Broaden Your Pasta-Making Knowledge with Newport Pasta Co. at Buttonwoods Brewery
Pasta enthusiasts unite: up your pasta-making game with the creator of unique pasta shapes and flavors.
Newport Pasta Co. offers about twenty-five different shapes and flavors of pasta. Photography courtesy of Alex Reppe.
For a not-so-traditional guy, unique and outlandish pasta follows suit. Alex Reppe, founder of Newport Pasta Co., hosts pasta-making workshops at local breweries to show pasta-lovers that they, too, can achieve the perfect ravioli or garganelli. On Tuesday, March 22 at 6:30 p.m., join the company at the Buttonwoods Brewery workshop in Cranston.
From rosemary-flavored jumbo shells to spicy ghost pepper pasta, Newport Pasta Co. makes small batch artisan pasta for customers to buy at farmers markets, and soon hopes to expand by selling to restaurants and supermarkets. When the veteran-owned-and-operated company isn’t selling pasta, it’s leading pasta-making classes throughout the state.
Ten years before building his pasta company, Reppe had been in the military as a sniper for the 101st Airborne and a paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne, and years before that he was in the restaurant business, jumping from industry to industry as a cook or head chef. As he grew tired of the restaurant business, Reppe settled that he’d rather be his own boss.
As someone who also once worked as a brewery manager and is an avid fan of beer, coming up with a venue for these pasta workshops was a simple task. Reppe’s purpose with these classes is to not only support the brewery industry but to give guests the confidence to create delicious pasta on their own and remove the anxieties attached to pasta-making.
“[Pasta] is intimidating, kind of like bread,” says Reppe. “Making sourdough is something that is still intimidating to me, but if I took a class on it, it would demystify it and I would do it on my own a little more.”
Founder of Newport Pasta Co. Alex Reppe poses with a blue farfalle pasta.
While making dough in front of everyone at the workshop, Reppe goes over the doughs and flours that cooks can use for their pasta. Guests can practice their kneading skills before he flattens the dough and passes it around. Using various machines and ingredients, everyone helps create different colored dough (like navy blue and black) and both traditional and unusual pasta styles to make farfalle, fettuccini, cavatelli and more.
“People mostly get excited about actually shaping the pasta, on top of learning new shapes that they’ve never heard of,” Reppe says. “Some people really like it because they have one of these tools or machines to make pasta at home but they don’t know how to use it. They come to my class and figure out how to use it so they can try it at home later.”
By the end of the class, guests will walk out with their newfound pasta knowledge and a personal bag of Newport Pasta Co. pasta, of course, usually made with the designated brewery’s beer or wine.
The Buttonwoods Brewery workshop ticket ($26) includes one free drink from the brewery’s beer selection. Fill up on Newport Pasta Co. products at upcoming farmers markets, including the Meet Your Makers farmers market at Hope and Main on April 10. Buttonwoods Brewery, 530 Wellington Ave., #22, Cranston, newportpastaco.com, eventbrite.com
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