From Cinisi to Flat Rock with Love
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Launa Tierney making homemade past with her mother, Theresa Marie.
Flat Rock resident Launa Tierney’s fledgling business, Homemade Pasta Noodles, is much more than the making and selling of pasta. It is a way to share a tradition that reaches back to her great-grandmother’s days in the small Sicilian town of Cinisi.
The recipe for making exceptional pasta at home goes well beyond the incredibly simple list of ingredients - 1 cup flour, 1 egg. As Launa sees it, the real secret to successful pasta-making relies heavily on the intangible ingredients of experience, family tradition, artistic expression, and possession of “the touch” - all sprinkled liberally with love.
The result can best be described as a kind of culinary magic that will make it impossible to ever look at boxed and bagged supermarket pasta the same way again.
Launa’s great-grandmother Marie brought her gift for pasta making to the United States, and she lived long enough to have a profound effect on her great-grandaughter. “My earliest memory of my great-grandma was running into her kitchen to find noodles hanging from wooden sticks,” says Launa. “They filled the kitchen like a forest of weeping willow noodle branches. I would crawl under them and stare up into the noodles. Six-year-old me thought it was the most beautiful and magical thing in the world. Today if I close my eyes, that memory is just as vibrant.”
Marie passed “the touch” to Launa’s grandmother Tina and the tradition of a family making pasta together was passed forward and indelibly stamped on Launa’s consciousness. “Whenever I was with my grandma we were always in the kitchen. She would share techniques and memories of her own mom and her grandma. Making pasta was expressing her love. The process of making homemade noodles is such a powerful memory, and even as a child, I felt important when I was included. It was like a rite of passage. To this day, I feel grandma with me when I am making homemade pasta.”
Pasta making continued through the generations and Launa’s mother, Theresa Marie hosted an annual Christmas Dinner that included hand-made pasta in prodigious quantities sufficient to feed a large and ravenous crowd on Christmas day. “Weeks before Christmas we would plan "the noodle-making day,” explains Launa. “We would make as many as 400 ravioli, 30 pounds of pasta noodles, 50 single sheets of lasagna, and 5 pounds of gnocchi. When it was “noodle-making day” it didn’t matter your age it was All Hands on Deck! The flour-covered table was long, and the pasta-making was fast and furious.”
Launa grew up and lived most of her life in Michigan. Then fate brought her to Hendersonville while driving a college-bound daughter to visit Clemson University in 2006. “It was Memorial Day weekend during the Garden Jubilee. We got out, walked around and just fell in love. And from that day forward, we said once our kids were done with high school, we would be down here.”
Good to their word, the Tierney’s packed up their life in Michigan and moved to Henderson County shortly after becoming empty nesters. And they never looked back.
After a career that included 20 years as a technical recruiter for the automotive industry, Launa switched gears in North Carolina and spent time working at Flat Rock Village Bakery and the Hendersonville Coop. She now works as a teaching assistant at FernLeaf Community Charter School. Although her address and job titles changed, one thing remained constant throughout the transition to North Carolina - making pasta by hand.
Launa didn’t start out with the idea of selling noodles. Instead, she wanted to share her passion by teaching others how they could make their own pasta. But fate stepped in again, and the pandemic made hosting people in her home impossible. At that point, a good friend suggested she sell her pasta at the local farmers market. “I wasn't sure how it would go over. It's been very surprising! I'm still in awe every weekend when so many people buy my noodles. I don't understand why nobody else has ever sold noodles before.”
The pasta recipe could not be simpler. One cup of flour and one egg. Or so it seems. As Launa explains, that’s where generations of experience really make a difference. For her, it is both an art and a science. “The traditional technique of making homemade noodles pays close attention to the type of flour you select, the weight of the egg, the temperature of the room, the moisture in the dough, the amount of time you handle the dough, and the most important part; the thickness of the dough. The ingredients are the same as dried pasta, but the taste is better and the texture is better. If it's homemade, it's also full of love.”
Launa’s success at the market has resulted in a business that Launa never expected. “It has snowballed. My intentions weren't to start a noodle company. But it just created a life of its own.”
Launa at the Hendersonville Farmers Market.
Now, Saturdays find Launa peddling her pasta at the Hendersonville Famers Market held each Saturday at the Historic Hendersonville Train Depot downtown. She shows up with a variety of offerings including her mom’s original recipe, gnocchi, and then flavored pastas that incorporate the contents of her CSA basket. “I've made spinach fettuccine, as well as carrot, mint and roasted red pepper fettuccine. And this week, I had extra eggplant. So I'm going to do an eggplants/garlic fettuccine.”
Launa’s customers are loving the results of her passion. There are also discussions with the Hendersonville Co-op about selling her pasta there. And she still wants to teach. “That's really what I'm most excited about- starting classes and then actually teaching people to do this so everyone can do it at home.”
In the meantime, Launa is enjoying life in Flat Rock. “I love the feel of it. I love Rainbow Row. I grew up in a smaller town, so I love that it has that small-town feel.”
With the passage of time, Launa has become the pasta-making matriarch of her family. And now “the touch” resides in the charming Highland Lake Village neighborhood of Flat Rock - in a kitchen nearly five thousand miles removed from Cinisi and as close as the beating heart of Launa Tierney.
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For more information about Launa and how to experience the joy of eating traditional hand made noodles, go to https://www.homemadepastanoodles.com/ and follow her on Instagram at homemade_pasta_noodles.
