- It's not really common to make new pasta shapes.
(upbeat music)
As people who are in the pasta business,
sometimes it can be a little stale,
you know, it's just a lot of penne, fusilli spaghetti.
So I think that's kind of why this took so well.
(upbeat music)
My day starts here at the factory
at about 7:45-8:00 o'clock.
Another day of pasta.
Just thinking about getting the day started
and envisioning a trouble-free day.
All right, let's head off to the plant.
That does not always happen,
but 80% of the time it works out.
(upbeat music)
It's about 8:30, we're about ready to fire up the machines,
and start making pasta.
This is a pasta shooter, a somewhat mid-scale in size.
All right, here we go.
(machine whirring)
What you have here is, flour is coming up,
mixing with water in the back, the high-speed paddle mix
that's pretty much forcing water into the flour.
It'll fall down and go into the main screw,
which is where all the pasta is gonna eventually come out of
about 5,500 pounds of pasta we made yesterday.
And we're gonna do it again today.
(upbeat music)
On a given week,
we're going through about anywhere between 36,000 and 42,000
pounds of flour a week.
As I said, we have this big Hopper
essentially flour is getting sucked up to the top
to make the dough.
And this is our Semolina.
Durum Semolina, very coarse, very yellow
the ideal flour for making dry pasta.
We will go through about 6000 pounds of flour today.
There's our flour storage.
Temperature here is about 50-60 degrees.
Nice and cool, dry.
So in this room, we have about a week's worth of flour
that will go through.
So,
actually we're sitting a little heavy on flour right now,
just 'cause we're getting ready for the holidays,
we've been really, really busy.
We have about 13 dies, those 13 dies can make
all 26 of our pasta shapes or flavors.
These are the dies.
Bronze dies weighing in at about 90 to 100 pounds each.
And this is what gives the pasta its shape.
A lot of bigger, mass produced pasta they use Teflon
instead of brass.
Rigatoni.
This is the mafaldine or reginette.
This is the shell.
And then, fusilli.
Sometimes they don't look like much,
but that's what comes out.
The pasta dies can vary from $3,000 to $5,000.
About $45,000 sitting there.
The die and the machine
are the backbones of the operation for sure.
The bronze inserts are very important for us,
or I should say important
for the artisanal side of pasta making
because of the rough texture
that it adds to the pasta surface,
gives it that really rough look
that helps sauce adhere to it.
So we're gonna push some dough through the die.
And then we're gonna put the cutter on
and get ready to start going.
So pretty much we're pressing it building up pressure
to where there's so much pressure
that it's gonna just force the pasta through the die.
It usually takes us about five to 10 minutes
to actually get really good pasta, so.
(upbeat music)
So now you can kind of see, it's starting to take shape.
Yeah, so essentially, this is fresh pasta.
Totally ready to eat.
So if you cook this right now, it probably take about
one to two minutes to cook.
This is the cascatelli.
So cascatelli is the brainchild of Dan Pashman,
who's the host, creator of the Sporkful.
His vision of a perfect pasta shape.
And then he came to us to help him produce that pasta.
It's not really common to make new pasta shapes.
I mean, so we were originally supposed to sell 5000 pounds,
and call the day but we've kept going.
So now we've sold probably over 300,000 pounds
of cascatelli now.
I was a chef before I started the pasta business
before I started Sfoglini.
The best part, is that I get to come in
and do really what I like to do, enjoy making pasta
and I enjoy the camaraderie of working
with all of the people we have here. It's a real pleasure.
So it's a great part.
You want probably about five pounds of pasta
spread pretty evenly on the tray.
Not clumped up, that way it can,
the air can pass through it.
So you can see there's not a lot of space
between these racks.
But pretty much what happens is
there's six fans in these dryers,
that's blowing air, and forcing air to criss-cross
as you lose about 16%- 18% water.
Well, that's how much we're taking out.
Yeah, that's all possibly come shop stables.
Each dryer is controlled independently.
so we can start it,
and then we move to the next one, start it.
At the end of the day,
they all finish an hour after each other.
You can see it's hard and rigid, but it cracks.
You can crumble it.
The technical term is called,
'check if the pasta is not dried evenly and it's cracking.'
As opposed to this, is solid and very strong.
But this is good pasta.
It is 9:45, machines is up and running,
the guys are dumping pasta,
I usually take a few minutes get some work done.
Right now I have to order a truckload flour,
we're in a bit of a negotiation to get the price lower,
and we did.
And so now we'll buy it.
We' buy probably like
750,000 to a million dollars worth of flour a year.
So the packing team has the job of emptying all the pasta,
so the first thing they do
is they dump all 5000-6000 pounds of pasta into the totes.
We make pasta one day, they pack it the next.
As you can see the totes lifted in the air.
The pasta is being taken to the top,
being weighed in the scale.
It's called a vertical partner.
So it's a vertical partner
with a 14-head combination scale attached to it.
- Every minute this is down
we're losing packaging about 30 boxes of pasta
and we need this thing running for morning the day ended day
every day.
So every second it's down, it's costing us a lot of time
a lot of money, a lot of backlash.
So it's gone down about five times in the last week.
- So yeah, we did have a little problems with this machine.
So we'll take a break and
(laughing)
- We lose 18,000 pounds of pasta that we could be
I guess the better way to look at it is on average,
if we per shift of pastas about $20,000 worth of revenue.
Say they fixed it, high fives all around.
Our three main sources are,
E-commerce direct to consumer, retail, wholesale.
Everything's labeled,
so I mean usually cavatelli starts here.
radiators, reginette, trumpets,
it's kind of alphabetized going that way.
So this is all retail packaging.
This is kind of like our whole e-commerce fulfillment area.
The top three best selling shapes are
whole grain reginette, the trumpets,
and now cascatelli is easily in that top three.
That is a challenge keeping people motivated,
keeping people focused,
because it is the work is very repetitive.
But usually the machinery keeps people
almost like playing a video game,
like there's always something to check,
there's always something to look at.
It's time check, it's about three o'clock.
As you guys can see all the all the empty trays are now full
and everything is in the dryer so,
so we're starting to break down for the day.
And as you can see we got John
is one of our new line operators.
We're pushing all the pasta from this back vat
into the front,
and then we're gonna disassemble the machine afterwards.
So we stopped all the,
you can kind of hear it's a little more quiet in here
So the reason we break the machine down
is mostly just to get a good clean on it.
(orchestral music)
Easy.
Easy fellas.
So pretty much we're just doing the opposite
of what we did this morning.
(orchestral music)
That's just pasta, it's all pasta.
Yes, just two sets of screens that we use.
If these screens weren't on there,
it could jam up the holes.
So pretty much the die just acts as a block.
And there's pressure that just builds up and builds up
that it eventually just pushes through the die
and that's how the pasta is being made.
But so what you're gonna see now
is the area that we didn't get out that's built up
so it's literally a 60, about 50-pound ball of dough
is gonna drop out of there.
(orchestral music)
This is 50 pounds of un-extruded pasta.
We birth one of these every day.
Yeah, it is actually surprisingly
it is one of the most satisfying activities of the day.
But yeah, it's like a solid,
it's just a f****** solid piece of dough.
(orchestral music)
It's about five o'clock.
We're just finishing cleaning up
getting everything back together and,
that's a day here at Sfoglini.
(orchestral music)