Arkansas’ little Italy
I was approached by a company to try a boxed pasta made in Arkansas, and write about it. After reading a review of the companies (the marketer and Pozza’s Pasta) I realized I was interested. After all, the state of Arkansas is not known to anyone I have talked with, as a place to find good pasta.
How did Arkansas’ Italian connection start?
What really interested me at first, was also the history of the town the pasta comes from, Tontitown, Arkansas. A bit of this town’s history is described on the pasta box and at their website but mainly indicates that in 1898 Father Pietro Bandini brought nearly forty Italian families to Tontitown, Arkansas. Well that intrigued me enough to look into this a bit more.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, writes that Father Bandini is remembered for his life’s work on improving the Italian immigrants’ lives here in the US and for the founding of Tontitown. Evidently, he named the town in honor of an Italian explorer Henry de Tonti, who was one of the founders of the first European settlement in Arkansas in 1686.
Looking it up on Wikipedia it appears that Tontitown (now with ~2k population) started with that large Catholic Italian immigrant community who felt that the terrain and climate reminded them of Northern Italy, and to no surprise, the area initially became known for its grapes and wine; and now for its annual Grape Festival..
Of course the state, just as our country, has changed from then. Now the state has less than 5% immigrant population. Of that 5%, the top countries of origin are now: 38.1% from Mexico, 12.8% El Salvador, 6.7% India, 4% Guatemala, and 3.6% from China.
Pozza to Mhoon
I then looked up the history of Pozza’s Pasta specifically, and found that it was started in the 70’s by Felix Pozza, who died just recently in 2018. He mainly sold his pasta to the many restaurants in or near his town, and appeared to be an important person, loved by his community. In the summer of 2005, Lucius and Alison Mhoon purchased Pozza’s Pasta from him, and carried on with the same traditional Pozza’s Pasta recipe. But they started expanding operations, and now have an active retail website.
So I was intrigued. How would living in the Ozarks for many generations change the approach to pasta? I have ordered pasta many times from online sources like Amazon, how would this experience compare? The only way to find out was to order the food.
Pasta by Post
I received two boxes of pasta in the mail, one labeled 100% Whole Wheat Handmade Italian Spaghetti, and another labeled Spinach Handmade Italian Spaghetti. Both were 12 ounces of dried pasta.
According to their advertising and website, Pozza’s Pasta has been making handmade pasta since 1977. They write: Our story is rich in Italian heritage and old-world traditions that take us back to the cucinas (kitchens) of our Italian ancestors. Their pioneering spirit and desire for a better life brought them to settle Tontitown, Arkansas. Here, they thrived by doing what they knew best – farming and cooking. The rich Italian traditions of using fresh, natural ingredients grown and harvested from the land complemented our ancestor’s centuries-old skills of creating delicious meals in the kitchen.
All the information I could find on the town indicates that while it was once a very agricultural region, it is now a modern US suburb with various industries. But the homey foods we love, often do have an aura of romance, tradition, and nature. The marketing of their product certainly does that!
Ingredients + Technique
Their ingredients are simple, local eggs and AP flour (as opposed to semolina flour); with no added salt, preservatives, or chemicals. That is it. The choice of flour is interesting as I read that semolina flour makes pasta firmer, so using AP flour is perhaps what makes the dough softer, perhaps more porous as some indicate.
Most of the dough work appears to be done by small machines and hand; essentially in smallish batches. They use small machines to help mix, flatten and roll out the dough, knead by hand, and then use a table top machine to cut the dough into strips. Finally, the strips of pasta are hung over dowels and are allowed to slowly air dry, rather than forced drying techniques used by larger industrial companies (1). Their claim is that the results of their old-world effort is better pasta.
What is in a Name?
But, their pasta is flat. Wikipedia clearly says that spaghetti is a long, thin, solid, cylindrical pasta, and fettuccine is flat pasta. But Pozza’s Pasta calls their flat fettuccine-like pasta “spaghetti.” So, I wrote to them asking about this puzzle.
Pozza’s Pasta co-owner Alison Mhoon responded very quickly: Thanks for reaching out about our pastas. We actually determine the pasta “cut” by the noodle’s width. We use the same process that our relatives used when they moved here from Italy. In that process, our pastas are not extruded through a press like most traditional American pastas. Instead, we roll them out to the desired thickness and use a cutter head that cuts each noodle to a width of 2mm for spaghetti. For reference, our linguini is 4mm wide and our fettucine is cut to 6mm. I hope this helps!
Visual Inspection
Regular Pasta: I took out a box of regular pasta. When I inspected the industrial box some of the pasta was broken, and all of it gave off an industrial look and feel. That is, the pasta has a smooth single tone yellow-gold color and texture, and everything is chopped to fit perfectly in the box containers. The pasta is heavy, solid, and it takes some effort to split a handful in half to fit a smallish pot. The box of spaghetti I had was round, and the regular box of fettuccine I had was flat.
Pozza’s Pasta: The boxes of Pozza’s Pasta arrived un-smashed. Yea. When I opened the Pozza box I had a couple of tablespoons of flour spill out, so be careful and open in the kitchen. Pozza’s Pasta spaghetti was immediately different.
The package is housing varied, but similar, lengths of looped pasta that gives it a “right off the drying rack” look. The Pozza pasta is a bit brittle when removing from the box. What I mean by that is, if handled roughly, one can easily snap the pasta strands. But mostly I saw that their spaghetti was flat (like fettuccine), which brought a memory I recalled of an Italian experience.
- I was invited to visit a friends family in the middle-part of Italy, and eventually was asked to stay the night and have dinner with them as well. At one point during the day, I observed their grandmother — armed with a bowl of flour, an egg, rolling pin + knife — totally hand-make pasta. The pasta was skinny and flat. She moved the pasta to a drying rack next to the house so it could air dry in the sun. That night we ate a bowl of homemade pasta and marinara sauce. Best Italian dish ever!
The Pozza’s Pasta spinach color looks more home made than industrial, and wonderfully varies in color just a bit, while the wheat was more color consistent; and both were thin enough to be almost porous. The result was that overall the pasta is very light in terms of weight and sauce adheres to it very well.
Cooking + Eating
I cooked a small sampling of both on the same night. But first, I tasted it raw, and then my spouse and I tasted a bit of each pasta cooked (per the package directions), and then with a basil and pine nut pesto. My spouse indicated that the Spinach pasta was preferred, and after a taste noted it was light, and tasted fresh. I ate mainly the whole wheat and its texture was clean, not as floury and gummy as regular pasta. So it had a great mouthfeel, and it really did soak up the pesto.
The next day, the leftover pasta was reheated using the microwave, then the next day by a quick-fry in butter on the stove, with some red pepper flakes and parsley. It reheated well in both cases, and was not clumped together as one mass.
Overall the highest praise I can give any pasta is that it enhanced the dish, rather than just served as a vehicle for the sauce. This is, to my palate, very good pasta. I have already put in an order for more.
Buying the Pasta
Pozza Pasta: On 2/11/20 the spinach box sells for $5.99 or, the Sample Box (with 4 packs: traditional spaghetti, spinach spaghetti, traditional linguini, tomato and basil linguine) is listed for $24.99. If you want to try this pasta use 30OFF (the number thirty, and then OFF) for 30% off the price at checkout.
Give it a try and let me know what you think. Or if you have suggestions for excellent foods let me know. Testing this food was fun, I felt like one of those cooks on test kitchen. Not the ones in front of the camera, but the ones you see in the background trying different things to make good food.
—Patty
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TIP: Advice to new cooks: Read your recipes to understand what ingredients are needed and what you will be doing. This way you can also time your dish. Learn to halve a recipe and to double it to meet your needs. Do the dishes as you go to lesson the mess. And have all the basic equipment you need to cook.
NEWS: Huffpost: Reports that thousands of households are recreating their own “climate victory gardens,” referencing WWII efforts. They wrote about one group: one of over 2,000 organizations and individuals across the country growing food in climate victory gardens ― be it on a balcony or in a backyard, a community garden or larger urban farm project ― in a bid to mitigate the climate crisis. In WWII these gardens were everywhere and produced ~40% of all the consumed veggies in the US.
Reminder: A cook’s veggie workstation includes a chef’s knife, a wooden cutting board (maple or bamboo), a discard bowl, bench scraper, salt + pepper, and a rag for cleaning messes. Then, you add equipment to it, based on what you are cooking.