Today, we visited the Pastificio Artigianale Fabbri Museum.
The Italian word pastificio translates to “pasta factory” in English, and artigianale means “handcrafted” or “handmade”. Fabbri comes from the person who created this company, Giovanni Fabbri, when he bought a piece of land in Strada in Chianti for a milling, pasta making, and grocery business. For those who do not know what milling is, essentially, it is a method used to produce flour, generally by separating the germ and bran of wheat kernels from the endosperm, then reducing the endosperm into flour.
During World War II, part of the building and many machinery, such as the mill and hoven for bread, were blown up and destroyed; however, some of the machines survived, which allowed pasta-making by this company to continue.
Currently, the company consists of two generations — Giovanni, part of the fourth generation, and Marco and Lisa, part of the fifth generation.
The difference between the production of pasta at Pastificio Fabbri is the use of ancient machineries and “The Fabbri Method, natural drying”, where the temperature is always under 38°C during all phases of production, including kneading, compression, moulding, and drying. In using this method, the nutritional properties of the wheat grain are unaltered. They also use ancient wheat varieties that allow for digestibility for people with gluten intolerance.
In our tour today, we got a glimpse of their museum dedicated to pasta. It includes machineries used by the company that Giovanni Fabbri collected from 1893 until he died and the different kinds of pasta produced by the company. We were given the Fabbri knowledge of pasta making, from the raw methods to the production, as well as compared it to common methods used in the pasta-making industry today.