In the Kitchen with Elemeno

Most everything on the round kitchen table at Lauralyn Rosenberger and Mason Purtell’s house on the east side of Madison is homemade by the couple. An earthy tea comes from bran that usually would be discarded from bread making. Blue and white cups, bowls, a water pitcher, and a larger bowl filled with ground cherries are hand-turned pottery. Black bean balls, yogurt, roasted squash seed spice powder and bamboo chopsticks (whittled by Mason) are set, ready for our lunch.

These are beautiful and useful accompaniments to the main dish that Lauralyn and Mason are creating in front of my eyes—hand-pulled noodles.

The couple, both 24 years old and graduates of UW– Madison, do not have a restaurant of their own (yet), but they have made a name for themselves as Elemeno, holding pop-ups and cooking classes around town. And they are looking into finding a space of their own where they can do more experimentation. The name, in addition to being the letters in the middle of the alphabet in word form, stand for (L)auralyn, (M)ason, hand-pulled (N)oodles and (O)ther things. Their two curious cats are everywhere, checking out the food and the visitors.

Shannon Henry Kleiber: How did you two meet?

Mason Purtell: We met dumpster diving.

Lauralyn Rosenberger: There was a group of us from Slow Food [UW–Madison]. We went to Metcalfe’s, Bagels Forever, Madison Sourdough.

MP: There was so much fresh produce. Underripe bananas.

LR: Avocados.

MP: A clean garbage can full of mangoes.

LR: There was going to be a food waste demonstration on campus. We had so much food we had collected. We ended up handing out the food on State Street to people.

MP: Suddenly it was night, and it was just the two of us handing out produce to people waiting in bar lines on State Street.

LR: That very first night we planned to open a restaurant together. We were inspired by the food waste.

SHK: How do you personally try not to waste food?

LR: We love squash seeds. We ask all our friends to give us the seeds they would throw away.

MP: We roast them [in the oven at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, no oil or salt, nothing added], and blend into powder, put on salad, on noodles, a caramel sauce, a fudge. We also want to work more with the local farmers.

MP: We cook every meal at home. It’s hard to go out to eat.

SHK: I love how open you are to wanting to teach and share the way you cook and eat with others. What motivates you?

MP: The engine behind this is social issues. The ethics. If we can get people to practice it themselves, if they can skip some of the trial and error, that’s great.

SHK: What are your kitchen tools you can’t live without?

LR: My temperature gun [used for precise measurements especially in baking and desserts].

MP: My bench scraper [used to scrape and cut dough].

SHK: Who has influenced you in food and cooking in Wisconsin?

MP: I feel like my degree at UW was in Slow Food.

LR: Monica White, my professor at UW-Madison [and author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement] and Jonny Hunter [of Underground Kitchen; Lauralyn was a pastry chef at his restaurant Forequarter].

SHK: What’s your cooking style?

MP: We’re trying to ignore what we’ve heard people are doing.

LR: We are not doing the traditional culinary thing. We’re trying to make things easy. Slow Food really influenced my cooking style.

MP: We hesitate to use the word terroir, but it’s true Wisconsin terroir. We’d say Wisconsin, but then that sounds like a fish fry. There’s a connection to the ingredients.

LR: Because we limited ourselves to Wisconsin-only ingredients, we have to make everything from scratch. We buy at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, the Willy St. Co-op, Circadian Organics.

MP: You lose your crutches when you cook like this.

LR: We’re getting into fermenting and storing.

MP: Canning and freezing.

MP: We taste things now more when we make them.

LR: It’s different in how sweet a beet can taste.

MP: It’s a sensory experience. I can now understand what I’m tasting.

MP: Our first step is to find small producers. We attach to local. Ethical is the primary thing, and local is next.

LR: We don’t use meat but do use animal products.

SHK: How did you decide to make noodles?

MP: When we met, I had a flight booked to China and Japan to go to work on organic farms. In China, I tried to find someone to teach me to cook the noodles. No one makes them like this in the area as far as I know. In China, I equate it to pizza places. Every couple blocks there is a noodle place. But I couldn’t find a teacher. On my 21st birthday, I finally found someone—a 19-year-old son of restaurant owners—who agreed to teach me. I went every day in the afternoon for a few hours. I called it my “noodle journey.” I wanted to spend a long time learning something.

SHK: What were your lessons like?

MP: There was no shared language. We tried Google Translate but that didn’t work well. I watched and learned using the flour they have in China. [The technique is called “lamian” or “la mian,” originally from Lanzhou, China. Mason learned how to make the noodles in Guangzhou, China.]

SHK: How did you start to introduce the noodles in Wisconsin?

MP: Jonny Hunter pushed us into it. [Both Lauralyn and Mason have worked for Jonny Hunter at Underground Kitchen.] He really pushed us out of the nest. At Underground Kitchen there’s a lot of freedom.

LR: We were doing a more classic pho then. People really took to it.

MP: At pop-ups, people asked for vegan [pho]. We were really proud of it. It’s creamy from oats. We nailed this vegan broth. We thought, we can ride this.

LR: We can swap out different vegetables.

SHK: OK, let’s do this. How do we make noodles?

MP: This lump of relaxed dough has four ingredients: spelt, flour, salt and baking soda. [Mason kneads the dough on a sideboard in their kitchen. He says the stance, where he keeps his feet, one leg in front of the other, is important.]

MP: I always say it should be a little annoyingly sticky at first. It’s totally a feeling-based thing. Pulling apart is aligning the gluten. [He’s twisting, making it into jump ropes, pulling, rolling, kneading and pulling again, throwing it higher each time. Small bowls of oil, flour and water are at the ready for adjustments. He whips his arms up and down until, seemingly suddenly, perfect noodles appear.]

SHK: This reminds me of meditation. Does it feel like that to you?

MP: When I get to put my hands on the dough, it’s peaceful. It’s an experiment in mindfulness.