The Florence Food & Wine Academy

Today's blog post will have a lot of food pictures, so don't read this if you're hungry (or go grab a snack and come back)! Today my mom and I took a cooking class with a chef in Florence at the Florence Food & Wine Academy. We started off by going to the Central Market, my favorite produce market, and then we headed to the cooking school to begin to cook. First step: aprons. Check!

We had to start with the tiramisu, since it has to be chilled in the refrigerator for a few hours. We separated the egg yolk from the egg whites, put them in different bowls, combined sugar with the egg yolks, added mascarpone cheese, and folded the cheese into the mixture. Then we alternated layers of cocoa powder, the cream mixture, and biscuits dipped in black coffee. Then it was time to put it in the refrigerator!

Then, we started to make pasta from scratch. The dough was just eggs and flour, created by placing the flour in a pile, making a well in the middle of the flour, pouring an egg inside and slowly beating the flour from the wall off the well into the eggs. Once all of the flour and eggs were combined, we began to knead the dough. Eventually, we got little dough balls like the picture below, and we had to let it sit for awhile.  

After a quick antipasti (bruschetta, parmigiano reggiano cheese with a balsamic vinegar glaze, and bread with fresh pesto) plus Chianti wine it was time to start making pasta. First, we had to roll it out to make it very thin.

Then, we folded the pasta into layers, starting at the bottom and working our way up to the top, so that we could cut it. When we unfolded the pasta, we had long strips of tagliatelle and ravioli squares.

We then began to put the ricotta cheese filling in, placing it in the middle of each square. 

We then folded the other layer of pasta on top, cut it, and pressed down the edges of the ravioli with a fork. We also made a traditional meat sauce to go with the tagliatelle which consisted of red onion, carrot, celery, ground beef, sweet sausage, Chianti wine and a little bit of tomato paste. 

Below is the end product of the ravioli, topped with a butter and sage cream.

And below is the tagliatelle with meat sauce.

By the time the cooking class ended, we had spent 6 hours working in the kitchen and we were very tired so we went back to the hotel to take a nap. When we woke up, it was already time for dinner. We tried a Chinese restaurant that is on my street because my ankle still hurts from when I fell the other week, but it wasn't the best. I definately miss all the authentic food in LA! Today was a long day and I'm already ready to go back to bed so...

Ciao for now!