Learning to cook, Bologna style

As you may or may not know, GrubGirl recently had a birthday.  I'm not going to tell you how old she is, but her age starts with a "T" and ends in a "hirty."  So to celebrate this big day, I wanted to get her something special.  My sister-in-law's mother recommended an amazing cooking class she took in Bologna, Italy, and I looked up the information and booked the class with Bluone Cooking Tours.  It was amazing.

Communicating through email, Raffaella and Marcello told GrubGirl and I to meet them at the iconic towers in Bologna.

Once we were here, Raffaella met us and we walked around famous markets in Bologna while she told us how Italian food differs not only from region to region, but city to city.  She told us about Eately, and how the one in New York from Mario Batali is not an original concept, but rather one stolen from Italy without asking for permission.

Raffaella then took us into a few butcher shops who gave us some fresh meat and cheese.

Ok, this is gonna be a good day.  The meat was cut so thin and the cheese was so fresh, we looked at each other and got very happy, very quickly.

Last, we learned about dessert, which was balsamic vinegar.  I know what you may be thinking, balsamic vinegar for dessert?  Isn't it tart?  Well yes, but true balsamic vinegar is also very sweet and used as a topping for desserts.  When we mentioned salad, Raffaella just laughed and said "you won't put this stuff on a salad."

True balsamic vinegar comes from Modena, Italy and is stored in barrels similar to the ones below.  Grape leftovers from the fermenting process are stored in these barrels made of different wood.  After a year, some of the liquid has evaporated so they take the bottom barrel and fill up the one above it all the way to the top.  This process is done every year for 12-25 years.  Once year 12 hits, you take the top barrel and go to authenticators to see if your balsamic vinegar passes the test.  If so, you can pour the vinegar in bottles to the left and it's true balsamic.  So yes, there is a committee of people who just sit around all day and drink balsamic vinegar.  Sweet gig!

So lunch was on our own and we had to meet her at 2:00 (or 14h00m, we were in Italy) to get ready to cook our feast.  GrubGirl and I both knew we were going to eat well tonight, so we just got some gelato and waited for our inevitable food coma to happen.

Once we arrived at their house (yes, we just cooked and ate dinner at their home) we headed right for the kitchen to start on dessert.  My kinda place. We made a semifreddo which was probably the easiest thing ever. It's essentially just egg yolks, sugar and heavy cream.  We whipped the cream, cooked the egg yolks and sugar, then combined so it looked like it did below. 

 Then we took 1/3 of the mixture and put it in another bowl and mixed some coco in it.  The second 1/3 of the mixture, we got some Italian cookies and just crushed them with our hands and put in the mixture. The final 1/3 of the mixture just stayed the same.

Once that was done, we poured the part with the cookies first, then the coco, then the one left alone, into a bread pan and put it in the freezer for 3 hours.  Done!  Ok, what's next?

Time to make some pasta.  The picture below is 1.5 cups of flour and 2 eggs.  What you need to do is make a hole with the flour and crack open the eggs inside.

Little by little, continue adding flour to the eggs until it is all absorbed.  Then we folded and kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes and then covered it. When that was done, it looked like this. 

Afterward, you get the rolling pin out.  While we learned a couple of different techniques, we rolled the dough until it was about as thick as a piece of construction paper.  

That's me rolling some pasta dough

Afterward, we made some tortellini.  You flatten out the pasta dough and cut them into 2x2 squares.  Then, plop some rocchetta cheese in there and close it to a triangular shape.  Then wrap it around your finger and close the two ends. Place the closed pasta in boiled water for 2 minutes and they're done. 

 



















Needless to say, we made a lot, then we ate a lot.  The finished pasta looked like this:

It was so fresh and delicious, I will definitely try and make this at home...maybe!  While we had so many other delicious things, it'll be up to you to go to Bologna and try this class out for yourself.