Company Profile
It all started in the first half of 19th century. The Russos, a large family of millers and pasta-makers from Torre Annunziata(Naples, Italy), devoted their life to the same long-standing activity that we, as Pastificio Artigianale Nicola Russo, intend to enthusiastically keep alive even today.
Between the end of 19th and the early 20th centuries the Russos moved to Cicciano (Naples, Italy), a small town of the Neapolitan hinterland. They started their production by firstly setting a small stone mill up, with animals and/or steam as a source of energy. This was subsequently substituted by an electricity-driven cylinder engine. The mill soon became a public affair by positively affecting the development of Cicciano with the introduction of one of the first electricity plants. The production of pasta itself was experienced by everyone, with the drying process often occurring on the public sidewalks.
Especially thanks to the passionate and farsighted Comm. Nicola Russo, the mill ultimately turned into a fully technological, productive and winning enterprise for the production and selling of Russos’ pasta. Nicola Russo devoted his whole life to his activity, and he eventually transmitted his secret recipe to the future generations. His passion for that dough made of bran and water that was at the basis of the delicious and unique macaroni from Cicciano allowed his brand to become an important landmark within the field.
For these reasons it is our duty to maintain such an antique and important tradition alive overtime, in order to preserve the foundational values of our activity and, first of all, of our family. We have indeed established a new lab equipped with modern machines that are purposely inspired to the production techniques deployed during the 50s. We firstly select our main ingredient, that is, durum wheat flour, based on its content of gluten and proteins. We subsequently knead our flour with the purest water, taking care that our dough remains homogeneous. The following extrusion deploys a bronze wire drawing machine, thus creating that rough surface that allows pasta to optimally hold any dressing. We ultimately dry our product by using ‘low-temperature’ machines, which make use of air at 45°C, thus resulting in a 15-to-30-hour drying process. Such a procedure clearly deviates from the industrial conventions, where the drying temperatures reach even 100°C, thus resulting in a concrete threat to the main organoleptic and nutritional features, together with the flavor’s flattening. We rigorously wrap the ultimate product manually, in order to avoid any impacts with automatic scales and wrappers.
Overall, our daily production reaches 1 ton of different categories of pasta (a total of 40 formats) made of durum wheat flour with a high protein content and/or ‘Senatore Cappelli Bio’ durum wheat flour.