Talking Italian: Emma Freddi is continuing the good work of teaching students about the joys of Italian cooking.
I’ve been making my own tagliatelle, linguine, ravioli and lasagne since the 1990s when I brought back a crank-handle pasta machine from Little Italy, New York. I’ve tried any number of different flours and ratios with water and eggs. Recipes have varied from La Varenne’s one and a third cups flour and three eggs to a YouTube video demonstration using one cup of semolina (ground durum wheat) and two eggs. There is even a Piedmont recipe that uses 40 yolks per kilogram of flour!
But it took me a visit to the Rocca School of Italian Cookery to get it right.
Enrica Rocca, now based in Venice, first opened her cookery school in Cape Town in the early 1990s. Managing the school today is her friend and former student, the vivacious Emma Freddi of Genoa. She offers lessons in wine matching and Italian food, Peninsula tours, visits to wine estates, and classes in authentic Italian and Ligurian cooking.
Cookery sessions cover the creation of a four-course Italian meal, the highlight of which is making your own pasta.
In my lesson with Freddi, we made roast tomato and cream of balsamic soup, oven-baked fillet in creamy horseradish and mustard coating, an egg-rich dark chocolate tart and, of course, pasta.
Semolina is best for eggless pasta but, although it produces a pasta that is drier and sturdier and therefore easier to pass through the machine rollers, it is too chewy for stuffed pasta. I have now found adding semolina to make up a quarter to half of the total flour works well for tagliatelle. If you can’t get pasta flour, use white bread flour. You want high gluten.
In her spacious modern kitchen in Constantia with wonderful views across the city, six of us, each with a glass of wine, were set to work by Freddi with 100g flour per egg, some olive oil and a little water.
Freddi gave me a number of indispensable tips to improve my pasta-making. The eggs should be between 50g to 55g each.
A crucial step is to let the dough rest unrefrigerated in a ziplock bag for an hour. I usually add a pinch of salt, but she added more than a sprinkling. Opinion is divided: some say never add salt to the dough; the saltiness should be derived only from the water in which you will boil the pasta, and the water should be as salty as the sea.
The bellybutton of Venus
In the old days in Italy, women pressed out the dough by rolling pin on a large table until it was paper-thin and had the wood grain of the table imprinted on it, the better to catch the sauce.
But unless you’re very practised, use a pasta machine. You start on the setting with rollers at their widest and work down. Another Freddi tip: 120g dough at a time is the optimum amount for the machine. When it is the right thinness (from 0.75mm for tagliatelle to 2mm for linguine), you are ready to cut and shape it to your desired variety of pasta.
I’ve always wanted to fold tortellini — the bellybutton of Venus, said to have been modelled on Lucrezia Borgia’s navel. Emma nodded with a knowing smile. Apparently, you only fold tortellini once in your life, unless you’re a dedicated chef.
Cut your dough sheets into 4cm by 4cm squares. Place a few grams of filing on each. We used an extravagant mix of ground pork loin, Parma ham, Mortadella Bologna, Parmigiano Reggiano, nutmeg and seasoning. Fold the square into a triangle, then fold up the base of the triangle, place on your index finger, wrap the other two corners around and seal. It took several attempts before I got one to look appetising.
Traditionally, the tortellini is cooked in a meat broth.
Tired of folding, we made ravioli with the rest of the dough. Freddi’s recipe produced silky, soft parcels, which we stuffed alternately with spinach and butternut ricotta. The key here is to have as little moisture in the filling as possible or else the ravioli will break apart when boiled.
There is a 90-second window when the boiling pasta passes from al dente to soft. Scoop out the ravioli, don’t dump it in a colander, and don’t pour the water down the sink. Reserve the water for reheating pasta later. You can also use it for stock.
Finally, no Italian kitchen is complete without its own vegetable and herb garden, and Freddi has a spectacular circular garden bursting with spinach, tomatoes, butternut and even bok choy.
We picked giant brinjals and pulled up a few thick leeks from the earth, happy that tortellini was one less mystery in the world.
The Enrica Rocca School of Italian Cookery, 5 Domira Road, Constantia. Sessions are on Tuesday evenings between 6pm and 10pm, and on Friday afternoons from noon to 4pm. Cost is R600 a person.
Tel: 082 378 8855