Best Day Evar

Posted: March 30th, 2011 | Author: bettybecca | Filed under: BettyBecca Reviews, Store-bought Remix, Try Something New | 2 Comments »

Mr. J did great on my gifts this year for Christmas. He got me several cooking classes, and I LOVED them. You’ve already seen the cake decorating class, and there is also a basic knife skills class that I’ll post soon. Here’s the recap of my favorite one…Pasta Making!

On a Thursday morning in February, I headed over to Franklin to The Factory. The Factory is a great place all its own, but one of the great things about it is the Viking Cooking School. I had trouble finding it at first so I was a few minutes late, but I didn’t miss much. We had an appetizer at our places around a huge wooden table along with an instruction manual for what we were going to do for the day.

Our teacher was a true Italian, and I loved how she taught the class. She told us stories about her family and gave us lots of little tips and tricks. She was very chill and laid back.

We broke into groups of 3-4 and made a basic pasta dough first.

Next, we prepared our fillings: one pumpkin and one goat cheese.

Then, we set off to make fettuccine from a prepared herbed dough. We practiced running the dough through the pasta maker, making it thinner and thinner and thinner. We cut it into strips, and we had our first finished pasta, ready to be cooked. The instructor taught us that you should never put oil in your pasta water. You should only put salt, lots of salt. The water should taste like sea water.

After that, we went to work on prepping the dough for our filled pastas from the basic dough we made at the start of class. I had a rock star lady on my team that hand-rolled all of her dough. She makes a lot of pies and was a whiz with the rolling-pin. We had a nifty little gadget to make the raviolis with. You can see it on the left of the ravioli picture. For the tortellinis, we cut rounds and then folded them up to form the tale-tell bishop hat shape. That was pretty much the highlight of my life.

For sauces, the instructor made a wine and mushroom sauce for the herbed fettuccine. We made a browned butter and fresh sage sauce for the pumpkin raviolis, and for the goat cheese tortellinis, we had a fresh sauce, called a concasse, from tomatoes and herbs that was similar to bruschetta topping.

All of it was delish, and I felt so satisfied having made it all. The bummer was that I had to go into work after class, but I felt so good after the class from eating all of the fresh ingredients! I haven’t had a chance to make pasta at home, but I’ll definitely try it soon.It was a great experience!!!

Check out the photo recap below…

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