Propelling a local pasta renaissance
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Buca’s David Marcelli has been making pasta his entire life, but there is one kind that eludes him. Su filindeu, or “Threads of God,” is the world’s rarest pasta shape. It is made by hand-pulling dough into 256 thread-thin strands then layering it to resemble a delicate sheet of cheesecloth.
Only three women on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia know how to make it, but only one — Paola Abraini — is currently making it. Once she retires — she is in her 60s — that’s it for the pasta. Chef Jamie Oliver visited the island in 2016 to try to make it, and pasta conglomerate Barilla has tried to duplicate it with a machine. Both were unsuccessful.
Undeterred, for the past few years Marcelli has been teaching himself to make su filindeu at the King St. W. restaurant while wowing diners with other kinds. He is perfecting his own as well as making pastas known in different regions of Italy, such as lorighittas, braided rings from Sardinia, and trofie, a twisted specialty of Liguria in the north.
While Marcelli is coming up with shapes for Buca diners, over on Geary Ave., an industrial area in the Wallace-Emerson neighbourhood, Leandro Baldassarre of Famiglia Baldassarre is supplying some of the city’s top restaurants with his own fresh pasta.
And on Roncesvalles Ave., Sarah and Christopher Terpstra, owners of Alimentari, are proving that handmade pastas can be a family weeknight dinner solution, not just a high-end restaurant meal.
Just as pizza has experienced a renaissance in Toronto with the opening of regional-specific pies such as Pizzeria Libretto, Falasca SPQR and Descendant Pizza, the city’s pasta makers are enlightening diners with variations of the Italian staple that typically contains just eggs, flour, salt and water.
Marcelli’s parents are originally from Monte San Giovanni Campano, a small town south of Rome. As a kid in Toronto, he helped his mom make fettuccine but it wasn’t until he was cooking at a restaurant in the Italian central region of Umbria a decade ago that he first looked at pasta as an art form. Their tortellinis were delicately steamed like dim sum, he says.
He returned to Toronto and honed his pasta-making skills at the now-closed Scarpetta and at midtown’s Zucca before becoming Buca’s pasta and bread maker more than four years ago.
The pasta shape is important on a practical level: Different shapes give off different textures to match the heartiness of the sauce (a finer noodle goes better with broth, while a thicker pasta will hold up against a ragu, for example), and some shapes have nooks and crannies to trap the sauce. But since diners also eat with their eyes, a particularly ornamental pasta doesn’t hurt. Each shape also hails from a different region of Italy, giving each province or town their own culinary identity, or tourism boost if it’s a shape that’s hard to duplicate such as the su filindeu, where hardcore diners from around the world make the pilgrimage.
At Buca, Marcelli plays with flours — among them fava bean, chickpea and an heirloom Durham wheat from a mill in Simcoe County that adds a subtle nuttiness and extra bite to the texture. The deep crimson pork blood spaghetti, which has a hint of iron flavour, is a staple at Buca at $24.
“A good pasta should hold up on its own, sauce or no sauce,” says Marcelli, pinching the pasta into a shape resembling a fleur-de-lis, a riff on the dia- mond-shaped cresc’ tajat. “You should be able to taste everything: the flour, the egg. It should hold its shape, it shouldn’t be drowned in sauce.”
He serves his cresc’ tajat in a white-wine tomato sauce with chopped octopus, mussels and cranberry beans.
At his corner work station, Marcelli compares samples of the real su filindeu with his attempts. His version is admirable — he has stretched the dough out to 128 strands so far — but the strands aren’t as fine yet.
Still, the 33-year-old isn’t not giving up. He shares his pasta-making trials on Instagram (@pastiodavid). He is active on social media, and likes to see what pasta makers around the world are doing.
“It also lets diners see more of what’s out there and what’s being made at the restaurant before eating there,” he says. “There’s now a story behind the dish, and I get inspired whenever I open Instagram.”
Baldassarre knows all about the Instagram effect as his Famiglia Baldassarre pasta shop has recently been seeing half- hour lineups on weekends. The one-time pasta maker at Splendido now makes pastas for about 30 GTA restaurants such as Piano Piano and Note Bene.
Baldassarre, 34, was quietly serving fresh pastas to nearby office workers, when word got out. His production facility, which opened in 2016, is near the Galleria Mall — loved ironically by hipsters — and has all the elements of a hot spot for the food-obsessed, so crowds appeared outside.
He now has a small licensed restaurant on site openly serving lunch to diners who make the trek for a taste of Baldassarre’s egg-rich pastas typical of the Bologna region. A plate of cooked pasta typically costs $12.
Since it’s still primarily a wholesale business, the menu is dictated by the orders the shop has to fill that day. Sometimes it’s long delicate strands of tagliolini, other times it’s pillowy ricotta-stuffed tortelloni.
“What we do here is a good representation of what people want in their food — you see everything being made from start to finish and there’s no hidden ingredients. That’s what Italian food is,” Baldassarre says as he rolls out sheets of golden dough as much as six metres in length with the sheen and stretch of fabric.
Baldassare, who was born to Italian parents, got his start working for the now-closed fine-dining institution Splendi- do. He travelled to Italy in 2007 cooking for the three Michelinstarred Dal Pescatore and came back wanting to start his own pasta business.
His former boss chef David Lee set Baldassarre up with a basement pasta-making kitchen on College St., and in 2010 Baldassarre was selling his handmade pastas to chefs across the city.
In 2016, he moved to the larger Geary location to meet rising demand.
Baldassarre is reluctant to list off the restaurants he supplies. Foodie culture has made it taboo for restaurants to admit something is not made inhouse, even when outsourced to a small-scale maker at the top of its game.
“There are some places that are proud to say their pastas are from here,” he says. “It’s not taking a step down by buying our product. You’re still supporting a local business, and the reality is that not every restaurant can afford to train or hire their own baker or pasta maker.”
But handmade pastas aren’t just for restaurants. Husbandand-wife team Christopher and Sarah Terpstra opened the kidfriendly Alimentari restaurant and Italian grocer in the former Foodliner space on the Roncesvalles strip last year, catering to parents looking for a quick weeknight dinner solution. They sells six to eight pastas at any given time — a mix of short and long pastas and two stuffed pastas such as scarpinocc, a shoe-shaped stuffed pasta from the northern Lombardy region and doppio, a stuffed pasta with two fillings. Customers can take it home to cook for about $2.25 per100 g or eat in for an average price of $16 per plate. The carbonara is cheesy umami heaven.
“We have a 2-year-old and it’s important for us to eat together as a family, so we wanted this to be a family-friendly place,” says Sarah, 31. “We want (our son) Hugo to eat what we eat, and kids what to eat what their parents eat.”
Christopher, 28, is the son of Dutch and Irish parents, but his earliest childhood memories are of Italy. His father, head of the University of Toronto’s history department, would take his family to Italy on long research trips. Christopher went to elementary school near Florence where he developed a taste for Italian food. He was the pasta maker at Buca when it opened in 2008 and later met — and fell in love — with Sarah while working on a farm in Tuscany. They got married in Toronto in 2012 and started selling their own pastas at farmers’ markets before opening Alimentari.
Christopher credits social media for piquing the interest in rare and obscure pastas and the rise of Airbnb for helping small shops like his flourish. “A lot more people are shopping at places like ours to take ingredients back to their Airbnb to cook,” he says. “It’s part of the experience of travelling now. It’s not just eating out, but also checking out the local markets and food stores.”
Watching these pasta makers roll, pinch and twist dough into intricate and uniform pieces by the hundreds in minutes is mesmerizing. It’s easy to see why diners are lining up for a taste, even while carb-counting diets reign supreme. Thanks to social media, foodies are getting a deeper understanding of a centuries-old art form and watching as it is taken to the next level.
“You see everything being made ... and there’s no hidden ingredients. That’s what Italian food is.” LEANDRO BALDASSARRE PASTA SHOP OWNER