Perfect for an Italian sausage ragù, fresh tomato basil sauce, creamy mushroom sauce, pesto, or rapini with garlic and sausage. The twisted fold of the strozzapreti was designed for one thing only: to trap the sauce in every one of its crevices.

You can recognize a strozzapreto by its twist: a small roll of dough twisted onto itself, as if rolled by hand, yet retaining all the firmness of durum wheat when bitten into.

A Romagna legend says that housewives of the past offered this pasta to the village priests in exchange for their blessing, and the greedy priests swallowed them so quickly that they choked on them. Hence the name, "priest-strangler." Legend or not, this little hand-twisted roll has become one of the great classics of Romagna cuisine.

Pasta Alica has been carrying on this same tradition since the 1920s in Laurenzana, in the province of Potenza. It all began with Grandmother Anna, helped by two of her thirteen sons, Rocco and Francesco, who opened a small grocery store for local farmers. In 1928, this shop became the Michele Crisci wholesale house, one of the most important in southern Italy, and that same family passion still guides Pasta Alica today.

Everything starts with the finest Italian durum wheat, grown in the fertile lands of Basilicata and the Tavoliere delle Puglie. The grains are slowly ground into a fine semolina, then worked with pure Lucanian water at a temperature that never exceeds 25°C to preserve the wheat's natural proteins. The pasta is bronze-extruded, which gives each strozzapreto a slightly rough surface designed to hold the sauce in every twist. It then dries slowly for nearly two days, between 36°C and 40°C, to maintain its amber color and a perfect al dente bite.

You don't buy strozzapreti for an ordinary meal. You buy them for that moment when the sauce slips into every fold, when the fork brings up a generous mouthful, when every bite tastes like a dish you could have eaten on a Sunday at a family table in Romagna.

And tonight, right here, between two tasks and an evening passing by too quickly, these same twists are rolling in a pot somewhere in Canada. For the time it takes for a sauce to simmer, you are somewhere else—in Romagna or Basilicata, where this craft has never changed.

Why our customers love them:

• 🇮🇹 Made in Italy, in Basilicata
• 🌾 100% Italian durum wheat, grown in Basilicata and the Tavoliere delle Puglie
• 🥉 Bronze-extruded for a texture that traps sauce in every twist
• 🌡️ Slow-dried for nearly 48 hours, between 36°C and 40°C
• 💧 Worked with Lucanian water at below 25°C
• 🍝 Twisted pasta, perfect al dente cook, ideal for generous sauces and ragùs
• 👵 Italian family heritage passed down since the 1920s