WASHINGTON — Jordan Fainberg knows fermentation. Fainberg founded Pinsa Love, a startup that produces Roman-style frozen pizza crusts called pinsas, in January 2020. Now he is taking that knowledge and using it to develop a differentiated pasta in the United States.
Fainberg’s fermentation journey began in 2019 while on a trip to Massa Marittima in Tuscany, Italy, where he first learned to make pinsas.
“When I learned to make pinsas in Italy, I was struck by how often the people that I was with would talk about the digestibility of them,” he said.
Pinsa Love uses cold fermentation to produce its pinsa crust. Cold fermentation is a slow-rise process where dough is left to develop in a cool environment, typically a refrigerator, over an extended period.
The method may help improve flavor complexity, enhance the dough’s texture and increases digestibility by allowing yeast and enzymes to work gradually, breaking down starches and proteins more effectively than quick fermentation, letting it ferment for 72 hours, Fainberg said.
After figuring out the fermentation process for the company’s pinsas, Fainberg said he wanted to bring the cold fermentation process to pasta. He said many Italian pasta manufacturers believe the process isn’t a fit for pasta due to its complex nature.
“Pasta making is an age-old process that uses a quicker process where flour, water and eggs are mixed and then extruded in 30 minutes, and that’s the way it is and most are resistant to changes,” he said. “Especially mixing the dough and waiting 72 hours.”
Fainberg began experimenting with a blend of flour that would survive 72 hours of fermentation using a mixture of semolina flour, water and yeast out of a commercial kitchen.
“There’s plenty of fast doughs out there,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with them; you’re just not getting the benefits of true fermentation. Kind of like making kimchi or kombucha, you need time. There are some sourdough pastas on the market. But what they’re doing is they’re not doing a long fermentation; they’re just taking sourdough cultures and mixing it and (using) a fast extrusion process to get that flavor. It’s clearly not the same as this long process.”
Enter Fermentelli Pasta, a sub brand Fainberg is launching under Pinsa Love.
“It’s a challenge because (with) normal flour the yeast burns itself out,” he said. “I was able to get the fermentation to happen in the semolina flour. The other challenge was the pinsa dough is 80% to 90% hydration. It’s very wet and fermentation loves wet. The pasta needs to be 30% to 35%.
“We were able to get the fermentation in this drier mixture, that was our first test. The second test is can we extrude it and get shapes out of it properly. And, yes, we’re able to do that now. Now we’re (on) to one of the more challenging parts of it (the process) — the drying of the pasta. We want to create a shelf-stable dry product, not (one that is) fresh or frozen.”
Now that the company has developed its fermentation process for the pasta, next steps include chemical testing on the product’s analysis to make sure the fermentation has a lower glycemic index and to convert all of the starches around doing what the fermentation is supposed too, Fainberg said.
Fermentelli Pasta is launching a pre-seed funding round on Kickstarter with a goal of raising approximately $10,000. The raise will help the company fund market testing and its first commercial batch.
Once the Kickstarter funding round is complete, Fainberg said Fermentelli Pasta’s first commercial batch will be sent out in early February for consumer validation.
“We also will be doing nutritional testing by working with the University of Maryland food science department,” he said.
Next steps include launching direct-to-consumer in early March and working into retail toward the second quarter of 2025.
“The nice thing about dry is we can start a direct-to-consumer business easily,” he said. “My goal really is to try to get it in the mouths of consumers as quickly as possible.”
Scaling Fermentelli Pasta will come in phases, Fainberg said. Phases include producing a couple hundred pounds of pasta a day and purchasing larger pasta equipment.
“The pasta equipment is the extrusion or the drying and those two need to tie together because you don’t want to extrude 1,000 lbs of dry and only dry 100 lbs,” Fainberg said. “As far as handling the dough, we know how to ferment, we can do that right away. I’m not worried about the pasta — unlike trying to make pinsa. Once you have pasta dough, everybody kind of uses the same process to extrude and dry, unlike trying to automate pinsa.”
With Fermentelli Pasta coming to the market, consumers may have “more pasta less blah,” said Fainberg.
“We’re trying to bring pasta into a place where it could be eaten more frequently without all those side effects,” he said. “(And) fermentation baby, that’s what I would say for my opportunity for my product in the market. I’m struggling a bit on the branding and marketing side and how strong we want to be with the word fermentation because that does scare people. Whether it’s called fermentation or not, I think there’s a huge opportunity for it.”Enjoying this content? Learn about more disruptive startups on the Food Entrepreneur page.