Rootle - Heritage Wholegrain Pasta

By Will Norton, one of the co-founders of Rootle. Will is passionate about wheat and he wants to see more chefs building relationships with local millers supporting agroecological principles. 

Two years ago, I entered an industrial unit in Buckfastleigh to be confronted by thumping drum and bass and a masked, boilersuited figure covered in white powder shouting something about elephants. It was more innocent than it seemed. 

Since that day, we’ve been buying flour, pasta, crackers and biscuits from Andrew, Lisa and the team at The Fresh Flour Company. It’s a relationship that has taught me to truly value the role that millers and processors will have to play if we’re to transform our food system for the better.

In the UK, wheat provides around 25% of our calories and many of our staple foods. There’s no agricultural crop more important to us and none, other than perhaps corn, that so epitomises the industrialisation of how we eat. We value yield above all else, often use what we grow inefficiently and choose to discard most of wheat’s nutrition and flavour to create the most shelf stable, white product we can.

We can talk about improving our food and farming systems, but until we’re brave enough to take on the elephant in the room, our cereal crops, we’ll be tinkering around the edges. 

Increasingly, farmers want to grow things in an environmentally friendly way but find themselves tied to commodity markets that don’t value them doing so. The Fresh Flour Company was created to help fix that, by valuing wheat grown responsibly and by using the whole grain. If you’re lucky enough to have a miller near you, pick up the phone, go and say hello and support them with your business. That will mean that they in turn can support farmers who want to break away and do things in a different, better way.  

FRESH FLOUR SPAGHETTI WITH CHEESE, PEPPER AND FERMENTED CHILLI 

INGREDIENTS

Serves 4 This is a take on an Italian classic. I’m not going to say which one, as I’ve messed around with it, but I’m sure you can guess. This version isn’t subtle. It’s a bowl of big flavours that shows off some of Fresh Flour’s amazing products.

  • 240g Fresh Flour spaghetti 

  • 5g whole peppercorns 

  • 60g good cheddar (grated) 80g pecorino, or good, mature sheep’s cheese (grated)

  • Fermented chillis, to taste (ferment these at least two weeks before cooking according to a basic recipe, in brine and with crushed garlic)

  •  2 handfuls of Fresh Flour white pepper sourdough crackers

METHOD

  1. Toast the peppercorns in a dry pan, then crush in a pestle and mortar. 

  2. Lightly crush the crackers in the pestle and mortar, maintaining some varied textures and bigger chunks. 

  3. Cook the spaghetti in well salted water. If doing this in a saucepan, cook in less water than you’d normally use and stir frequently - this means that the starch in the cooking water will be more concentrated. If using a commercial pasta cooker then there should be plenty of starch in the water anyway. 

  4. Grate the cheese into a sauté pan and add half the pepper. Add a ladle of the brine from your fermented chillis and mix these ingredients together to form a paste. 

  5. When the pasta is two thirds cooked, remove it from the water and add to the pan. Toss the ingredients together over a low heat, adding pasta cooking water to form an emulsified sauce. Gently keep everything moving, adding more cooking water as required, until the pasta is perfectly cooked and coated by the sauce. 

  6. Add some sliced fermented chillis and serve. Top with more chillis, black pepper and the crushed crackers