During this past weekend’s Halloween-themed festivities at the West Side Market, Ohio City Pasta showed off with an impressive, massive pasta sheet that was created with the community’s help.
“We have done it for school demonstrations for elementary students, where we come in and we make pasta and we just try to roll out the pasta sheet as far as possible,” says Ruby Thomas, OCP’s director of operations for West Side Market and wholesale sauce. “It’s a really interactive, fun thing for kids to do, and this being a family-friendly kid event, we just decided it would be another fun thing to do here at the market.”
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Once the sheet of dough ran through the pasta machine several times, it ended up lengthening to a total of 65 feet long. Around 30 or 40 people helped hold up the long noodle, in a line that stretched along the length of the West Side Market.
“That was the longest that I’ve seen it,” Thomas says. “It was outside, so the dough was kind of dry, so that kind of hindered the ability to stretch it any further. We probably could get it longer given better conditions.”
It was impressive, but it wasn’t quite long enough to earn a Guinness World Record; honors like that have gone to Xiangnian Food Co. in China in 2017 for a 10,119-foot-long noodle, and to Lawson Inc. in Japan for a 12,388-foot-long strand of pasta, according to Guinness World Records’ website.
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The event highlighted OCP, a brand that’s existed since 1989 when Thomas’ father, Gary Thomas, founded the company in the neighborhood. A year later, OCP opened its popular booth at the West Side Market, which Ruby Thomas now runs. She says to stay tuned for OCP’s seasonal specials, which, this year, will include delicata squash ravioli, specialty meat ravioli and more.
The West Side Market’s Halloween event was a part of the organization’s new series of free monthly programming. Upcoming events include a holiday kick-off festival on Nov. 23 and a home for the holidays event on Dec. 21, both running from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. The series features pop-up vendors, a beer garden, treats, decorations and more.
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