Casarecce Pasta — 12 oz (Sfoglina)
Casarecce means "homemade," and the name tells you what the shape is for. A short, twisted scroll with a groove running down the middle, rolled the way a cook might have done it by hand at the kitchen counter.
That little channel is the whole point. It grabs pesto, holds onto a chunky sauce, and traps bits of sausage and roasted vegetables in the curl so no bite comes up empty. It's a shape that makes a simple sauce taste like someone worked harder than they did.
Toss it with fresh Italian basil from the Hub, olive oil, and a handful of cheese for a pesto that tastes like July. Slice up Rome's Hot Italian Sausage links, brown them, and stir them through with roasted vegetables for a one-pan dinner with some attitude. Melt a Yoder Garlic Basil chevre log into the hot pasta and the whole thing turns creamy and tangy without a drop of cream.
Good for: pesto, sausage and roasted vegetable pasta, tomato sauces with texture, a quick weeknight dinner, bringing to a potluck, dinner for two that looks like effort.
Meet the maker: Sfoglina, Denver
A sfoglina is the Italian word for a woman who rolls out sheets of fresh pasta by hand. It's also the name Jesse Albertini gave to the Denver pasta company she started in the summer of 2020.
She had planned a brick-and-mortar Italian shop. The pandemic changed the plan, so she started with what she could do: make pasta, dry it, and sell it online and at markets. What she kept coming back to was the grain. She set out to build her pasta around heritage and local grains, and the farmers who grow them.
The pasta is pushed through brass dies, which leaves a rough surface that grabs sauce, then dried slowly for days instead of hours. Today she makes hundreds of pounds a week in a Denver kitchen, for restaurants and home cooks.
I chose Sfoglina for the same reason I mill einkorn to order and stock CastleDough's fresh-milled Colorado wheat bread. Good food starts with the grain, and with the people who care about it.
Store in a cool, dry pantry. Salt the water generously and save a cup of the cooking water before you drain. A splash of it turns sauce silky and helps it cling to every groove.