What's a Pasta Factory Like? Inside Morelli.

Nested racks of pasta in the drying room.

Morelli’s factory is a connected series of five rooms. The pasta comes in as raw grain in the first and leaves as case packs of pasta in the fifth.

The durum grain, primarily from Italy with supplemental grain from Canada when necessary, is held in three silos in the warehouse. Vacuum hoses pull it to room two.

Room two. Here the durum semolina is mixed with water and, for the pasta we buy, wheat germ. The germ is perishable and held in their coffin freezer, which looks just like the one we have on the pick and pack line. When I visited there was one man mixing chiles for a spicy pasta. He’s one of only two men I see in the factory, both doing heavy jobs. The rest, about twenty more, are women.

Room three is very hot. It feels like the Bakehouse bread side. The pasta is coming through the machine in cut pieces of penne, red from the chiles that were mixed in. I can see the big bronze die that forms them. It looks about ten inches across, a couple inches thick. The bronze die is traditional and key to the pasta’s exterior texture. Feel a piece of Morelli pasta and its surface is rough, not slick like the pasta you get from newer Teflon dies that are widely used. Its more pleasant in the mouth and holds sauce better. My understanding is bronze dies cost more, need to be replaced more often, and produce pasta more slowly, hence their demise.

The penne falls already cut out of the machine onto drying screens. They’re about the size of half a screen door, wood-rimmed, with a nylon screen. They stack on top of each other like bread racks. Two people do the stacking and one — the other man in the building — wheels them away. It takes more people when they’re making a long shape, like linguine, because they have to cut that kind of pasta by hand.

I quickly learned the heat comes from the drying chambers which line one side of the room. They look like walk-ins, silver with big doors, colorful buttons, blinking lights, inscrutable numbers. There are about six of them, each eight feet square.

The dryers are the other key to the pasta’s interior texture. They are set at 44 Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) and the pasta spends 24-36 hours there. It can be dried faster if the temperatures were higher. The slow drying enhances the texture and flavor, though, to be honest, I’m not quite sure how yet. Our Italian and English translation wasn’t doing the job there. More to come.

The fourth room is full of people, twelve women, all packing pasta. No big machines or anything. Just trays, scoops and bags. Each bag is filled, weighed, and riveted shut. This was pretty remarkable to me. I mean, this business has been around 150 years. These guys are obviously smart business folks to stay around for that long. Giovanna told me the great grandfather moved the factory to this location in 1907 in part to be close to the rail line — it’s across the street — to save on costs. Pretty savvy move. All that time and smarts, though, and they still haven’t found a better way to package pasta than a person working by hand. It reminds me of what lean guru Eduardo told me early on when we were working together. “Mo, the most flexible machine in the world is a human being.”

The last room is, you guessed it, inventory. Cases of pasta stacked everywhere, though in reality it was probably only a few hundred cases and they looked to be leaving soon. From here it’s out the door to the loading zone, which is so tiny it makes the back dock of the deli look luxurious. The door opens on an alley about a dozen feet wide with tiny Fiats parked on one side against a wall. It’s Italy, though. That's a huge amount of space, so of course a giant eighteen wheeler delivering grain has found a way to wedge itself between the door and the cars.

A Visit to Morelli Pasta

I took a trip to San Romano last week to visit the small pasta facory of Morelli. It’s about an hour due west of Florence in western Tuscany. They’ve been making pasta there for about a hundred years — and that’s their second location! They moved here after a fifty year run in a small village nearby. Now if a hundred year old factory has you thinking cobwebs and cobble stones, you can scratch that image from your mind. While not exactly high tech — they still bag everything by hand, as you can see in the picture — it’s bright and shockingly clean, with a glossy green floor.

Even though the Morellis have been making pasta for almost 150 years we just started carrying them this summer, in the current catalog. I was especially excited about their pasta with wheat germ. It’s the only one of its kind that I’m aware of. Most pastas are made from fully refined flour where the germ is removed. In other words, most pasta is kind of like white bread. For a few of their pastas the Morellis add germ back in. The quantities of germ are relatively small — 3.2% for the tacconi and over double that for the ricciolina, which also has bran — so it is not overwhelmingly wheaty. You can catch wafts of wheat aroma when you boil it. The flavor is what I might call “gently rustic,” something you don’t want to cover up with too many other flavors .

Morelli is collectively run by siblings Antonio, Marco and Lucia, the fifth generation to have the honors. They are in their 40’s and 50’s, slim and trim (take that, Atkins diet). They split up roles. Marco handles the wheat buying side of the business. Antonio, the pasta making and sales. Antonio’s wife, Giovanna, manages all the export. Their father is still involved — he popped his head in and said hello — and there was even a teenage regazzo (boy) hanging around. Pretty solidly a family business.

I take it as a good sign that the family totally loves their pasta and eats it, as Giovanna told me, “every single day, often twice.” How do they like to serve it? I wasn’t surprised that the recipes were very simple, usually the case with folks who make foods with a lot of flavor on their own.

Antonio likes the ricciolina best, tossed with a bit of grated pecorino, olive oil and black pepper. Kind of like the Roman dish, cacio e pepe (sheep cheese and pepper), which is something I make a lot. Giovanna likes the paccheri (available at deli) with cherry tomatoes, basil and olive oil. She tosses the pasta in the olive oil that’s been cooked with a clove of garlic that then gets tossed out. She also really likes the tacconi simply with olive oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Tomorrow I’ll take you inside the factory for a quick tour.

Non-required Reading

In the last couple weeks I read two articles I felt were worth sharing.

The first — and most pertinent to ZMO — is How David Beats Goliath. Malcolm Gladwell describes how underdogs can even their chances when they're fighting the big guy. It's mostly about sports but the lessons can easily apply to, say, a small food company in the Midwest. He also manages to squeeze in an interesting diversion about batch vs flow that's kind of interesting. If you like what you read I'd be happy to share some more things penned by Gladwell, who is a damn compelling writer.

The second isn't related to ZMO but affects us all. It's an article called The Cost Conundrum. The author compares two towns in Texas, one of which has the highest health care bills of any city in America but doesn't seem to get any better health care. I read a lot of this kind of stuff and this is the best article I've ever read on America's health care system by far. It's so good Obama made it required reading in the Oval Office. I'm not requiring it at ZMO of course, but if you're interested in the subject I highly recommend it.

Harissa, Lemon, Olives & Olive Oil

When Majid Mahjoub was here last week, I asked him what's the simplest way he likes to eat harissa. He made a little picture. It's a dish with some harissa in the middle, surrounded by some sliced preserved lemons and olives, all swimming in some of his olive oil. Serve at room temperature, eat with a bit of bread.

Visiting Ortiz in Spain

Packing tuna tins by hand at Ortiz

I caught this quote last week in a review of a New York restaurant: Spain is "perhaps the only country in the world where it is desirable to serve food that comes in a can." The author was talking about tuna and kind of poking fun at the restaurant where, in her mind, the chef should be more ambitious about cooking than being a good shopper. Well, be that as it may, chances are the chef couldn't make tuna better than what you get in a tin from Ortiz. If you've had Spanish tinned tuna before, you'll know it's something very special. It's not a poor substitute for fresh tuna. It's got it's own thing going on. For me, it is more rewarding and interesting than the fresh stuff. Given the choice, I'd eat from a tin of Ortiz's tuna instead of taking a bite of tuna sushi any day.

It may be hard to think of tuna in a tin being worth eight or nine bucks when you see them at the supermarket for a buck. I think we should all be a bit more weirded out by the dollar tins, though. After all, fresh tuna is expensive. They're only caught wild (we haven't domesticated them yet) and tuna goes for $20-$30 a pound and more. It's almost always one of the most expensive fish in the case. Why should it be the cheapest food on the shelf?

Vanessa Sly just spent some time in Spain visiting food makers. One of her stops was at Ortiz, the tinners of our excellent Spanish tuna armada (for what it's worth, the Ortiz folks tell me we're the biggest seller of their tuna in America). Vanessa is taking her turn as guest blogger with some notes she made from her visit. Take it away, Ms Sly.

----------------------------------

Ortiz is a Basque company of 5 generations. They have several small factories along the northern coast of Spain near San Sebastian, as well as one in near Barcelona.

In Ondarroa there is a tuna factory in the oldest building they inhabit, circa 1891. Very nearby is the victim of the most recent bombing in Basque country, the Ondarroa Police station. The bombers called to inform them of their intentions, so the building was evacuated before the explosion, but it blew out the windows on the nearby buildings (including a school). It is currently being rebuilt- much progress made in the 6 months since the occurrence.

The tuna factory, unmarked from the exterior, is a multi story building. The foreman, a stern but good man, lives on one of the upper floors. One of the owners of the company was there, and elder woman. She greeted me with a smile and stated in Euskera that their goal was to have a tin of Ortiz tuna in the house of everyone in the world.

At street level the tuna are unloaded via truck from the Cantabrian sea's main port, Getaria. First they’re cut with a table saw, removing the heads, tails and separating the ventresca, the belly section, which is the finest cut of the entire fish. Yellowfin tuna can grow to upwards of 150k, but the smaller the fish, the closer the meat is to the ventresca, the better the overall quality is. They were working with yellowfins that were about 20-22k. The Ventresca is separated out and sent into a separate, quieter room for special processing by woman who skillfully clean each piece. The quiet is to facilitate their focus. It’s very detailed work. It’s one of the top tier jobs because of the value of the meat and the skill required.

The remaining fish bodies are first steamed and scraped to remove the skin, than sent via conveyor belt up to the second floor. They’re cut into sections with a guitar that is adjustable for varied sizes of chunk. From there, an assembly line of women pack tins and jars by hand, (pictured) discarding the flake for food service packaging. All waste is collected and sold to another company to make ‘farina’, flour, that serves various different purposes. Once hand packed, the jars are placed on a series of machines that fill them with oil and affixes the lids. They’re washed and the lots are recorded on the jars/tins just as before. From there they’re cauterized in a large steam chamber, and moved into an area for 40 days of quarantine to make sure the canning is up to standard. Labels are applied only when the orders are placed, to allow for the various different languages (Spanish, English, French, Italian, German) in the packaging.

Additional information:
• The yellowfin in oil jars come either kosher or not.
• Txakoli (cho-col-li) is a young white wine native to the San Sebastian region.
• There are about 2 million Basque in this region.
• There is a large Basque population in Boise Idaho, former sheep herders that came over 100 years ago. The mayor of Boise is Basque.

Signs: Visual vs Verbal

In a previous post I laid out different ways to communicate with signs, from fastest to slowest. Signs using images are faster to process than signs made with words. Said a different way, a good image can convey information more quickly than a set of written instructions. That might make intuitive sense, but here's a quick experiment to prove the case.

Take in this image. I have no idea what it would be a sign for. Maybe one that shows how awesome white pants and docksiders are. Anyway, look and count to ten, then turn your head away and start describing what you saw.

Did you draw the full picture with words in ten seconds? How about fifty seconds? Think about more details you saw. Can you keep talking about it for five minutes?

While the image isn't exactly a sign, it makes the point. What took ten seconds to soak in with your eyes took much longer to describe with your mouth. It also shows another thing about pictures: they display information densely. A thousand words, that's cake. Pictures can hold way more data than that, gobs of information that our brains process faster — and often more clearly — than words. When we untangle an image with language, the process is slow and prone to error.

Gelato

With ice cream season getting into high gear and our last gelato shipment of the year coming for Father's Day, I'll hand the reins over to guest blogger Tim Miller who recently made gelato with our resident ice cream maker, Josh. Here are some excerpts from his visit plus photos. Take it away, Tim.

The history of gelato dates back to the 16th century. As most stories go, it is credited to Bernardo Buontalenti, a native of Florence, who delighted the court of Caterina dei Medici with his creation. Italians are certainly credited with introducing gelato to the rest of Europe. Sicilian Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli was one of the first to sell it to the public. Summoned to Paris in 1686, he opened a café named after himself called Café Procope which quickly became one of the most celebrated haunts of literary France. In Italy meanwhile, the art of traditional gelato making was passed on from father to son, improved and perfected right up to the 20th century, when many gelato makers began to emigrate, taking their know-how to the rest of Europe.

The “mix” that Josh uses for each flavor was made prior to my arrival with fresh milk, cream and sugar. I learned that different mixes are used depending on the flavor of gelato that will be made. Fruit flavors such as strawberry are made with a mix that includes more fat since fruit is naturally fat free. Flavors like nocciola (hazelnut) and peanut butter are made with a mix that has less fat since nuts contain more fat.

I start my shift by helping label the many pint cups that will be used for selling gelato to some of the Creamery’s guests. The cups are dated on the bottom with an expiration of two months out. The Creamery also makes tubs of Gelato and “trays”. The trays are used by stores that sell Gelato from cases and are dated a month out expiration since they are exposed to higher temperatures while sitting in the cases. Josh has a spreadsheet he uses to determine how much Gelato of each flavor he needs to make today.

As the machine is churning and freezing the gelato, Josh starts breaking up pieces of burnt sugar that will be mixed in as it comes out of the machine. Josh says that he makes the burnt sugar next door at the Bakehouse. He puts a mix of sugar and water in a kettle, and cooks off the water to make burnt sugar syrup that will be blended into the mix before freezing. He also cooks sugar into dark pieces that almost look like smoked glass. This is his favorite because of its depth of flavor and because it's not too sweet. There’s almost a coffee flavor, due to the bitterness of the burnt sugar.

I soon get the opportunity to get my hands dirty scooping Gelato into the pint cups that I was labeling earlier. I start with Dulce de Leche that was made earlier. It looks SO delicious that I just want to scoop it out of the container with my hands and shovel it in my mouth!! Instead, I try to get it into the cups. Josh explains that I need to be careful to not overfill the cups and to use a paper towel if there is spillage (more on this later). After filling a sheet tray with some cups, I take them into the freezer where we rotate the old stock to the front and place the new stock behind. The freezer reminds me of that episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy gets stuck in a freezer and finally comes out with icicles hanging from her nose. Every time I step in, I get a little bit of panic, thinking “What if this time, I can't get out?"