Interview with the Manchester Evening News

20 November, 2015Read More

Italian ‘pastificio’ The Pasta Factory opens in Manchester

The shop and restaurant in Shudehill serves fresh pasta and authentic Italian sauces to eat in or cook at home.

An Italian ‘pastificio’ serving fresh, authentic pasta dishes to eat in or take away has opened in Manchester. The Pasta Factory, in Shudehill, was opened by Elisa Cavigliasso, her boyfriend Alberto Umoret and their friends Enrico Princi and Paolo Gaudino, who grew up together in Turin, northern Italy, before moving to Manchester, where they spotted a gap in the market for the type of traditional pasta shops popular back home. “As Italians, we thought about what we missed from our country and what this city may miss, and it was pasta – fresh pasta,” said chef Elisa, 26. “It’s perfectly normal for us, for special meals like Sunday lunch, to go to a shop and buy fresh pasta and cook it at home. Here you can’t really buy it anywhere so we thought let’s do that, and we can give the opportunity to eat the pasta inside or take it away.” The pasta and sauces – ranging from tagliatelle with slow-cooked venison ragù to bucatini with monkfish in a tomato sauce – are all family recipes and are cooked fresh on site every day, using meat sourced from the Butcher’s Quarter in Tib Street and seafood from a fishmonger in Chorlton. Gnocchi, gluten-free pasta and vegetarian options are also available. Diners can also order antipasti platters and desserts including chocolate ravioli filled with almonds and amaretti biscuits, served with orange cream and toasted pine nuts. To drink, there is a selection of wines, all from the friends’ native Piedmont region, and a range of draught and bottled Italian craft beers from the San Paolo and Baladin breweries in Turin. “We like to support little businesses, in Italy and here as well,” said Elisa. “It’s why we chose this area of the city, because of all the independent shops and cafes around here.” Open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 11am to 10pm through the week and a little later at the weekend, diners can linger for as long as they like over lunch, dinner or drinks. “In Italy, going out for a meal, we can spend three hours or more talking over our food, like you would if you had friends to dinner at home. We wanted to recreate that atmosphere,” said Elisa. “Restaurants here are very busy and you feel you have to go as soon as you’ve finished. We want people to relax and really enjoy the food, really taste it. “Italian food is about being together, sharing a moment.” The pastificio is just a stone’s throw from Ancoats, which was once known as Manchester’s Little Italy, and it is already proving popular with the city’s modern-day Italian community. “At the beginning, 90 per cent of the clients were Italian. Their feedback was important because if you have someone that knows your food tell you that it’s good, and if they come back again and again and again, that’s a very good sign for us,” said Elisa. “We’ve got a lot of regular customers now even after just four weeks open. The other day an Italian guy came in for his lunch and then back again for dinner. “We are starting to get a few English customers now too and of course we hope to have many more. Italian food is not just for Italians, it is for everybody.” www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk

60% of Your Calories Are From Highly Processed Food

7 November, 2015Read More

Most of the foods we buy are highly processed and loaded with sugar, fat and salt

A new study suggest that 61% of the food people buy is highly processed, according to research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And almost 1,000 calories a day of person’s diet come solely from highly processed foods.

Not all processed food is the same, however. The USDA classifies processed food as any edible that’s not a raw agricultural commodity, so even pasteurized milk and frozen fruits and vegetables count. “It’s important for us to recognize that a processed food is not just Coca-Cola and Twinkies—it’s a wide array of products,” says study author Jennifer Poti, a research assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

So in the first study of its kind, researchers scrutinized our diets by analyzing a massive set of data of the foods we buy while grocery shopping. The stats came from 157,000 shoppers, who tracked their edible purchases with a barcode scanner from 2000-2012, for anywhere from 10 months to 14 years.

Using software that picked out words in the nutrition and ingredient labels, the 1.2 million products were placed into one of four categories: minimally processed—products with very little alteration, like bagged salad, frozen meat and eggs—basic processed—single-ingredient foods but changed in some way, like oil, flour and sugar—moderately processed—still recognizable as its original plant or animal source, but with additives—and highly processed—multi-ingredient industrial mixtures that are no longer recognizable as their original plant or animal source.

No surprise, people favorite categories are those last two. More than three-quarters of our calories came from highly processed (61%) and moderately processed (16%) foods and drinks in 2012. Best-selling products were refined breads, grain-based desserts like cookies, sugary sodas, juice, sports drinks and energy drinks.

Preferences for highly processed foods were remarkably stable over time, Poti says, which likely has implications for our health, since the study also found that highly processed foods were higher in saturated fat, sugar and salt than other purchases.

To be clear, the researchers aren’t pooh-poohing processing, per se. “Food processing is important for food security and nutrition security” Poti says. The study wasn’t able to capture the full spectrum of our diets—loose spinach doesn’t come with a barcode, after all—and the authors acknowledge that food purchasing doesn’t always directly translate to dietary intake. But the results suggest that we might want to swap some bags of chips for, say, cans of beans. “Foods that required cooking or preparation”—like boxed pasta and raw eggs—”were generally less than 20% of calories purchased throughout the entire time period,” Poti says.

Reference:

J.M. Poti et al. 2015. Is the degree of food processing and convenience linked with the nutritional quality of foods purchased by US households? The American Journal of clinical nutrition.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2015/05/06/ajcn.114.100925.abstract