Tirrena Paccheri

What I love about this pasta is how effortlessly it cooks to perfection. When I'm making pasta, I want it "al dente" just enough bite without a hard centre. With many mass-produced, cheaper pastas, achieving this can be frustrating, the centre often stays hard, while the outer edges start to overcook as you try to get it just right.

This pasta, however, has a magic touch; it cooks evenly throughout, so there's none of that unpleasant hardness in the centre, just a beautifully tender, "al dente" texture every time. It’s as close to a professional, Italian cooked pasta as you can get in your own kitchen and that is why it is in my larder in all shapes and sizes!

The Natural Drying Method

Tirrena is produced following a natural processing method that has been handed down for generations. The pasta is bronze drawn and then dried slowly in static cells (from 84 to 144 hours) at temperatures below 38°C, to keep the organoleptic qualities of the ancient grains intact. This gives the pasta its natural hazelnut colour, high digestibility and an extraordinary ability to absorb seasonings. It is precisely this type of pro- cessing that makes Tirrena a pasta which fully recalls the scent and the taste of the Frescobaldi’s wheat.

About Tirrena

The launch of Tirrena pasta marks a new departure for the Frescobaldi family; a semi-whole durum wheat semolina pasta made from three types of ancient grains grown on their estates. It is a truly artisan product, but we have come to expect no less for a product bearing the name Fres- cobaldi.

The Terroir

The wheat is grown on the Frescobaldi estates of Val di Pesa, south-west of Flor- ence, and to the west, up to the province of Livorno, on the coast. This area is historically suited to the cultivation of du- rum wheat, thanks to the symbiosis between fresh soils, mild climate, and the afternoon breezes of the Tyrrhenian Sea.