CET Student Correspondent News: Tuscan cooking class

Our group did a Tuscan cooking class at a culinary school that had a kitchen with 4 stations set up for groups just like ours, and then a separate nicer dining area downstairs for us to eat the meal we made. 

The menu for the night was an eggplant caprese for appetizers, handmade spinach ricotta ravioli, and panna cotta with a strawberry sauce for dessert.

Eggplant Caprese:
The eggplant slices had been grilled for us, and making the rest was pretty easy. We sliced up blanched tomatoes and some fresh mozzarella, and then arranged everything. The eggplant slices were set in groups of 3 on a tray, then tomato slices were put on top. Olive oil, salt, and pepper were added, then each set was topped with mozzarella slices and oregano, creating a pyramid of delicious food. All that went in the oven for 10 minutes and came out as a delicious, easy appetizer

Ravioli:
Here was the hard part of the meal. We started out by dumping the flour on the table, creating a hole in the center, and adding eggs to make it like a volcano. Then we mixed the eggs as flour was gradually pushed inward. The dough looked pathetic at first, but as we pressed and kneaded it, it started to actually look like a dough. 

It was set aside for a while, and then rolled out and cranked through a pasta making machine. It's just a metal piece that clamps onto a table edge and has slot in the middle with adjustable width. The dough is fed through it repeatedly until it is at the thinnest setting, a process I was used to since my mom and I have made homemade pasta a lot at home. It's become one of our favorite activities to do when I'm home from college. The sheets of dough were laid out, and then a filling of ricotta, cooked spinach, and egg was mixed together and put in a plastic bag that had a narrow hole at the bottom. It was used like a pastry filler to squirt dollops of filling in a row on the sheet of pasta dough. 

Making the spinach and ricotta filling 

Then the dough was folded in half, and a metal circle was used to press the ravioli centers into shape. The chef showed us how to "massage" the gaps between each filling dollop to create individual ravioli where the 2 folded halves would seal together. Imagine the karate chop method of massaging, only here you're hitting rows of dough instead of aching muscles. Then a pizza slicer shaped object was used to cut the individual raviolis apart. It had a zigzagged edge to create a prettier edge to the ravioli. A sauce was made by cooking butter with sage in a pan - a chef just did that himself since there wasn't really much for us to do, and they also boiled the ravioli for us.

Rolling out the dough

filling the ravioli 

Squeezing the water from the gelatin sheets 

Panna cotta:

This was surprisingly easy. Cream, Vanilla, and sugar are mixed together and heated. Gelatin came in sheets and were soaked in water before adding to the pot of cream. The whole pot was heated on low and stirred continuously, but not boiled, and then when the gelatin had melted it was poured into small foil cups. Each up was put in the freezer (a refrigerator would have been better, we were told, but that would take 3 hours) for a while. The strawberry sauce was made for us and poured on top of the individual cups of the panna cotta, and served. So delicious. I need to figure out how to buy that gelatin in the States so I can make it again! 


Contributed by Laura Kaufman
History of Art & Italian Studies in Florence, Italy
Summer 2011