In This Installment
Ziti Rigate Pasta from Michigan
Both of the items you’ll find in this month’s installment come from Chef Michael Murray and his small crew working at West Michigan Pasta & Provisions outside Kalamazoo, Michigan. He’s originally from Ann Arbor, though, and grew up with Zingerman’s as a major part of his food education and inspiration. There’s a good chance my early 20s self might have given a sample of olive oil or a taste of cheese to Michael’s teenage self in the mid-90s, but no specific memories flooded back when we got the chance to sit down and chat a few weeks back.
Michael was doing a weekly delivering to Detroit of his dried and fresh pastas so it was no problem to hop off I-94 at Ann Arbor as he ping-ponged along the interstate between Kalamazoo and the Motor City. He and his wife moved back to Michigan to be closer to family as they raise their kids. We chatted about our kids in school and coordinating schedules for sports and lessons and all the other things kids get up to nowadays. We reminisced about Zingerman’s Deli “back in the earlier days” and what that was like for a kid like him growing up in a town like Ann Arbor with access to a place like the deli.
It struck me that Michael was a part of the next, next generation I’ve had the pleasure to meet in food. Through sheer fortune, I’ve managed to work (basically) the same job for decades now: finding food, meeting the people that make it, sharing their story with our you and our staff. It’s a great job. As you collect these stories, you notice patterns depending on the age of the producer or the type of food they make. In the early 2000s, for instance, a common origin story might be: “I was working a high stress, six figure salary job in (type of high powered job here) and hating it. I learned how to make (type of food here) from old family recipes and my friends couldn’t get enough. I started selling it at farmer’s markets on the weekends, then I started renting space and selling it to local groceries and now I’m ready for the world! Or at least outside Brooklyn.”
The origin stories have been updated in 2024. Instead of old family recipes being resurrected and introduced to a new audience, I’m meeting more and more passionate producers who were raised on good food (thanks to places like Zingerman’s or DiBruno Bros. or Dean & Deluca or Zabar’s or Bi-Rite or—you get the idea) and have longed dreamed of making a specific food for a very specific reason. Happenstance doesn’t seem to play a role these days. Case in point, Michael has been thinking about making pasta ever since he studied abroad in Italy. It was on his mind when he trained to be a chef at the Culinary Institute of America, too, and that was back in 2000.
Michael and his small crew (“mostly parents with kids in school during the day,” he told me) have been producing fresh and dried pasta for nearly seven years now. The growth has been steady, but not gangbusters. “There’s not a big focus on pasta in the west side of the state,” Michael explained, “so I’m building up the demand by educating the chefs and mongers that I meet.” He continued, “if I can get them to try it, they love it, but I wouldn’t say they’re clamoring for high quality pasta exactly.”
Still, as word spreads west to Chicago and east to Detroit, I’m confident folks will get onboard. Like Michael, I’ve had the privilage of traveling to Italy and even visiting pasta makers from around the country. The best ones use bronze dies to extrude their pasta becauce it gives the noodles a coarser texture than plastic dies, and coarser noodles grab sauce better. Michael uses bronse dies.
The best pasta makers in Italy use the best durum wheat they can find which—funny enough—comes from the plains of Canada and America. Michael uses the same, except he’s even closer to the source and can employ greats grains from the great state of Michigan, too.
And when it comes to drying the pasta, the best maers in Italy take their time, often employing the natural environment and taking days to properly dry, instead of the hours it takes in more industrial productions. Michael utilizes three different drying rooms to dry his different shapes and sizes of noodles. He controls the humidity and keeps the heat low, often taking multiple days to dry them. This ‘low and slow’ process lets the more bready and nutty flavors of the pasta develop and—this might sound funny—but it better captures the terroir of the area. This pasta tastes like the clean, fresh, ingredients its made from as well as the skill that went into making it. That’s its terroir. And it goes great with the sauce, obviously.
Tomato Marinara Pasta Sauce
When it comes to pasta sauce, there are American versions and Italian versions. I like American versions better (for nostalgic reasons) and I’d venture you might as well. It’s not that one is better than the other, really, it’s just that in Italy they don’t have thick, luscious, rich sauces to cover their noodles. Instead they toss their pasta with thin sauces that lightly cling to the noodles and provide a complex, balanced, lovely experience.
Here in America, we like our pasta sauce (i.e. tomato sauce) thick. When my wife—who grew up learning “the family recipe” from her mother who learned it from her father who ran restaurants and learned it from his Italian mother—makes pasta sauce it takes hours and hours of slow, low cooking and lotes of stirring and lots of patience and when we sit down to eat that night it is worth every minute we spent in anticipation.
But that’s not an Italian version, even though the origins are Italian in pedigree. We simply like thick sauce here in America. We like it slightly sweet (but just slightly) and we like it to taste like fresh tomatoes, not bitter like paste. With that in mind, I fell for this sauce hard. First off, I love that it’s a big jar so you can get a few meals out of it without having to be too judicious with your serving size. Second, I love the ingredients. They’re clean, pronouneable, and even Italian! Michael uses real San Marzano DOP tomatoes that he brings in from Italy to make the sauce as well as Italian extra virgin olive oil. It’s wonderfully rich, tomato sweet, and ready for spooning over piles of noodles. Just how we Americans like it.