The fine folks at Garofalo Pasta were nice enough to send me some pasta to review. To date, I have only made pasta with one of the bags of Casarecce pasta, a sort of tubular pasta that seems to twist around on itself. I also have some spaghetti to use in my future (which I am thinking of using with a mushroom sauce of some sort).

Garofalo Pasta is made in Italy, near the ruins of Pompeii. They have been making pasta for over 200 years, which I think gives them a little edge over some of their competition. They offer a line of 21 traditional Neapolitan cuts, using traditional bronze dies for quality and integrity.

The pasta itself is good – no complaints there. I also do like the packaging of the product in the clear bags with their wonderful scrolly logo across the front.

I didn’t actually make the sauce this time – my mother did – so I don’t have a recipe to offer up since she, like me, kind of makes pasta sauce on the fly with no recipe. You can be sure that there was lots of meat, garlic, onions, tomato sauce and bay leaves in the mix. Dished out on top of the Casarecce pasta made it a good and hearty meal. Pasta kind of all tastes the same to me, but I did find the Garofalo Pasta to be a high quality pasta for this dish. I’d like to try using their Ziti for a baked pasta dish some time and I still need to get cracking and try out the spaghetti. I have no doubt that I won’t be disappointed, unless I do something silly like overcook the pasta (knock on wood).

Garofalo Pasta is available from Costco here on the West Coast as well as independent gourmet stores.  Costs run about $1.99 – $2.39 a pound.