Flair, vision and professionalism are some of the peculiarities of Filippo Dragothe artisan miller, as he likes to call himself, who has rediscovered and brought Sicilian ancient grains to the forefront, making all chefs and bakers in Italy and overseas fall in love with them. Visiting his mill gives one the sensation of travelling back in time: alongside his father's old stone mills stand ultra-technological and sophisticated machinery that performs all the necessary tasks to keep up with the times and guarantee the quality of his flours, while rigorously maintaining stone milling, which, as he claims, is the future. A passionate entrepreneur with an insatiable curiosity, he has been able to challenge modern times with ancient knowledge, making an ancestral craft the pride and joy of his beloved Sicily, exporting to the world the unique and genuine flavours of a land that, in its slow progress, has preserved the richness of its territory and its ancient traditions.
Where did the idea of ancient grains come from?
'In 2002, thanks to a meeting with Slow Food in Caltanissetta, I learnt of the existence of the Experimental Consortium of Graniculture for Sicily in Caltagirone, where the grains that were saved in the early 1920s, thanks to the agronomist Ugo De Cillis, are preserved. He sensed that industrialisation would lead to the extinction of local wheat varieties and so he created a collection of seeds that he catalogued and preserved so that they would not disappear. So I asked the director for a bag of them, took them to the field and with farmers and friends, who were as desperate as or perhaps more than me (laughs), we recovered the Perciasacchi, the Maiorca, the Tumminia. In Sicily we have as many as 54 varieties of ancient grains.
Why do you call your flours 'wheat-squeezed'?
I call them wheat presses because we do not add anything to the raw material. I like to compare my flours to squeezing a citrus fruit. When you squeeze the orange, you take all the juice from the fruit as it is and drink it. The same happens with my flours: I extract the best from the grain of the wheat and turn it into a flour as rich, fragrant and tasty as the orange. The wheat is well controlled with our very modern cleaning systems and then ground and distributed to the various pasta makers and bakers. The concept is not to intervene on the wheat, because it is perfect just as nature created it'.
How does the stone mill work?
"The stone mill is an instrument to grind grain, i.e. to reduce the grain into flour. Out of the stone mill comes a 'full-body' bean and thus contains both germ and bran. It then passes into the safety tumbler where the flour is checked. The mill is very simple. It is made up of two millstones also known as grindstones: underneath the underneath grindstone, which is also called a dormant grindstone because it remains stationary held by a vertical axis to the upper rotating grindstone or soprano grindstone: within a radius of 60 cm we have a finished product for bread-making and pasta-making. With the stone mill and exact dressing, which is the reshaping of the grooves in the stone, there is direct and immediate extraction and no need for a second pass, thus avoiding stress on the grain and flour. The 100 revolutions per minute guarantee slow processing which, combined with the excellence of the grain, results in a very high quality product'.
Are these particular stones?
"The stone of my mills is special and comes from the quarry of La Ferté-sous-Jouarreal, a small village north of Paris, a particular type of stone, called siliceous stone or molar stone, which has grooves made with special hammers. French stonemasons were called the blue-handed men because this chiselled flint stuck under their skin like a tattoo, making their hands this colour. They are very durable stones suitable for grinding hard grain because they do not wear easily. The stone is usually dressed twice a year'.
What is the special feature of your mill and your success?
"Definitely the cleaning of the wheat, which is that path that precedes the milling and is more important than the milling itself. Regardless of whether it is organic or not, a wheat field is full of life and when the threshing machine arrives it threshes everything even the little animals that inhabit it. We then do an analysis called 'filth test' which analyses the presence of these foreign bodies and establishes whether the flour is in order and how careful and professional the miller is. In our flours, the presence of foreign bodies is zero because we have installed a very strict cleaning plant that ensures that all the life that comes from the field is removed before milling. So all this has led to the success of my company and my flours because we guarantee a top-quality product that complies with current health laws. We also have reduced consumption of the millstones because they avoid friction with that abrasive part that settles on the grain. This is why my flour smells of dill, wild fennel, chamomile, which are the wild herbs that grow among the grain and when you thresh them, they give that imprint, which in the world of wine is called terroir, to Sicilian grains.
You represent the fourth generation of this family business, which started how?
"With the Molini del Ponte company born under the name "Molini Fratelli Drago" we are in the fourth generation with me and the fifth with my son Francesco, and hopefully many more to come. Before that there was my father, a successful visionary entrepreneur, and before that my great-grandfather and grandfather who were coachmen: they transported people and foodstuffs and already traded flour".
Do you grind all the grains? How do you select them?
"We only process Sicilian grains, which have the particularity of having a moisture content that never exceeds 10% and this means that the grain is naturally free of aflatoxins, which are highly toxic and carcinogenic mycotoxins. It can be stored even 2 years because it does not spoil. We talk about the quality of the food but we never talk about the quality of the supply chain: healthy and happy farmers and workers who put the right passion and expertise into their work to offer a high quality product and are paid the right price. I personally select the wheat using a French machine called the infraneo Chopin, which tells me the level of protein, planing strength, moisture and other characteristics contained in the grain. From this analysis, I understand if it is a quality grain and I either select it or discard it'.
Which chefs rely on your products?
'Many well-known chefs and bakers, not only in Sicily, choose my artisan flours every day'.
Can you tell us a funny anecdote related to your business?
"One day chef Crescenzo Scotti from the Cappero restaurant of the Therasia resort on Vulcano came to visit me. That day I had a goose egg with some field vegetables and I asked him if he wanted to come to my house to eat them. I did it out of sympathy is the way we are here in Sicily. We became friends and after a few years he won a Michelin star'.
What do you mean when you say that the future is in stone?
"My work is a continuous balance between past and future, between ancient knowledge handed down from one generation to the next and the need to keep up with changes. So on the one hand I buy state-of-the-art machinery to select and keep the grain clean, and on the other hand I keep the milling stone milled. My mission is to recover the ancient native Sicilian varieties and continue to grind them the old-fashioned way. That is why I maintain that the future lies in stone and its flavours appreciated by those who love to delight their palate with authenticity and simplicity'.
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