Make your pasta as flavour-packed as your sauce

At BakeryBits we are really enjoying this extraordinary artisan pasta, and it’s locally made. Meet the The South Devon Pasta Co, turning heritage grains like Einkorn and Emmer into top-rate dry pasta that tastes delicious, cooks quickly, and uses grain grown by small producers in England, crafted into pasta within 48 hours of milling. No silos of old flour ageing away, instead all of the flavour and nutrients released from the grain during milling, made into pasta, and ready for you to enjoy.

Heritage Grain Pasta, 6 reasons to love it.

1. Heritage Grain Pasta is not a substitute for the 'white' supermarket kind, no more than sourdough is a substitute for sliced white bread. Heritage grain pasta is a rare and beautiful ingredient. Cook it lightly, serve it with your best and boldest ingredients, and you will impress your guests and have them begging to come back for more.

2. Our Heritage Grain Pasta is in essence a wholemeal pasta, but one little known fact is that many Italian cooks and top chefs use wholemeal pasta often. Ok, white pasta is far more common. But all the refined-flour cooking and baking we see in Italy, and in our take on Italian cooking in the UK and US, is very much a 20th century thing. Before this, Italy was filled with working watermills and windmills using diverse grains – like farro, saraceno (buckwheat), maize, even chestnuts – and slow-milling special flours with distinctive flavours. Today these flours are still being made into exceptional pasta for top Italian chefs. Luckily, now you can enjoy this range of pasta, made from heritage grains.

3. Wholemeal pasta got a bit of a bad reputation because – cooking it like a regular pasta and tipping in a jar of super bland “Generic Italiano” sauce, then praying it would somehow turn into trattoria magic does not work and ends up tasting more like a bran-flake bolognese. The secret, as great Italian chefs say, is (a) keep it simple, and (b) keep it vibrant, especially when you’re using complex grains and flours in Italian cooking. Got some super-virgin olive oil and dark squishy fragrant olives? They’re perfect together with Heritage Grain Pasta. Got extra-creamy gorgonzola or even a rich buttery stilton? They’re the business, just let them melt slightly into the hot pasta sauce.

4. Having a variety of ancient and interesting grains coupled with a multitude of shapes to try out gives you the scope for creating the dishes that suits your taste.  

5. You want Heritage Grain Pasta magnificence? Try the Casarecce or Sedano Rigati, bold shapes made through a bronze “die” that gives the extruded surface a rough absorbent texture that soaks up flavour while cooking evenly and quickly. Giving you pasta that’s molto buono without the mush.

6. Does it come from a responsible, sustainable and utterly top-notch company? Absolutely, we wouldn’t sleep at night otherwise. The Fresh Flour Company pay their UK farmers a fair price for their grain, and they make sure that the standards of welfare and agriculture are respectable (though not necessarily certified organic).

Choose the Heritage Grain pasta that’s right for you. And get your creative mind working on how to wow your family and friends with it.