74 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {food coloring} words by ANDREA GEMMET • photography by PAULETTE PHLIPOT NOODLES pasta aplenty Almost every Friday, you’ll find Trish Battaglia cooking up something delicious for the staff lunch at Saporito Pasta in Redwood City. In good Italian fashion, it’s known as the “mangia meal,” and Trish is always changing the menu to whatever the factory’s small crew is craving. “I do salmon or tri-tip, sometimes burgers, a lot of seafood,” Trish says. Perhaps unsurprisingly, pasta is frequently on the menu. “They always want pasta!” she laughs. Saporito is tucked into an unassuming block of industrial buildings off of busy Veterans Boulevard. Inside a small office space, I find Trish wearing a chef’s coat and bright blue hair net. I suit up and follow her onto the factory floor, a compact space humming with activity, as Saporito’s handful of skillful staffers are hard at work producing hundreds of pounds of pasta. Angel hair emerges from the imported Italian extruder—“Just like Playdoh,” Trish comments— and with the swipe of a blade, handfuls of slender golden strands are freed from the machine, tossed with flour, gathered in a loose twist and gently placed in a clamshell box. Short, ridged tubes of mostaccioli pop out from another extruder, while nearby, the laminator is producing sheets of pasta that will be cut into linguine, lasagna and pappardelle. Another specialized machine produces nothing but plump, potato-enriched gnocchi. Metal trays fill up with packages of pasta and are rolled past 50-pound bags of flour and into the walk-ins to chill. At Saporito, there’s a strict order of operations. The first pasta of the day is the traditional stuff, made with just flour and water—“All our Italian clients ask for that,” Trish explains—followed by pasta enriched with eggs and lastly, flavored pastas. On this overcast Thursday, Saporito is making lemon-pepper linguine and saffron pappardelle. Once, they even produced a special order of chocolate linguine. Which raises the question: What
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