Being a sfoglino, or pasta maker, in Bologna is a position of honor, deeply rooted in the city’s cultural history, traditions, and lore. For hundreds of years, bolognese pasta makers have practiced their daily ritual of rolling pasta by hand in laboratori (workshops) and homes all over the city. Sfoglini are the very foundation of bolognese cuisine.
My acquaintance with sfoglini and their craft began more than a decade ago, at the tail end of 2007. I was stuck in a dead-end job at a shitty hotel in Beverly Hills. I felt completely lost. While battling bouts of hopelessness, a singular thought struck me one day and it would, ultimately, change my entire life: I wanted to make pasta by hand. To achieve this goal, I wanted the best teacher in Italy (therefore, the world). In those days, the internet was not what it is today—think: dial up and web pages. After scouring the web for months, I stumbled across a page with a link to La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese run by a woman named Alessandra Spisni. Through a series of emails and phone calls in broken Italian, I eventually secured a position as a student.
Via Malvasia 49, the original location of La Scuola, was 5 kilometers [about 3 miles] from my little apartment on Via Stalingrado. Each day, I hoofed it from that apartment in Bologna’s red-light district to the school and back, and everywhere in between. Back then La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese was a tiny ground-level laboratorio with a shoebox kitchen and a 12-table private dining room. Alessandra was not yet the powerhouse celebrity chef she is today, but she was surely impressive. She was a teacher, a mother, a cook, and Emilia-Romagna’s preeminent sfoglina. Over the next three months, she would lovingly bestow upon me the fundamentals of making sfoglia—sheets of pasta rolled with a rolling pin called a mattarello. Included in these lessons was a veritable master class in the richness of the bolognese kitchen.
During my pivotal stay in Bologna I also encountered another masterful character, Kosaku Kawamura, who opened my mind to a different perspective, one that allowed me to see past some of the dogma surrounding Italian culinary traditions. The fundamentals that lie herein are a confluence of these two perspectives and define this book.
Much like the traditions passed on here, pasta making is cumulative. This book is a distillation of my time in Bologna, followed by 10 years of trial and error, curiosity, and repetition. The skills and stories in these pages represent hundreds of years of practical knowledge and the people and philosophies that have shaped my understanding of bolognese traditions. It is my responsibility as a perpetual student and custodian of these traditions and techniques to pass on to you what I have learned.
I’ve been chasing a seemingly unattainable balance between texture and structure, elasticity and extensibility, heart and mind. I am chasing the perfect sfoglia and, maybe, through the fundamentals in this book, with some perseverance and love, you can find yours, too.