The history of agriculture is the history of wheat. The crops are millennial.

And in Europe, Sicily has been the centre of this wealth for centuries. It was a granary of a thousand empires. The Sicilian whole-wheat bread was served at the banquets of Archimedes, Cicero, Julius Caesar, and then of Frederick II, and gradually until today. Nowadays technology and chemistry make any land fertile. And the market has chosen the quantity at the expense of the rest. Above all, often, to the damage of health.

Sood is looking for business owner who can challenge this way of doing.

One of these is Salvatore Curcio, from Modica, forty years old, who grew up in one of the capitals of the Baroque and at the same time is a legitimate son of Magna Graecia for his fervent faith in building a society that relies on the common good, on the construction of civil value both in the economy and in food, as well as in the story of his past and his future.

What did Salvatore Curcio do? He created Stories of Grains. A brand that produces pasta from the grain of wheat that grows in those lands, the same lands where he grew up.

But which kind of grains? Exactly those that the industry working on distribution through large scale has decided to abandon in the name of quantity and on the cheap.

Curcio has studied the history of his land. He understood which were the ancient seeds and which characteristics they had. He found them and slowly reproduced them. Up to make it his asset.

The wheat that he grows is the Bidì, an ancient crop, it seems to have come to Sicily from neighbouring Tunisia (at the time a formidable empire with the capital Carthage) and very particular in its aspect: it has a dark, almost black, bran that the ancestors associated with its African origin. In the quantity of harvest that it guarantees: 20 quintals per hectare, half of the modern varieties compared to almost 50 of the industrial ones. In its chemical components: it is very low in gluten and very rich in proteins, anti-modern aspects since gluten makes the mass elastic and facilitates its fundamental processing mechanism in industrial processes. Finally, the Bidì is difficult to harvest: in June, when the scorching sun brings the ears to their maximum height, more or less two meters, and with rains or winds that can knock even in summer, it often happens that they bend down to the ground, making the work of the threshing complex.

This list of uneconomic aspects is what excites Salvatore Curcio. In the story of his products he emphasizes the complete integrity of his raw material. The complete absence of any fertilizer pesticide; furthermore the Bidì, having a radical apparatus so robust as to prevent the growth of parasitic weeds, does not need any treatment. Moreover, there is the great contribution of the land where his farms sprout, composed of clay in that segment of Sicily. Finally,  the climate that, after the winter rains, passing through the mildness of April, ripens the harvest in June, the moment in which the torrid heat of those latitudes dries the ears, removing the aflatoxins, which are present instead  on the grains cultivated in wet lands, like Canada (huge exporter) for example, and which are even carcinogenic substances.

Salvatore Curcio’s pasta comes from there. From those grains. Then it goes through a mill that marries Curcio’s philosophy: high technology and innovation at the moment of cleaning and tradition in breaking the grain of wheat: the grain is ground on a stone (dated back to the end of the 1800s) and for this reason the flour that comes out preserves all its nutritional properties, along with the scent given by that environment.

The final step is the bronze drawing, made by a craftsman who studied the shapes. The dough is wrinkled and the mass is reach, generated by a slow drying process at 36 degrees, which happens to be the outside temperature, in the summer, when women used to make pasta at home and drying it under the sun.

Try tasting those flavours.

Good discovery.