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Dried pasta pales next to Stellina’s hand-cut, freshly flavored variations
• by Pat Eby • Photo by Josh Monken
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Before I moved to St. Louis and began shopping on The Hill, I didn’t know there was anything other than dried, commercially produced semolina pasta, plain. If you haven’t tried it, the taste of fresh pasta is a revelation. It’s toothsome. It’s tender. It’s simple and fast to cook. And locals now have a new source for fresh, handcrafted, organic pasta at Stellina Pasta Café.
The basic ingredients of all pastas are flour and water. Industrially produced dried pasta relies on the protein-rich durum wheat semolina flour. The composition of semolina makes it ideal for pastas that need to be dried. Less water is required to bind the dough, resulting in faster drying. In addition, the gluten matrix of semolina flours is strong enough to take the beating of the machine extrusion process. The result is a tougher pasta with less breakage and lower water content.
Fresh pastas, on the other hand, can incorporate different types of flours, further expanding the taste combinations, and hand-kneaded doughs can also incorporate eggs, flavorings, salts and sometimes oils. At Stellina, Jamey and Lisa Tochtrop, who founded the company in 2005, use all-organic ingredients, from the Heartland Mills flours to the New Zealand sea salt.
Jamey Tochtrop first learned to make fresh pasta when he worked at an upscale catering company. “I fell into the pasta making,” he explained, “and I loved the process. I would spend eight or nine hours a day making pasta.” He began researching and making pasta at home, seeking new flavor combinations and shapes. His wife proved to be a good critic. “She’s good with flavors, and she knows what’s needed, whether it’s in the taste or even in the mouth feel of the fillings,” he said.
Tochtrop is proud of Stellina’s whole-wheat-walnut pasta. “I probably tried 80 recipes before I got that one right,” he said. He uses a combination of whole-wheat and semolina flours. The walnuts are puréed “almost to a butter” before he incorporates them into the dough. He then cuts the dough into shapes such as linguini, tagliatelle and pappardelle.
At the café, fresh lasagna, fettuccini and agnolotti are available in a rotating variety of pasta doughs including, but not limited to, whole-wheat-walnut, lemon-pistachio, golden and toasted flax seed, sunflower-tomato-basil and herbed rosemary-lemon. The fillings include pancetta with leeks, blue cheese with artichokes, wild mushrooms, ricotta with spinach, goat cheeses and tomatoes, fresh in the summer and sun-dried in winter.
For now, Stellina only offers pastas cut from flat sheets of hand-kneaded dough. “Pasta aficionados prefer laminate [or shapes that aren’t extruded],” Tochtrop noted. But not every restaurant can pay for hand-cut pasta, and the softer, handcrafted dough isn’t strong enough for extrusion. Down the road, the Tochtrops may produce extruded pasta shapes, but only if they can maintain standards of the highest quality and taste.
This summer I bought Stellina’s fresh agnolotti filled with goat cheese and spinach as an appetizer for a special dinner party. Tochtrop described the shape as similar to a priest’s hat. The priest would have be about the size of a Beanie Baby to wear this hat, which comes in at just under 2 inches long and about 1 inch tall.
Tochtrop suggested cooking the agnolotti by plunging the pieces into rapidly boiling water just until they float to the top, then carefully transferring them to a medium-hot skillet prepped with a bit of olive oil and butter, browning them lightly and finally saucing them. The pasta was delicate, the filling sharp and tangy, and my fresh tomato sauce the perfect complement. My dinner guests were delighted.
The Tochtrops will sell small quantities of their specialty flours like semolina, spelt and whole-wheat upon request. In a typical month, Stellina uses 700 to 1,000 pounds of flour, 1,500 eggs, 3 gallons of olive oil and five pounds of New Zealand sea salt. And that doesn’t include the seeds, nuts, herbs and flavorings.
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