Giada De Laurentiis Launches a Line of Pasta, Says She's in a 'Rebirth' Since Leaving Food Network

Pasta is in Giada De Laurentiis' blood.

The food star launched a private-label pasta line, Giadzy Pasta, on Sunday. The eight, harder-to-find shapes are sold exclusively on her lifestyle website Giadzy for $10.50 for 1.1 lb. boxes.

"It's super exciting to finally have it out in the world," she tells PEOPLE.

De Laurentiis comes from "a pasta family" — her great grandparents had a pasta factory outside of Naples, Italy. Of course, she also made a name for herself cooking it, among other Italian staples, on the Food Network for 21 years before leaving for Amazon Studios in February.

"From all my years cooking it and working with different brands, I realized that there are certain things that I'm looking for in a pasta that I still haven't quite found all in one package," she says.

So she made her own. The Giadzy Pasta shapes — nodi marini, bucatini, taccole, pappardelle, paccheri, bucatini lunghi, manfredi lunghi and spaghetti chitarra — are made in the Abruzzo, Italy region and are cut on 100-year-old bronze dies.

"It was really important to not just to do the average shapes that everybody can find, but things that are more unique," De Laurentiis tells PEOPLE. "I think that's why at the end of the day, kids and adults alike will fall in love with the pasta, because the shapes are fun and cool and different."

Giadzy, De Laurentiis' lifestyle e-commerce platform that sells Italian products curated by the chef herself, is what she calls "a dream come true." It's an all-women run business and something De Laurentiis has really focused on the past few years, but has been "envisioning for 20 years."

"I've had a rebirth in my career and in what I really want to do," she says. "Partnerships have been amazing over the years and I've been super lucky, but I haven't been able to really tell the full story. At the heart of it, I'm a teacher and a storyteller, and when you're in a partnership with somebody else, you have to make compromises in that storytelling."

In February, after 21 years as a host and chef personality at the Food Network, De Laurentiis revealed that she will no longer collaborate on new projects there, and instead signed a multi-year deal for unscripted series production with Amazon Studios. Shows that she will both star in and executive produce are still in the works.

One change she's had to adjust to since is a smaller budget for glam.

"I don't have a big conglomerate behind me anymore that facilitates those things, so a lot of the stuff, I do myself, and hair and makeup is one of them," she says with a laugh. "I'm not great with the hair so I do get a blow dry. I try to do it only once a week because that's what the budget allows, and then I try to tweak it myself."

She enjoys doing her own makeup and her daughter Jade, 15, is "really good at hair" and often acts as her "mentor" in that department.

"She'll say, 'Mom, you've got to brush it fully through in the morning,' because I get lazy when it comes to my hair and so I don't brush all the way through. I just kind of put curls in the front of my face, whatever frames my face," De Laurentiis recalls. "And she's like, 'No, mom. You have to brush all of the hair. You have to take the extra time, then you've got to go through and start curling from underneath.'"

Since running Giadzy full time, De Laurentiis says she's in "this awesome growing period of my life."

"I feel like I'm learning so much in a world that I didn't really know much about in the past and owning it as we go through it," she says. "The mistakes are mine and the wins are mine."