Meet Our Makers: Elizabeth Hewson of Saturday Night Pasta
Elizabeth Hewson is a degree-qualified gastronome and slow food icon, famous for her fun and vibrant recipes that scream Italian summer. With a regular gig as food columnist for The Weekend Australian and fierce online following, Elizabeth’s range of small batch comfort food is absolutely crushing it. It features:
Three hearty sauces filled with high summer Romas and terrific things like Fiasco Shiraz, Iron Bark smoked garlic, Archie Rose vodka and Toolunka Estate olive brine.
Two unique pastas made from golden Aussie durum wheat semolina, extruded through bronze dies and air dried for 48 hours.
One more reason to stay home this weekend!
C&C: Hi Lizzie! Can you tell us a bit about the early days of Saturday Night Pasta - how did it start and where did the idea for the business come from?
Lizzie: It came about in a very organic way. I have anxiety and I was going through a particularly rough time at work and was very stressed. My husband was travelling a lot for work, so I was home alone and felt like making pasta from scratch one day. I’ve always loved to cook and I lived in Italy for a year, so I had a passion for and understanding of pasta anyway. But I didn’t often make it from scratch, so one night I made a basic tagliatelle egg dough and tossed it through a sauce that didn’t require much from me and ate it at the counter straight from the pot with a glass of wine and my favourite music playing (I’ve actually got a playlist on Spotify now called Saturday Night Pasta with Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra - I love old school music!). It was the first time I’d felt present for ages and was really in the moment, so I started repeating that every Saturday night, hence the name. I slowly started sharing this on social media and people started to make pasta on Saturday night too and began tagging me.
This grew into a bit of a movement, then a book deal arrived and my book Saturday Night Pasta was published in 2020. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I created self-care pasta packs where I would curate a recipe box with simple ingredients that people could throw together and they would sell out really quickly. It was during that time that I started to cruise the supermarket shelves and noticed that pasta sauces had an element of ‘sameness’ and were quite predictable and lacking personality on the shelf, compared to the condiment aisle which was bursting with vibrancy, fun and colour. My background is in marketing, communications and branding, so I put that hat on and wondered if there was something that I could do in this space. I decided to make a limited edition pasta sauce that was different.
C&C: It seems that this innovation in pasta sauce flavours is a really key point of difference for Saturday Night Pasta, with flavours like the Dirty Martini with Archie Rose vodka. Why did you decide to be ‘different’ to the other brands with your flavours?
Lizzie: At the time, one of my recipe boxes that I created was a vodka pasta sauce and it sold out within an hour. There wasn’t anyone doing a vodka pasta sauce at the time in Australia - there were a few overseas brands but they had a lot of preservatives in them - and I wanted to do something Australian with high quality ingredients. I approached Archie Rose - they have an incredible native botanical vodka and they were really keen. I love a dirty martini, olive brine and the native botanical lemon myrtle flavour, so I found a manufacturer and produced the Dirty Martini sauce. I ended up having a lot of pasta sauce show up at my door (and had a bit of a ‘what am I going to do with all of this!’ moment), but knew that I had to get it out there.
I did a Carriageworks Christmas market stall that went really well and then I approached a lot of my favourite retailers. To my surprise, they said they loved it and would take it on and reordered it. It sold out really quickly, so I thought ‘maybe there’s something here’. In 2023, I tested the waters and developed an approachable, familiar tomato and basil flavour which is now called Home Base. I launched this as a test to see if people were buying the sauce because of the flavour, or because of the brand. It was great to see that it was a bit of both and Home Base sold really well. I did all of the sales myself and at the end of the year I decided to really try to grow the brand and get it on shelves, started speaking to distributors and signed on with Cartel & Co.
C&C: How has the process of getting the products on the shelf been?
Lizzie: I found it so overwhelming! Like most things, it’s not what you know it’s who you know when you get into retail and I knew that if I was going to grow the business and brand, I needed someone who knew the space and understood the brand. With everything that I have going on in my life - all of the marketing and creative for Saturday Night Pasta, writing a recipe column, kids - I needed to be smart with where I put my time and energy. I knew that if I wanted the brand in supermarkets and independents, I needed to be with someone that ‘got it’.
I spoke to a lot of distributors, but when I spoke to Cartel & Co, they got it straight away from a brand perspective. Hayssam (‘The Chief’ at Cartel & Co) understood that I was nervous about handing this part of the business over from a product and margins point of view, but he really got it and it felt like a natural partnership and that he was someone that could help me grow and was ‘on the team’. It was really key that I worked with someone that got the brand and could see the value of branding. Retail is really tricky and I wanted to find someone that I trusted and connected with.
C&C: That’s great to hear! In terms of the products themselves, the pastas and sauces prioritise the simplicity and quality of the ingredients and have specific processes in relation to how they’re made. Can you tell us a bit about why the quality of ingredients and the method of creating your products is important to you?
Lizzie: It’s rare for people to understand the difference between standard pasta and a great quality pasta. From a nutrition perspective, a lot of people mention that they find pasta hard to digest and I started to wonder if it was because they were eating standard supermarket pasta, which is pushed through a Teflon dye and isn’t dried for long periods of time.
When you make pasta properly and put it through a brass dye then dry it well (Saturday Night Pasta products are dried for 48 hours), the nutrition, digestibility, texture and shape are completely different.
I think it’s not until you try that type of pasta that you ‘get it’. I studied my Masters in Food Culture & Communication, so I learned a lot about sustainable agriculture and ingredients and really had an appreciation for producers and ingredients. I knew that if I was going to do it, it needed to be in that high quality, Australian made category. It’s hard from a price difference point of view because the pasta on supermarket shelves is still fine and people are used to paying a couple of dollars for pasta - but I know there is a significant difference in quality and there’s room for an Australian made pasta on the shelf.
C&C: Very understandable. So if I was brand new to the Saturday Night Pasta world, which product would you recommend that I try first?
Lizzie: I would say the Dirty Martini pasta sauce, it’s my signature sauce and there’s nothing like it on the shelves. It’s got punch and brininess and is reminiscent of an Australian dirty martini. I think it captures what the brand is all about and it’s my favourite. I also love the new Red, Red Wine sauce (don’t make me sing it!) - it uses roasted peppers for smokiness and Adelaide Shiraz, which is something really different and great for Winter.
C&C: Do you have a favourite recipe to make with the pastas or sauces at the moment?
Lizzie: I’ve been loving my 15-minute bolognese with Red, Red Wine (linked on the Saturday Night Pasta website here). We’ve done all the hard work for you in terms of the normal long simmer and complex, robust flavours with a bolognese - to be able to then throw some mince in it and make it feel like a ragu that’s been simmered away for hours is pretty cool.
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