrap and rest for 15 minutes.

 

3. On a well-floured surface, roll out the noodles to the desired thickness; about 1/8 inch is usually ideal. Use a pizza cutter to cut them into the desired shape. I usually cut them about ½ inch wide and the full length of the rolled dough. But make them any width and length you like. Leave them liberally floured to prevent sticking while you pull the chicken and finish the broth.

 

4. Pull the meat from the chicken bones, removing and discarding the skin as well. Shred the chicken with a fork and reserve on a platter. Return the cooked broth to the heat, making sure you have 2 quarts or slightly more. Add a little extra water if needed. Add the remaining 2 teaspoons salt and pepper, and bring to a rolling boil. Drop the noodles in at once and give a quick stir to make sure they don’t clump. Reduce heat to medium low and cover the pot. Steam the noodles for 5 minutes, add the chicken, stir, replace the lid, and steam for 5 more minutes. Remove from heat, stir, and allow to steam off heat, covered, for 10 more minutes. Then serve!

 

Note: The Food and Drug Administration recommends against washing raw chicken due to the risk of transferring dangerous food-borne pathogens through splashed water. Another warning: even though Fehribach clearly writes “steam the noodles” and not boil the noodles, I advise not turning your back on a covered pot of cooking noodles, even whilst on a medium low heat. The starchy mixture might choose to boil over.

 

I plan on using home-milled Pembroke 2021 flour to make other pasta shapes suited to a soft wheat dough. Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (2009) offers some suggestions. One piqued my interest: ciriole, a long noodle made with soft flour and water, hand rolled into a sheet, cut into strips that are rolled again by hand to form “long irregular spaghettoni”. Zanini De Vita writes that ciriole, “an old name for a small thin white eel”, is found in Tuscany and Umbria and served with local sauces. In Terni, find the noodles served in a sauce of pioppo mushrooms. Butter-cooked mushrooms, by-the-way, make a delicious additional ingredient in Chicken and Noodles.

Fortissimo Durum Flour

I recently purchased a bag of Fortissimo durum flour from Cairnspring Mills in Burlington, Washington. According to the North Dakota Wheat Commission, “[d]urum thrives in a climate characterized by cool summer nights, long warm days, adequate but not excessive rainfalls and a dry harvest….”  Although California, Arizona and North Dakota produce the majority of US-grown durum flour, Fortissimo, developed in 2006, performs well in certain Pacific Northwest regions. Cairnspring’s Fortissimo grows in Washington’s Skagit Valley.

Fortissimo is a very hard variety of durum wheat. Cairnspring claims that during its early milling trials, the wheat broke its mill stones. Durum’s protein content can range from 9 to 18%. Fortissimo has a protein level between 10-11.5%, which is just a tick below average. Cairnspring mills and then sifts its Fortissimo to a Type 90 flour, which has slightly more texture than Central Milling’s Extra Fancy Durum. Neither Cairnspring’s Fortissimo nor Central Milling’s Extra Fancy Durum flour resemble traditional semolina, which is a granular flour composed of evenly sized endosperm. 

 

When I first came across Fortissimo on Cairnspring’s website, the mill only had 50-pound bags of the durum available for pick-up in Burlington. As I write, Cairnspring now offers 2.2-pound bags that it will ship (but, per the website, supplies are limited).

 

I’ve made a number of batches of pasta blending 60 grams of Cairnspring’s Fortissimo durum with 90 grams of Central Milling’s Organic Type 00 flour. To hydrate the flour, I add one whole egg and two egg yolks, which together weigh just under 100 grams. Using a standing mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, I slowly add the egg mixture to the flour blend until the dough just comes together. I then tightly wrap the dough in plastic film and let it hydrate at room temperature for 30 minutes before rolling the dough out in my Imperia R220. I plan on using the same flour blend to extrude pasta with my torchio, but will cut back on the amount of the egg mixture to make a harder dough.

 

I try to support my local Pacific Northwest food industry, especially newer ventures like Cairnspring Mills, which started in 2016. Its Fortissimo durum flour feels like the freshly milled and sifted flour that I grind with my Komo grain mill. The pasta I made with Fortissimo using my preferred 2:3 ratio of durum to Type 00 flour had a balanced, firm texture and lovely yellow hue. Although not traditional, I especially like to use this 2:3 flour blend when making pappardelle destined for a hearty sauce.

Spelt & Kamut Pasta

I take and keep notes when making pasta with a new flour blend. I often shoot a reference picture of the recipe with the finished pasta. If the dish turns out, I store the photo on my computer and the recipe in my pasta journal. (Sometimes it takes me a while to move my notes into my journal.)

 

About week ago, I came across a photograph of an emmer and Kamut pasta that I made back in 2016. I wanted to try out the recipe again, but couldn’t find any emmer grains in my pantry. I did, however, find a bag of spelt. I decided to improvise.

 

If you root around on The Internet, you will find a lot of conflicting information on…well, a lot of things, but, for purposes of this post, on emmer, spelt and einkorn grains. Each is different, but these grains often get lumped together as farro. Although mixing-up emmer, spelt and einkorn is easy, it’s hard to confuse these grains with Kamut, which is a trade name for Khorasan wheat. I love cooking and baking with Kamut. I often blend this ancient durum wheat with other flours to make pretty much everything taste better. When I received my first bag of Kamut from Montana Flour & Grain, I understood why some call it “Camel’s Tooth”. If you have not worked this grain, I suggest you give it a try. Finding Khorasan wheat gets easier with each passing year.

 

Per my 2016 notes, I used 75% emmer and 25% Kamut flour. I wanted to keep close to these percentages with my spelt and Kamut pasta. With a goal of making 2 serving portions, I started with 250 grams of spelt that I milled and sifted through a No. 40 and No. 50 sieve. (More on bolting flour here.) This produced 75 grams of spelt flour. I then milled 150 grams of Kamut grain and similarly sifted the flour achieving 32 grams of Kamut flour. I wanted 115 grams of total flour, so I added 8 grams of Central Milling Organic Type 00 Normal to my flour mixture.

 

I usually add an egg and a yolk to 115 grams of flour when making pasta. In this case the egg/yolk mixture weighed 78 grams. After mixing the flour and egg together by hand in a shallow bowl, I kneaded the dough for 8 minutes, wrapped it in plastic, and set the dough to rest for 30 minutes at room temperature.

 

After resting, the dough felt soft so I decided to make a laminated noodle using my Imperia R220 manual pasta machine. After multiple passes through the rollers, I stopped at the machine’s number 3 setting. The pasta still felt a tad soft. I cut the pasta into 4 sheets, dusted it with semolina and let the sheets air dry on my kitchen counter for about 15 minutes per side. Because I planned a sauce of fresh borlotti beans and razor clams, I cut the pasta into tagliatelle. I wrapped the cut noodles in a kitchen towel and let them sit for about 45 minutes as I made my sauce.

 

I taste my fresh pasta while it cooks. Although the pasta felt soft after rolling, the cooked spelt and Kamut pasta had a firm bite to it. After about 2 minutes in salty, boiling water, the pasta achieved the right texture to finish cooking for another minute or so in my sauce.

 

Spelt pasta has a lovely mild wheat flavor. Bolted Kamut flour helps the noodle’s strength. Conclusion: Switching out the emmer for spelt worked out great. For the last couple of years I have experimented with making an extruded Kamut pasta using my torchio pasta press. After a lot of fine tuning, I’m getting closer to a recipe that I can share with you.

Red Russian Wheat Pasta

 

In Mastering Pasta (Ten Speed Press, 2015), Marc Vetri writes about making pasta with freshly milled wheat flour at Washington State University’s Bread Lab. The results, he reports, were “staggering.” Pasta made with commodity flour “made the familiar mild-tasting earthy pasta that most people are used to.” But pasta made with freshly milled wheat varieties, such as Soissons, Tevelde, McGuire and Dayn, produced outstanding flavors and fragrances. However, Vetri continues, one grain stood out:

 

“One variety in particular, Red Russian, smelled complex in the bag but failed in the bakery. It was high in protein, 14.1 percent, but the protein wasn’t strong enough to make bread. So I asked [the WSU Bread Lab] to grind the Red Russian wheat berries very finely, like tipo 00 flour, the grind I normally use for fresh pasta….With this freshly ground whole wheat flour we made a basic egg dough, rolled by hand, and cut it into pappardelle. Just boiled and put on a plate, it was like no pasta I had ever tasted. The texture was soft but chewy and the flavor was pronounced: earthy, nutty, and fruity all at once. It was light years ahead of any other whole wheat flour I’ve ever used to make pasta. And none of these flavors was detectable in the pastas made with commodity flours. The textures were similar, but texture is something you can manipulate by mixing flours together to change the protein content. Flavor, on the other hand, cannot be replicated.”

After reading this paragraph in Mastering Pasta, I—probably like many other curious pasta makers with grain mills—searched for Red Russian wheat berries. I couldn’t find any. I kept looking, on-again/off-again, over the years, but with no success.

 

About a month ago, I had a lucky break: I came across a scan of a 1922 U.S. Department of Agriculture Farmer’s Bulletin (No. 1305) on the Bread Lab’s website. This bulletin examines soft red winter wheat varieties found in the US and contains a section on Red Russian. Upon learning that Red Russian was a soft winter wheat, I augmented my search parameters and found Palouse Heritage, a grain supplier in Eastern Washington State. Palouse Heritage sells Red Russian under the tradename English Redhead. According to Palouse Heritage, high protein soft red wheats, like Red Russian, “…have been used for centuries for scones, biscuits, flatbreads, and pastas. It is also prized by craft brewers for imparting a rich, tangy flavor to craft English wheat beers.”

 

I placed my Red Russian order with Palouse Heritage and, upon receiving my wheat, made my first batch of Red Russian pasta. I finely milled 57 grams of Red Russian and blended it with 57 grams of Central Milling’s Organic Artisan Bakers Craft bread flour. I brought the dough together with 1 medium egg and 1 small egg yolk and kneaded the stiff dough for 5 minutes. After a 30-minute rest at room temperature, I rolled the dough out with my mattarello and cut the pasta into fettuccini. The pasta’s texture, soft but chewy, mirrored Vetri’s description, but I didn’t taste a pronounced nutty or fruity flavor. Maybe blending the Red Russian with refined flour mitigated the whole wheat flavors?

 

I made a second batch of pasta, this time using 100% freshly milled Red Russian. I followed Vetri’s Whole Egg and Whole Wheat Dough recipe on page 29 of Mastering Pasta. This pasta also had a mild wheat flavor—one might say earthy—but, at least to my taste, not a pronounced nutty or fruit quality.

 

A myriad of factors (e.g., soil, geography, weather, farming practice and seed variety) can impact the flavors of fruits, vegetables and, yes, grains. My experience with Red Russian wheat reminds me of a similar episode I had making pasta with Warthog, a hard red winter wheat. I bought a bag of Warthog from a Texas mill and these remarkable berries smelled and tasted of baking spice. The Texas mill sold out before I could place another order, but I found an East Coast mill that sold Warthog grain grown in New York State. Although harvested in the same year, the Texas and New York grain smelled and tasted materially different. The New York Warthog did not express any spice notes while the Texas grain smelled redolent of baking spice.

 

Next year’s Red Russian crop might better express the flavors that impressed Vetri. Although not quite as expected, the grain made great tasting pasta. I like that the soft Red Russian did not produce a gritty-textured noodle that often occurs in a home-milled, 100% hard wheat pasta. I look forward to making further experiments with this Washington State heritage wheat.

Minestra di “cicerchiole” con i ceci

I hope that you and your loved ones are all safe and well.

 

My state’s Stay Home/Stay Healthy order allows market shopping, but experts advise to limit these outings to once a week. So like many others, I am buying more canned and dried food items. I picked up some dried chickpeas (aka garbanzos beans) and decided to make a bean and pasta soup from Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio (University of California Press, 2013). I find this pantry-friendly dish comforting and, when necessary, adaptable.

 

Minestra di “cicerchiole” con i ceci features a small, square pasta that goes by different names throughout Italy. Many will recognize the shape as quadrucci and quadretti (“little squares”). A factory-made version goes by the whimsical name lucciole (“fireflies”). But in Lazio, they call the pasta cicerchiole and ciarchiola because its diminutive size approximates that of a local wild pea.

 

Here’s Zanini De Zita’s recipe for Minestra di “cicerchiole” con i ceci (Soup of chickpeas and homemade pasta).

 

1 pound (500g) chickpeas, soaked and ready to cook

1 sprig rosemary

1 slice lardo or pancetta

1 garlic clove

1 ladleful tomato purée

salt

5 ounces (150g) cicerchiole (i.e., quadrucci, a homemade pastina)

 

Bring 2 quarts (2 liters) lightly salted water to a boil in a pot. Add the chickpeas and rosemary and cook over medium heat until the chickpeas are tender; the timing will depend on the age of the chickpeas. Check after 20 minutes and frequently thereafter. Drain the chickpeas, reserving the cooking water.

 

Chop together the lardo and garlic and sauté gently in a pan over low heat. Add the tomato purée, season with salt, and cook until the sauce is well reduced. Add the cooked chickpeas, the pasta and 4 cups (1 liter) of the chickpea water to a boil. When the pasta is al dente, transfer the soup to a tureen or ladle into individual bowls and serve.

 

Some notes and thoughts. In my experience, dried chickpeas—at least the store-bought domestic ones sold in the US—rarely cook in 20 minutes. Check after 20 minutes, but let the chickpeas cook until they are truly tender—this may take an hour or even longer—but not so long lest the chickpeas become mush.

 

If you have lardo, pancetta or some other equivalent meat or fat on hand, then lucky you. With no lardo or equivalent in my pantry, I sautéed the garlic in a couple good glugs—maybe 4 tablespoons—of nice olive oil. In the past, I’ve added diced onion to the garlic, and sometimes carrot and celery, too. Many recipes for chickpeas and pasta soup include anchovies.

 

In Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds, Zanini De Zita shares a quick and easy way to make cicerchiole:  cut fresh “…fettuccine crosswise at intervals equal to the width of the noodle.” She writes that most recipes for cicerchiole call for an egg dough.

 

With the flour shortage at my local market and because I own a KoMo grain mill (here), I made whole-wheat pasta mixing one large egg with 50 grams freshly-milled Warthog hard red wheat from Barton Springs Mills and 50 grams Central Milling Artisan Bakers Craft Plus bread flour. (More on milling, blending and bolting flour for pasta here and here.) As it comes out of the mill, Warthog flour strongly smells of cinnamon and baking spice.

 

If you want to take a deeper dive into cicerchiole, I recommend that you consult Zanini De Zita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (University of California Press, 2009) and The Geometry of Pasta (Quirk, 2010) by Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy. Zanini De Vita covers cicerchiole in the Encyclopedia’s Entry No. 203 for Quadrucci. She writes that the small pasta generally contains wheat flour, eggs and sometimes nutmeg. In central and southern Italy, cooks often make this pasta using just flour and water. In Italy’s Marche region, they mix wheat and corn flour to create their version called quadrelli pelosi. Lazio’s cicerchiole often contain wheat and emmer flour.

Looking at the above regional variations, one might conclude that authenticity springs from necessity and availability. So especially at a time like this, use what you have on hand. And if that’s dried pasta, cook it in salted water then add the pasta to the cooked chickpeas (or beans or farro or barley or lentils).

 

Back to cicerchiole. The Geometry of Pasta says the small square pasta measure 3mm by 3mm by .5mm. Kenedy writes that the little squares are “…the simplest shape to make, but rather fiddly and so easier to buy.” This may be true in normal times, but these are not normal times. 

Pasta Lunga Dough for a Torchio

I first made the pasta dough featured in this post on World Pasta Day—25 October—back in 2016. The dough contains a blend of freshly milled and bolted White Sonora flour (here) and Organic Artisan Baker’s Craft bread flour from Central Milling. I developed this dough for use in a torchio pasta press (here) and it works extremely well when extruding long forms of pasta (e.g., spaghetti, spaghetti quadri (here) and even capelli d’angelo (angel hair)). 

I previously covered my approach to milling (here) and bolting flour (here). The following recipe, which makes enough pasta to serve 2 or 3, includes precise weights based upon the results that I consistently achieve with my KoMo Fidibus Classic grain mill and Gilson Company No. 40 and No. 50 stainless steel test screens. Different milling and bolting set-ups will yield different results. Treat the following recipe as a guide and adjust, adding more or less of an ingredient, as necessary. It may help to know that the 85 grams of twice bolted White Sonora flour described in step 8, below, constitutes approximately 57% of the total flour used to make the pasta dough.

1) Place a medium-sized pouring bowl on a scale, tare the scale and put 275 grams of White Sonora wheat berries into the bowl.

2) Adjust your grain mill to a fine—but not its finest—setting. On my KoMo Fidibus Classic mill, I set the grind indicator near the top left mitre joint of the face of the mill’s housing.

3) Place a clean sheet of parchment paper (approximately 13” x 15”) on your work surface under the mill’s spout. The paper needs to be large enough to catch the flour that falls through the bolting sieves.

4) Put a full height No. 40 sieve on top of the parchment paper under the mill’s spout. Turn on the mill and add the 275 grams of White Sonora wheat berries into the mill’s hopper. While the mill processes the flour into the sieve, replace the pouring bowl onto the scale, which should read zero.

5) After the mill finishes grinding the wheat berries, lift the sieve with one hand and lightly tap the sieve against the heel of your other hand so that the flour moves back and forth across the screen’s face and flour gently falls onto the parchment paper. Stop bolting when the falling flour begins to slightly darken and the remaining material in the sieve looks coarse compared to the bolted flour.

6) Pick up the parchment sheet on either side and carefully pour the sifted flour into the bowl on the scale. 275 grams of Sonora White wheat berries milled and sifted as described above produces approximately 130 grams of flour.

7) Replace the parchment sheet onto the work surface and put a full height No. 50 sieve on top of the sheet. Pour the ±130 grams of flour in the bowl into the sieve and replace the bowl onto the scale. Bolt the flour through the No. 50 sieve onto the parchment paper. Again, the material in the sieve will slowly darken as the flour makes its way through the screen, leaving behind bran and other material.

8) Carefully lift the sheet and pour the sifted flour into the bowl on the scale. You should have approximately 85 grams of White Sonora flour. 

9) Add 65 grams of Central Milling Organic Artisan Baker’s Craft flour to the White Sonora flour. You want the flour mixture (i.e., the bolted White Sonora flour and the Artisan Baker’s Craft flour) to weigh 150 grams. Stir the flour to blend.

10) Add 1 whole large egg and 2 egg yolks to a glass beaker and beat together. The egg mixture should weigh approximately 100 grams.

11) Put the 150 grams of flour into the bowl of a standing mixer equipped with a mixing paddle.

12) Turn on the mixer and set it at its lowest speed. Very—and this is key—slowly add small amounts of the beaten egg mixture into the flour. Patiently wait between each small pour to allow the mixer to incorporate the egg into the flour.

Most likely you will not need to add all of the egg mixture to get the proper consistency for this particular pasta dough. On average I use approximately 85 to 88 grams of the egg mixture. The dough should look clumpy, but not too dry. After removing the dough from the mixer’s bowl, you should be able to form it into a ball that retains its shape. The dough will feel a little dry, but don’t worry, it will soften as it hydrates in step 13, below. From start to finish, the step of adding the egg mixture to form the dough takes me about 6 minutes, more or less.

13) When the dough comes together as described in step 12, above, turn off the mixer and form the dough into a log shape that will fit into the torchio’s chamber. Very tightly wrap the dough log twice in plastic film and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. Tightly wrapping the dough helps the dough to hydrate.

14) After 30 minutes, unwrap the dough, screw in your chosen torchio die and place the dough in the torchio’s chamber.  Set the piston into the chamber and turn the handle. Cut the pasta at your desired length. The pasta should feel dry and not unworkably sticky. When making a very thin noodle such as capelli d’angelo, I dust the cut pasta with semolina flour before placing the pasta on a tray to dry out a little. 

Although this dough works particularly well when making long noodles—this is my go-to recipe for thin soup noodles—don’t limit this dough to making pasta lunga; the dough works great for rigatoni (here), gramigna (here) and, well…a lot of different pasta shapes. The combination of the soft White Sonora’s elasticity and Central Milling’s hard bread flour produces a fantastic tasting pasta well-suited for a torchio. If you want to roll this dough with a pasta machine, soften up the dough by adding more of the egg mixture. If you do not own a grain mill and want to try out the recipe, consider using Hayden Flour Mills White Sonora Type 00 flour.

Happy Pasta Day, everyone!

Flour Lab by Adam Leonti

The Fall 2019 Cookbook Season has arrived! On 10 September 2019, Clarkson Potter released Flour Lab by Adam Leonti with Katie Parla. On 24 September we’ll see American Sfoglino by Evan Funke with—again—Katie Parla (Chronicle Books) and The Gaijin Cookbook by Ivan Orkin and Chris Ying (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In October the floodgates burst open. I look forward to reading: Alpine Cooking by Meredith Erickson (Ten Speed Press); South by Sean Brock (Artisan); Pasta Grannies by Vicky Bennison (Hardie Grant); Poilâne by Apollonia Poilâne (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Lavash by Kate Leahy, John Lee and Ara Zada (Chronicle Books). I’ll hold back on my picks in November’s crop, but will note that November’s offerings look as exciting as October’s.

If you frequent this site, you know that I spend a lot of my energy exploring fresh pasta and home-milling flour for pasta making. When I heard about Flour Lab by Adam Leonti and its section on pasta, I became pretty excited. Few books meaningfully cover making pasta with freshly milled flour, the exception being Paul Bertolli’s 2003 classic Cooking by Hand. Leonti worked with Marc Vetri and both clearly know pasta.

Although Flour Lab contains a section on pasta, it is not and does not bill itself as a pasta-centric text. The book’s subtitle reads “[a]n at-home guide to baking with freshly milled grains.” Flour Lab divides into six chapters: The State of Grain; Cooking with Fresh Flour; Making Bread; Making Pasta; Making Pizza; and Making Pastry, Cookies, and Cakes.

Flour Lab’s Making Pasta chapter runs about 50 pages long.  It opens with this sentence: “If you’re a novice, I want you to forget about recipes for a moment and instead get acquainted with how dough feels beneath your fingertips.” Sound advice. 

The challenge of a book like Flour Lab lies with having something meaningful to offer beginning, intermediate and experienced pasta makers. Based upon my reading of the book’s milling overview and pasta section, Flour Lab will satisfy and best serve the motivated novice and, perhaps, a slightly more seasoned maker. Beginners should not expect to be spoon-fed, but rather will be exposed to milling basics and possibilities. The real teaching comes from experimentation and the lessons gleaned.

Flour Lab rewards the attentive reader. For example, when attempting Leonti’s pasta recipes take note of his recommendations regarding Extraction (on pages 119 and 120 of the US hardcover first edition). He writes “[y]ou can make all of the pasta recipes here with 100% bran inclusion, but I recommend sifting out the bran, then adding a percentage back to taste.” He continues: for a pasta paired with a “hearty Bolognese, I add 5% of the weight of the flour—for example, I add 25 grams of bran to 500 grams of flour.” Personally, I think this important information belongs on the same page as the pasta dough recipes or with the pasta sauce recipes found at the end of the chapter. I understand that the amount of bran that a pasta maker wants in a pasta dough is, in part, a matter of personal taste. However, I believe the beginning pasta maker working with whole-grain flour will benefit from more guidance. A pasta novice trying to make Leonti’s whole-egg dough with 100% bran inclusion Sonora wheat will certainly be in for a wild ride.

The more advanced pasta maker should appreciate the legwork that Leonti put into the book’s Resources section and review his grain recommendations.  However, I don’t believe the advanced maker is his intended audience. In my opinion, Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand will better serve the more experienced pasta maker interested in using home-milled flour. With this said, any book that propels the home-milling movement forward deserves praise. If you are a new or intermediate pasta maker with an interest in home-milling flour, definitely check out Flour Lab.