Tag: scholar

Think of Michael Patrick as a pasta scholar. A fascination with homemade noodles began during his South Florida childhood and grew into an obsession for obscure pastas made by vanishing Old World methods. A certified sommelier who worked in restaurants as well as wine education and journalism for two decades, Patrick spent six years traveling intermittently through villages all over Italy, learning from home cooks and culinary professionals, before starting his own small-scale production in a shared kitchen near Your DeKalb Farmers Market. The fanciful shapes, many with unique fillings, that he sells through his company, Storico Fresco, reveal more skillful attention than any other fresh pastas sold in Atlanta. He makes his products with little more than a rolling pin, small dowels, and a wooden comb called a pettine that creates ridges on, as one example, lumachelle—a tubular pasta infused with cinnamon and lemon zest that he traces to a recipe from Benedictine nuns in the province of Le Marche, east of Tuscany.