A different
kind of pasta
story.
We make pasta in Britain, from grains grown in Britain. It sounds simple. But it changes almost everything about how we make it.
For generations, dry pasta has been closely associated with durum wheat, grown in regions where the crop is well established. Britain has its own agricultural traditions, its own grains and a remarkable range of flavours waiting to be explored.
We began with a question: what sort of pasta could we make if we started with the grains growing in our own fields, rather than the ingredients conventionally used to make it?
That question became Carleschi. It led us towards spelt, einkorn, rivet and British-grown pulses, and towards a way of making pasta that responds to the particular character of each grain.
But our work is about more than finding different ingredients. By creating demand for a wider range of crops, we hope to give farmers more reasons to grow them, and people more reasons to enjoy them.
We are pasta makers first. Whatever its agricultural story, the pasta must taste wonderful. The pleasure of eating it is what makes the whole endeavour worthwhile.
From an idea
to a pastificio.
Carleschi did not begin with a factory or a business plan. It began with curiosity about grain, flour and what makes really good pasta.
The earliest experiments go back to 2012. Making pasta offered a way to explore something that had become increasingly interesting: the relationship between the character of a grain and the food it becomes.
Rather than beginning with conventional durum semolina, the question was whether grains grown in Britain could make pasta with their own distinctive qualities. It meant learning to work with different flours, understanding their behaviour and discovering what they could offer in flavour and texture.
In 2019, Pastificio Carleschi took that idea to market. The first customers could encounter the pasta directly, ask about its ingredients and discover that British grains could offer something different from the pasta they already knew.
Those early years were about more than introducing a new product. They were an opportunity to listen, to learn what people enjoyed about the pasta and to understand what needed improving.
As Carleschi developed, so did the work behind it. Making pasta from wholegrain spelt, einkorn, rivet and other distinctive ingredients required experimentation with milling, hydration, extrusion and drying.
The pastificio grew around that work: producing pasta, refining the process, building relationships with British growers and exploring what else could be made from the grains available in our own fields.
The idea has evolved, but the question remains: what can we make from the grains we choose to grow?
Many hands.
One pasta.
Every packet of Carleschi pasta is the result of more hands than you might imagine.
It begins with the farmers who choose what to grow. Growing distinctive grains involves decisions about varieties, soil, rotations, harvests and the markets available for the crop.
Then comes the work of preparing the grain. Cleaning, dehulling where necessary and milling all influence the flour that eventually reaches the pastificio.
We depend on people who understand the grain long before we begin making pasta from it.
Inside our pastificio, the work becomes more immediate. Flour is mixed with water, dough is pressed through bronze dies, and fresh pasta is carefully arranged for drying.
Every stage requires attention. Different flours absorb water differently, behave differently under pressure and respond differently to drying. Experience matters, but so does the willingness to keep learning.
Some of that knowledge comes from years of making pasta. Some comes from conversations with farmers, millers, researchers and other people working with grain.
Our production is small enough for us to remain closely involved in how the pasta is made. That means understanding the ingredients, following the process and paying attention to the finished product.
What connects all these people is a shared practical question: how do we turn a crop into food that people genuinely want to eat?
Discover how we make pasta
Against the
Monoculture.
The diversity of what we eat begins with the diversity of what we grow.
Over generations, agriculture and food production have increasingly concentrated around crops and varieties selected for yield, consistency, ease of processing and commercial demand.
These choices have helped make food more plentiful and affordable. But they have also contributed to a narrower range of grains reaching our kitchens.
We believe there should be room for more. More varieties, more distinctive flavours and more opportunities for farmers to cultivate crops that might otherwise struggle to find a market.
At Carleschi, we work with British-grown spelt, einkorn, rivet and pulses, exploring the qualities that make each ingredient distinctive.
We are interested in how these crops grow, how they fit into farming systems, how they can be milled and what kind of pasta they can produce. Their history matters, but their future matters more.
A grain cannot return to widespread cultivation on nostalgia alone. Farmers need dependable buyers, and buyers need products that people genuinely want.
That's where making pasta becomes an agricultural act. When people choose pasta made from a distinctive British grain, they contribute to the market for that crop.
We cannot claim that every different crop automatically creates greater biodiversity. Outcomes depend on farming methods, rotations and local conditions. But making more crops commercially viable can give farmers additional choices.
For us, being against the monoculture means challenging the assumption that the same few ingredients should dominate everything we grow, make and eat.
Not because the past was better, but because the future could be more interesting.
Explore our grains
What comes
next.
Carleschi is still a work in progress. There are more grains to discover, more questions to answer and more pasta to make.
Much of our work begins with curiosity. What happens when we grow a different variety of wheat? How will it behave when milled? Will its flour make good pasta? And, perhaps most importantly, will people want to eat it?
These questions take us back to the field. We are exploring different varieties of spelt and other wheats through growing trials and collaborations with farmers and agricultural specialists.
We want to understand which grains have a future in British fields, not simply which ones have an interesting past.
A promising variety has to prove itself in several different ways. Farmers need to know how it performs in their fields. Millers need to understand the grain and the flour it produces. We need to know how that flour behaves under the press, through drying and in the cooking pot.
Yield, protein characteristics, flavour, texture and cooking performance all contribute to the picture. No single measurement tells us everything we need to know.
Some experiments will succeed. Others will lead us back to the drawing board. That is part of working with ingredients that do not always conform to the expectations of conventional pasta production.
We are also interested in what happens when cereals are combined with British-grown pulses, and how new combinations of ingredients might create pasta with distinctive flavours, textures and qualities.
But innovation, for us, isn't about producing something different merely for the sake of being different. Each new grain, blend or shape must earn its place through the quality of the pasta it produces.
Our ambition is not to make every grain into pasta. It is to discover which grains can make pasta worth growing, making and eating.
Explore the grains we're working with