“My girlfriend’s gluten-free – my GF GF – so I’ve worked on this pasta [recipe] over a couple of years,” Lachlan Peachey says of the product at his new gluten-free pasta shop, Pasta Pi-Ci. It recently opened on Breese Street in Brunswick, just down the road from Kines.

Determined to eat better gluten-free pasta than what he could find at the supermarket, Peachey’s refined a coeliac-friendly secret recipe that leans on rice and corn flour. He started out supplying his fresh, handmade creations to pasta bars Pinotta
and Hope St Radio before moving into this discreet, snug shopfront beneath an apartment building. A cute decal, which reads “Tutto Senza Gluten” (“all gluten-free” in Italian), adorns the window.

Here, he singlehandedly rolls, shapes and sells his pasta. “It’s just me, I can only do so much,” he says. “I’ve got no extruder – it’s all made, shaped by hand.” Still, Peachey – who worked as a chef across Australia, the UK and Europe for nearly 20 years before going on to study anthropology – says he makes around five kilos a day.

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It’s a simple set-up: Peachey scrawls the day’s menu on a piece of paper (he often posts a picture of it on Instagram if you want to know what to expect), while the pastas sit in a small glass cabinet, to be sold by weight.

There’ll always be plain pappardelle or tagliatelle on the roster, but he’s also experimenting with more adventurous pasta shapes and flavours. That includes scarpinocc (shaped like an old-fashioned wooden shoe) filled with porcini, taleggio and walnut; agnolotti (or “puffy bois”, as he calls them) with broad beans and Geraldton wax; and carob-and-cinnamon varieties (“carob sounds shit but it’s great in pasta”).

As well as pasta, Peachey sells pecorino, black garlic, olive oil and eggs, but he plans to add sauces in the future – “so you can buy everything you need for a pasta meal”.

And as for the name? “I couldn’t think of anything better,” Peachey admits. It’s a riff on his last name and pici pasta, the thick, hand-rolled “fat spaghetti” with Tuscan origins.

Pasta Pi-Ci
10 Breese Street, Brunswick

Hours:
Wed to Sat 10am–6pm

@pasta.pici