Cooking and Dine: How to Make the Best Pasta From Scratch

Jiaqi Luo
 October 13, 2015
Cook and dine
There is no better way to learn about a culture than learning a typical grandma-style recipe at her home. Especially in Italy, a country obsessed with producing everything with hands and experience for the "from-scrach" meals. Last night, I signed up for a pasta-cooking lesson in Milan and invited my friend Ryan to come with me. There were other three Canadian girls to practice with us and have a peak into the masterful universe of home pasta making. Our chef Aurora, is a certified chef in Italian cuisine that has several years of experience working in the top Italian restaurant in Australia. Her cooking philosophy, like most of the Italian chefs, feature fresh ingredients and made-by-hand traditional methods. Our menu for the day is: Tagliatelle from Bologna (with ragu sauce) Vegie lasagna from Liguria Orecchiette from Puglia(small pasta with Broccoli sauce) Tiramisu First, we prepared the coffee in ready for making Tiramisu. Finger biscuits, fresh milk, egg yolks, every ingredient are brought from the open market by our chef in the morning. Later, we chopped the meat and sausage to make the delicious Bolognese sauce for pasta. Here comes the secret word - Massage. With a little bit of hand massage to the meat mixture, the sauce becomes more flavorful and the texture will be much softer. In the pasta-making session, everyone seems a little stressed out. It is always pleasant to watch the chef preparing everything from scratch and people rarely realize how much effort it takes. It is in fact, a very, very tiresome job. Not only we have to make sure the consistency of moisture is perfect, but also control the pasta into standard shape. After half-an-hour drilling of pasta making, we are all amazed by the amount of effort and heart it takes for a wholesome meal. Now, time to dine. Having tasted our results after two and half hours' preparation, we were all overjoyed by how delicious it tasted. Fresh made pasta, really tasted entirely different than the hard pasta packet from the supermarket. The texture, consistency, and chewiness totally converted me into the believer of "from-scratch" Italian cuisine now.

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Jiaqi Luo

<p>Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Spanish, English and currently perfecting her Italian, it&#39;s clear why Jiaqi chooses her next adventure in the dynamic capital of Milan! An art lover and a free spirit, Jiaqi is now majoring in Art History and Latin American Studies at the University of Richmond. During high school, a month of staying with a host family in Helsinki, Finland opened the doors to a world of exotic saunas, lake kayaking, and inspired her wanderlust. A self-proclaimed travel sensualist, her favorite way of seeing the world is experiencing the culture through its people: she&#39;s volunteered in rural Nepal, conducted Holocaust research in Poland, and has lived with seniors in Spain.</p>

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University of Richmond
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Art History
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