Cooking School – Week Three

On By Lauren Case

All alone in the kitchen this week without my mom. A little lonely at first, but dessert day helped me pull through.

Day 11 – Desserts

We started off making biscotti and a vegan cookie. We used the biscotti to make a biscotti-flavored bavarian. The bavarian was really complicated, and included what can best be described as a wine jello shot in the middle. Then we made sebadas, a dessert from Sardinia, which is sort of like an Italian quesadilla, with honey on top. Really good.

Below are the sebadas. They have pecorino cheese inside. Yum.

Bavarian didn’t have enough time to set. Imagine it prettier. The filling is an Italian sweet wine – vin santo!

Day 12 – Sauces

We made about 5 different sauces today. The best part was that Marcella had me make two different tomato sauces anyway I wanted, and then we just watched what happened. I made one spicy sauce, and one without spice, each sauce using a different technique.

The spicy sauce got started with hot oil, and was not put through a food mill. The other sauce was started in cold oil, and then put through a mill.

Before and afters. Spicy sauce shown above, non-spicy below.

The main difference between the two sauces was heating the oil or not – heating the oil first leaves an oilier residue (in a good way), whereas starting the sauce cold causes the oil to be absorbed by the ingredients and the finished product looks a little more watery as opposed to oily. Here are the sauces with pasta, spicy (hot oil) on the left.

Other sauces and dips made today.

Day 13 – Low Cooking with Game Meat

Marcella got us some fresh Tuscan hare and wild boar today. We made stew and pate with the boar, and braised the hare. We also made some pork confit. The hare was really tough and gamey, the boar and pork were delicious.

Hare with blackberry sauce and chestnut “polenta”.

Day 14 – Offals . . .

Made lots of strange stuff today, but I’ll say this, actually preparing the strange stuff makes it a lot easier to eat and it all tasted just fine. I probably won’t make any of it ever again, but it was tasty! We also made pan brioche, which was delicious.

  • Fat web.
  • Liver wrapped in fat web.
  • Brioche.
  • Sweetbreads and artichokes getting ready for frying.
  • Tripe for stew.
Some of the finished products. Dish with strawberries on top is chicken liver pate.

Day 15 – Gelato!

Last day of cooking school . . . I’m really sad to see it end. But I definitely didn’t tear up or anything (I did).

Gelato! A perfect topic to end on. We made seven gelatos with different bases and flavors. They break down into a few different categories by the base: 1) milk base; 2) milk/egg base; and 3) water/sugar base (sorbets).

We made two milk-based flavors – fiore di latte (just plain milk and a little vanilla) and a savory flavor, parmesan cheese. Three milk/egg bases – crema, basil, and chocolate. Basil was really good. Wasn’t expecting it. Finally, we may two sorbets – lemon/strawberry, and rose. The rose was amazing. I’m usually not one for flower-flavored foods, but the rose is a winner. And both sorbets were really creamy! You would not have thought they were sorbets. The trick to the creaminess is folding Italian meringue into the base part-way through the freezing process.

  • Meringue getting added to the strawberry.
  • Rose! The best. But I didn’t freeze it quite long enough . . .
Clockwise from top left – chocolate, strawberry, parm, fiore di latte, basil, crema.

If anyone is in Florence and is looking for a cooking class, I highly recommend Giglio. Marcella and her team are awesome. She can teach you any traditional Italian dish, or really just anything (but I think the Italian dishes are most fun!). And for those who are not unemployed and traveling, you can sign up for half-day classes.

So glad I had this experience, and I now have a lot of cooking gadgets to purchase when we return to SF, including a pasta roller and gelato maker.

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