PASTA SCHOOL
Roald Dahl once said that, ‘if you are interested in something, no matter
what it is, go at it at full speed, embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it,
and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good.’
About two years ago, my Saturday Night Pasta routine was in full ight.
Ihad been practising for well over a year and decided that to take my hobby
to the next level, I needed some formal training. For a now pasta obsessive,
that formal training just hadto be a short course in Italy.
Fast forward months of planning (and saving), I nally took myself to pasta
school in Rome. Grano & Farina is a small professional cooking school run
by a husband and wife team, chef Pino Ficara and sfoglina Julia Ficara.
A sfoglina is a person who rolls out pasta by hand (very dierent to a
machine). Purists consider this the only way to make pasta. Julia is an
American who has lived in Italy for half her life (you’d be hard pressed to
dierentiate her Italian from a native speaker). She has dedicated herself
to the art of handmade pasta, studying in Bologna as well as travelling
around Italy learning from the best teachers, the Italian nonne.
I began an intensive four-day program covering pastas from the south,
pastas from the north, four types of gnocchi and some pizza that was thrown
in for good measure (we were in Italy, after all). The pièce de résistance,
though, was learning from Julia how to roll out pasta by hand. I eagerly sat
at the end of her bench and watched her work the dough, transforming it
from a small ball into the most beautiful sheet of pasta that apped in the
breeze as she held it up. She had an innate understanding of the dough
and knew how to gently handle any nuances that inevitably arose. There
is a distinctive swoosh noise that is made when you roll out pasta by hand,
like a cat’s tongue licking you, and I wish I had recorded it for my sleep app.
Julia loves the art of la sfoglia so much that she competes every year in
competitions that celebrate rolling out pasta by hand. I asked her how she
goes, and she leant in to say under her breath, ‘Well the judges can’t exactly
give the prize to an American over a 90-year-old nonna can they?’, but that
doesn’t stop her from participating. It’s the highlight of her summers.
Of course, I’m under no illusion that attending a short course in Italy
makes me an expert – the Italian nonne prove that by having years of
pasta making under their aprons – but what Julia and Pino gave me was
agreater condence with pasta that I hope, combined with my own
humble discoveries, to pass on to you.