When wheat is the largest crop grown under the Big Sky, in a workspace, the size of a garage, on Broadwater Avenue in Billings, Henry Kennah makes homemade and hand cut pasta using Montana durum wheat semolina. His company, Yellowstone Pasta Company supplies local restaurants such as Walkers Grill and the Granary as well as the Yellowstone and Hilands country clubs. For retail customers, his pasta can be found at the Hesper West End Farmers Market and at the Billings downtown Yellowstone Farmers Market in the summer. In Midtown, Town and Country also carries the 15 different shapes of pasta he makes.
Kennah started working in restaurants at the age of 17 as a dishwasher. “I didn’t come from a family where we ate out at any place fancy.” He admits have a revelation when the sous chef passed him a plate of shrimp scampi. “I fell in love with food right there. I was like, ‘oh my gosh,’ food can taste like this?”
“I worked at Jake’s for a number of years, and then I actually met Alan Sparbo.” He followed him to the Beanery and then to the Granary. He also stepped into the kitchens at the Windmill and Commons.
In the early 2000s, the Food Network was the established source for learning about cooking and baking. For Kennah, he found the Discovery Channel and its offering of culinary shows. “I would just binge watch that stuff as much as I possibly could. And then I started collecting cookbooks and I just started studying. I was fortunate enough to work with people in the industry that fostered my creativity and my exploration of food.”
“I’ve been making pasta for a long time. Pasta was one of the first things I could figured out young in my career. It was one thing that I knew that I could make from scratch in my home.”
Eventually Kennah discovered that the long hours he was working did not fit his personal life. “And so we had three kids. We had three under three for an entire year. So we had our daughter, Lucy, and then we had twins.”
His time as an at home dad gave him a chance to consider opening his own business. “I was hand rolling pasta for a long time, and the initial thought of staring a pasta company or maybe even a small little bistro that was going to serve pasta, I realized that it wasn’t going to be sustainable to hand roll enough pasta.” The labor required would be challenging.
He made a trip out to San Francisco to learn about the Pastabiz extruder machine. The machine kneaded and extruded the dough which made the process much easier.
The use of bronze dies to extrude his pasta “puts this texture on the outside of the dough and so that whatever sauce that you pair with it, it just clings to it.” Extruded pasta is more robust than delicate hand rolled pasta.
Kennah uses Montana durum wheat semolina for his pasta. He sources the coarser grain flour from General Mills in Great Falls.
According to Dr. Mike Giroux, professor of plant genetics, durum breeder, and department head of plant sciences and plant pathology at MSU Bozeman, “There is both red and white winter and spring wheat, where Montana only grows red spring and winter wheat. But when you say durum, people mean only durum, because there isn’t any winter durum. And all durum is yellow in seed color.”
Semolina is often times confused with cornmeal. “So the center of the seed, the endosperm, is crushed. And for semolina, which comes from durum wheat, you end up with larger particles because the seeds are harder than for other wheats where you get some small particles for flour release. So why the preferences for yellow pasta and white bread. People traditionally like yellowish pasta.”
In the state of Montana, Giroux says, “we select all of our spring and winter wheat to have high gluten strength because that makes for a big loaf of bread. And that also is true for semolina. We want high gluten strength so that we have firm pasta.”
According to Executive Nick Steen Gullings of Walkers Grill and Bin 119, he recommends cooking pasta in salted water. “It should taste like the ocean,” he states. For fresh pasta, “It takes two or three minutes in boiling water.” Fresh pasta should be toothsome in texture while dried pasta can be cooked to be firmer.
The pasta should be a little chewy but “it shouldn’t break when you’re moving it,” Gullings advises.
Here under the Big Sky, with wheat grown in the state, Yellowstone Pasta Company is demonstrating that it is only natural that good pasta can be made here.
