Tuscan Pici from Val d’Orcia - Pastificio Toscano -

A specialty typical of the beautiful Siena on your table. A unique product that stands out from other pasta on the market: Pici, the ancestors of Spaghetti.
Pici are normally made by hand and stretched until they are about three meters long.
Pici have deep roots in history and they are a food of great interest since the  Etruscans time. Pici contain the smell and the  taste of the Sienese countryside and, unlike spaghetti, they have an irregular and rough surface while their diameter is never less than 3 mm. This pasta is appreciated for its surprising consistency after cooking and for its roughness that allows a better adherence of the sauces. The Pici are excellent with Tuscan meat sauce,  with game meat sauce (for example wild boar and hare), with mushrooms or, following the ancient tradition, with tomato sauce, extra virgin olive oil and garlic, known as "pici all'aglione": all these ingredients recall the sunny Tuscan countryside.
Produced in Castiglione d'Orcia by Pastificio Toscano owned by the Panarese family, protagonist of the story we're telling. The Panarese family owns a vast land in Val d'Orcia, and in this very beautiful area they grow a durum wheat of excellent quality with which they produce a very good pasta, in the noble perspective of "short chain".
The job they love becomes a mirror of the Tuscan tradition, but also a leap towards the future, because the Pastificio Toscano is expected to become the flagship of a sublime culture.
Made using the traditional methods of bronze drawing and slow-drying, Pasta Panarese has a rough texture that will help the absorption of water whilst boiling, and will allow a better adherence of the sauce.
The slow drying at low temperature (up to 26 hours at temperatures lower than 50 ° C) allows to maintain almost unchanged the organoleptic characteristics and the taste of starch and gluten, without causing a precooking and an "evaporation" of the protein components and nutrients, unlike instead of industrial technology that, because of the high temperatures, up to 110 ° C for a short time (a maximum of 2 hours), produces a uniform product in color, with little flavor and with a surface so-called "ceramic",   that prevents a good water penetration.

Nutritional information per 100g
Energy value: 1487 kJ / 350 kcal
Fat: 1.2 g
Carbohydrate: 70.0 g
Protein: 14.0 g