Bologna Pasta Class – 9th Nov

Bologna is famous for three things—the oldest university in the world, food and its porticos which are UNESCO World Heritage listed. In planning our two full days here I had the food side pretty much covered and then planned to hit the other two in the gaps.

Our first day I had booked a pasta making class. Bologna has several pastas that it is known for, tortelloni, tortellini, tagliatelle ragu and lasagna verdi. In our pasta class we would make and eat the first three. That would start later, this morning we went for a run. Had some breakfast. I’m off coffee due to migraines but most bars do fresh squeezed orange juice which I enjoyed every morning while we were in Italy. After breakfast we headed to Piazza Maguire, the main piazza in town. On the way we strolled through the market area and then checked out the Basilica. The church is unfinished, being only partially covered in marble.

Once the pasta makers finished making the pasta for their shop at 1pm they came and took us up to their kitchen. They make it by hand. We started by learning how to make a yellow dough, 1 large egg to each 100g 00 flour. We made a well in the centre for the eggs then started slowly working the flour in. We had to work pretty hard to knead it in, then we let it rest. The ladies had some pasta they had made earlier that they used to show us how to hand roll the pasta. We used this rolled pasta to make our tortelloni and tortellini with. Tortelloni is bigger, starting with 6cm squares of pasta and can be filled with a variety of filling. We made a ricotta, spinach and nutmeg one. Tortellini in contrast must have a pork, beef, mortadella, prosciutto and parmesan and are smaller, being folded from a 3cm square. We managed to get the hang of the folding but the ladies helped us and generally made 5 to our 1.

Once we’d finished folding both pastas they were put aside to dry while we rolled out our pasta dough. It was not as easy as it looked, although they did say they’d had some trouble that day because of the weather. I ended up needing a hand getting mine fully rolled out, then we wrapped it in a cloth to dry. Meanwhile we are our tortelloni and tortellini.

After finishing that we unwrapped our pasta and cut it into tagliatelle. The ladies then cooked it for us and served it with their ragu. Yum!

I don’t have photos of the pasta cooked because I was just too busy eating. After finishing our lunch we were stuffed full with pasta and bid farewell to our teachers, heading down to the street with our recipes in hand. Will we be brave enough to try this at home? We shall see.

Next I wanted to see the town from above so we went to the Torr dell’Orologio in Piazza Maguire. Originally part of the house of Accursio a law student, then jurist. After his death it was bought by the municipality.

Afterwards we visited the anatomical theatre where anatomy lectures were given at the medical school. It was built 1637. There is a marble slab in the centre where dissections were carried out. The room is made of heavily carved spruce which was badly damaged by bombing in WWII but has been meticulously restored.

Since we were still full from our lunch we had gelato for dinner from Cremeria Cavour. It was some of the best gelato we’ve had.