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Culinary School In Italy

Have you ever wondered what it's like attending culinary school in Italy? I'm here to share my personal experience of learning to cook authentic regional Italian cuisine. Here's a little more about what Italian culinary school classes are like!

Before we jumped into any cooking, we had to first learn about some of the raw ingredients Italians use on a day-to-day basis including extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, truffles, and various kinds of cheese.

Foundation of Italian Cuisine

After becoming familiar with Italian ingredients, we got to cooking starting with the basics. We worked on many different types of stocks, demi-glace, basic sauces, and infused oils.

Foundation of Italian Cuisine

We learned how to make so many classic Italian pasta dishes like aglio olio, orecchiette with broccoli and sausage, carbonara, and pasta with 'Nduja sausage (pork sausage from the Calabria region).

Foundation of Italian Cuisine

Next, we learned about traditional charcuterie, also known as how to cure and preserve meat. We learned how to completely break down a whole pig.

Charcuterie

Some of the highlights from charcuterie week for me personally included learning how to make mortadella and seeing just how many ways you can use pork in the kitchen.

Charcuterie

One way Italians ensure they don't waste food is through different methods of conserving. This week we learned various ways to conserve food through canning, marmalades, cold smoking, and dehydrating.

Conserves

We learned ways to preserve fruit. Since we were at the peak of citrus season, we made orange marmalade, as well as candied orange rinds.

Conserves

Mixology week started with learning how to make various sugar syrups. We made many different flavor varieties like lemon syrup. We also learned techniques for infusing, smoking, and fat-washing liquor to add another depth of flavor to our cocktails.

Mixology

Next, we learned (and tasted) many of the classic cocktails like a dirty martini, negroni, & fruity martini. Not only did we learn the common ratios for these cocktails, but we also learned how to change out certain ingredients to reinvent the cocktail's taste.

Mixology

We started by baking up some traditional Easter pastries including cudduraci (a bread filled with hard boiled eggs) and colomba pasquale (a sweet Italian bread).

Italian Pastries

By far my favorite pastry that we learned to make was cannoli. These are made from a fried outer shell, then stuffed with a ricotta-based filling. Cannoli are always best if the shell has been fried that day and the filling is stuffed right before you eat it.

Italian Pastries

We started out learning about the history of gelato in Italy, as well as what makes gelato unique. The ingredients used in gelato, how a recipe is balanced, and the machine used to gel the gelato are all important aspects of making artisanal-style gelato.

Gelato

After practicing some math, watching a few gelato-making demonstrations, and of course, tasting some more gelato, we developed our own gelato creations. I worked on developing a chocolate red wine gelato for my personal recipe.

Gelato

One of the first essential skills we learned about bread making was how to make BIGA. This is a pre-dough that's added to various types of bread that helps with flavor, predictability, and longevity.

Bread & Pizza

We made over 25 types of bread throughout the week, but some of my favorite types of bread included grissini (from the Pieomont region), taralli (from the Puglia region), and decorative bread rolls (naturally dyed dough with spinach and beetroot).

Bread & Pizza

While it takes years and years to practice the art of becoming a sommelier, this training allowed us to dip our toes into the world of wine.

Sommelier

One of my favorite activities we did during sommelier training was a sensorial analysis. During this exercise, we tasted various types of wine with sweet (sugar), umami (soy sauce), acidic (vinegar), salty (salt), bitter (angostura bitters), and spicy (peperoncini oil) foods.

Sommelier

To start off our week learning about cheese, we first dove into the science of milk. We learned the different components of milk (casein, whey, proteins), as well as how it is pasteurized.

Cheese

Cheese making, while it varies from cheese to cheese, often has a similar process. Over the week, we learned to make many different types of Italian-style cheeses.

Cheese

Swipe up for all the details about what it's really like attending culinary school in Italy.