Photos courtesy of Airbnb
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The next time you’re at an Italian restaurant, marveling at the silky texture of your fresh tortellini, wouldn’t it be nice to know how to make it? It’s one of the many reasons to take a cooking class on your travels in the beautiful country, which you’ll find bookable the same way as your accommodation: on Airbnb.
Airbnb Experiences offers more than 100 pasta-making classes to choose from in the Florence area alone, and even more in the rest of Italy. Whether you prefer to roll out fresh tagliatelle in a Chianti Farm, stylish restaurant kitchenWhere roof over Brunelleschi’s dome, the choice is yours. Most of the courses boast about teaching you how to cook like a “real Italian mom”, and I’m sure they deliver. For me, it seems like the best way to learn everyday cooking is to do it in someone’s home – which is how I recently found myself Francesca’s Pasta and Gnocchi Class, held in her spacious, art-filled apartment in a quiet neighborhood about a 40-minute walk from the center of Florence. The class delivered on everything they promised, and more; in three hours, Francesca taught me how to cook a trio of homemade pasta dishes that she learned from a combination of professional pasta makers and her own grandmothers. Throughout it all, the snacks, dessert and prosecco never stopped flowing.
The Italian hospitality started when we walked through the door. Coffee was brewing and a spread of dark cherries and buttery shortbread cookies lay on the table. Francesca set up our pasta stations in the kitchen while our party of seven got to know each other in her living room. We were a varied group: an accountant based in San Francisco, an architect and English teacher from the central coast of California, a British couple, an Australian woman and a writer and private chef based in Florence from Dallas (that’s me ).
First on our to-do list was to make the pasta dough. Aprons and hands washed, we stood around Francesca’s long wooden table, each with their own pile of flour. We used forks to slowly whisk an egg into the flour as Francesca floated around the table, making sure to mix the “piano, piano” batter, slowly, slowly.
Although I went to the culinary school in Florence and taught cooking classes myself, I discovered that I had already learned something new from those first moments of class, because Francesca emphasized the importance of gradual mixing to achieve the smoothest batter, adding a tablespoon of olive oil for an extra velvety texture. After a few minutes of kneading, we each had perfect little dough babies, which we snuggled up in tight plastic wrap to allow the gluten to relax.
“Resting time is no excuse for drinking,” Francesca clarified as we refilled our prosecco glasses.
Maybe so, but resting the pasta seemed like a good excuse to snack. We stocked up on bruschetta, the tomato juice dripping profusely onto our plates. Meanwhile, the kitchen filled with the aromas of our first sauce, garlic, oregano and basil sizzling in a skillet with tomato puree and olive oil. Although not traditional, Francesca added a pat of butter at the end, my kind of finishing touch.
By now our dough was done napping and we were impressed with how smooth we were able to smooth it out with wooden rolling pins. We used Francesca’s Atlas Marcato 180 pasta machines to form dough into spaghetti alla chitarra, a square-cut spaghetti that takes its name from the “guitar” tool with which it is traditionally shaped. Later we tossed our spaghetti with summer pesto and cherry tomatoes.
The rest of the dough was reserved for the main piece, a generously stuffed pasta called cappellacci. To make it, we cut sheets of pastry into squares and top each with a mixture of spinach, Parmesan cheese, nutmeg and fresh, silky ricotta. Francesca taught us how to skillfully fold the cappellacci into what looked like tortelloni (big old tortellini).
We moved on to our final dish, the gnocchi, by steaming boiled potatoes through a potato masher, then stirring in the egg and flour until combined. Francesca taught us to find the happy medium between not enough flour (your gnocchi will fall apart) and too much flour (your gnocchi will be tough). We rolled the dough into ropes and cut them into pillows, handling the dumplings as little as possible to maintain a tender texture. Each of our stacks of uniquely beautiful gnocchi, from the bodacious blocks of Joe the Briton to the delicate quadrangles of Gab the Australian, boiled briefly as we transformed our workstation into a dining table. I’m sure Francesca’s neighbors heard our contented sighs when we finally sat down and rested our feet.
Our gnocchi were ready to eat first, and they were perfect – light and fluffy and barely chewy, tossed in a lightly spiced tomato sauce. We had now switched to red wine and were all comfortably out of our shells. For my part, I was particularly happy to have had the opportunity to ask my British classmates what they thought of the island of love.
The next course was our cappellacci, the fluffy pasta swimming in a rich, golden sauce with butter and sage. The flavors in each scrumptious bite worked in tandem, the nutty parmigiano balancing the sweet ricotta, the fragrant nutmeg adding subtle warmth.
“My nonna likes to pretend she invented cappellacci,” Francesca told us as we ate, then added, “but that’s not true.”
With a third plate of food—our spaghetti with pesto—my classmates and I clinked glasses of limoncello as amateur pasta makers and new friends, discussing each other’s travels through Italy as we getting ready to bring our happy bellies home.
You could host a private cooking class with Francesca, but the group event (capped at eight people) really lets her teachings and the food shine. Plus, cooking with strangers allows you to collect more stories, and isn’t that what travel is all about?
3-hour pasta, gnocchi and Italian sauces class from Francesca is currently available for $63 per person, or for private groups of up to 12 people from $558.
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