How long does it take to make a bowl of pasta? For most home cooks, the answer is just a few minutes. For a farm to table restaurant like Five Four One, it takes all year.
“For me, starting with quality ingredients and ingredients with integrity is one of the most important parts of building a dish,” says Dale Lawson, chef de cuisine at Five Four One. “Your end result will always reflect the quality of the ingredients that you started with."
The production kitchen at McNary Dining Center is a busy place, full of black-coated chefs prepping meals and orderly racks of spices and seasonings. Smack in the middle of it all are rows of shining steel commercial mixers, just like the ones you’d find on the counter in any home kitchen--except big enough for a toddler to sit comfortably inside. Around the corner, a gleaming pastamaker.
The Five Four One chefs use these workhorse machines to blend the Hunton family’s Camas Country Mills flour with an organic semolina flour and other natural ingredients to create something special: fresh, made-from-scratch pasta noodles.
UHDS chefs make many different types of pasta at Five Four One--from long Fettucine noodles hand-cut to the proper length, to tube-shaped Rigatoni and even house-made Ramen for this term’s Sunday night Ramen bar. After the fresh pasta is shaped with the machine, it’s cooled, stored, and used within 3-4 days.
After selecting their ingredients and sauce, guests can watch as a chef sautees their custom-made meal and carefully pours steaming pasta onto a waiting plate.
To the guest, the entire process would appear to take just minutes from start to finish. But the farmers, gardeners, and chefs behind the meal know better.
The wheat used in these dishes travel a total of 33 miles from where it was grown and milled at the Hunton family’s Camas Country Mill, an old-fashioned grist mill that grinds the wheat using enormous mill stones rather than steel machinery. The ancient technique takes longer, but produces a more nutritious flour.
From farm to mill to kitchen to plate, each plate of pasta represents more than six months of work and craftsmanship. That’s a lot of labor for some noodles.
But for the farmers at Camas Country Mill and the chefs at Five Four One, it’s a labor of love.
“Yes, making food this way is more labor-intensive than serving pre-packaged items,” Chef Lawson says. “But that’s okay. It’s all part of our mission to support local growers and serve our guests the freshest, most nutritious meal we can offer.”
Take a peek behind the scenes and watch our video of pasta-making in action.
Want to try Five Four One's pasta for yourself? Check the hours or see what's on today's menu.