La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese: Making And Rolling Pasta The Old Fashioned Way

A day in Bologna, Italy at an Emilia-Romagnan cooking school.

Throughout my spotted and shady cooking career, I have always taken joy in making fresh pasta, and at times even naively thought I was getting okay at it.  The second I walked into La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese though, a traditional Emilia-Romagnan cooking school just outside of the Bologna city centre, I had to admit to myself that I knew basically nothing.

The school was founded by Alessandra Spisni in 1993 and caters to amateurs, professionals and tourists alike. With a mission statement to pass on and preserve the traditions of Bolognese cooking, they offer classes in fresh pasta, bread making, main courses and dessert.

In a jet-lagged daze, I arrived one day early for the pasta class I had signed up for on-line back home. This turned out not to be a problem though, as within minutes, I was in a small kitchen classroom with five Italian women in the middle of their week-long course. I quickly decided that despite the language barrier, this was probably preferable to taking the class with a group of foodies from Baltimore. It’s not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed hanging out and learning with other tourists, it was just a lucky turn of fate that I got to be in a class with five women of Bologna as they learned a few of their province’s storied dishes. You don’t have to travel in Italy very long before you realize that women are the heart and driving force of the Italian kitchen, and it felt like a  privilege just to be there on that day.

Sabina, the one teacher who spoke English at the school, guided me through the making, rolling and shaping of the “pastry” (pasta directly translates to pastry). She was a hard-lined, yet very kind teacher with a commanding way about her.  Any time she noticed me doing anything she considered the least bit untoward, she would grab whatever I had in my hand and show me “the way” until she was sure I got it.

The dough recipe was different than any I had made in the past. It was much wetter and used only whole eggs, whereas I usually make it with about a 60/40 mix of whole eggs and yolks. The “uova” used at the school are from chickens that are raised on a diet high in carrots, specifically tailored to making the dough as bright yellow as possible. I was a convert to the wetter dough pretty quickly. Once you start rolling, it is so much easier to work with and during the process it dries out slowly, so by the time you go to shape it, it is the perfect texture.

La Vecchia Scuola Pasta Dough:

600 g “00″ flour (“00″ flour is a finely ground wheat flour prized in Italy for its softness. You can find it in most Italian supermarkets)

6 large whole eggs (60-65 g each)

If you can’t find eggs from chickens raised on a diet of carrots, any good organic, free-range egg will do, it just won’t be as bright yellow.

This recipe is more of a ratio: for every 100 g of flour, use one large egg. You can make as little or as big a batch as you need.

Method: Pour the flour onto a clean counter or big wooden cutting board and make a well using a claw grip. Break the eggs into the well, and using a fork, slowly work the flour in while beating the eggs. Once it starts to come together, work in the stray flour and scraps with a bench scraper.

Now knead the dough with both palms of your hands until it comes together. Take a second to scrape the board with your bench scraper and discard any dried bits of dough. It is very important that none of these hard bits gets into the pasta, as they might tear the dough during rolling. Now continue kneading using both palms, gently pushing down and away from you until you get a log shape, then rotate 90 degrees and repeat. Sabina explained to me that what makes the dough smooth is not rigorous kneading, but the repeated action of pushing down and away on the clean board. Continue this for 15-20 minutes until the dough is as smooth as silk. If at any point it begins to stick, dust the counter lightly with flour.

When the dough starts to “sing” it is done. The singing you will hear is tiny air bubbles inside the dough popping. Cut the dough in half and inspect for bubbles. If it looks like the above picture, form the halves into nice balls and let rest for 1-2 hours.

Now to the rolling, which is not done by machine, but by hand with a metre long rolling pin called a mattarelo. Sabina kept telling me how hard it is and not to get discouraged if my dough dries out and tears. “You must move quickly,” she said. So off I went and I think I did okay, but my dough was bound for tagliatelle, as it took me forever and was pretty dry. The great thing was, every mistake had a home in some other shape or use. Small scraps of dough were bound for soup, and any bigger scraps were saved for the dog. Check out the above video for Sabina’s demonstration of the first stage of rolling and then one of the professional program students to see how thin you can get it by hand fairly quickly.

Alessandro displays the proper way to hold the mattarelo.

So now that you’ve got this big sheet of perfectly rolled pasta, what to do with it? Well, lots of things: cut very thinly rolled dough into small squares and make tortellini with a filling of mortadella, prosciutto, pork and parmesan; cut it into bigger, thicker squares and make tortelloni with a ricotta filling; cut rectangles with a fluted cutter and pinch the center to make farfalle (bow-tie); rectangles can also make garganelli, which you achieve by rolling the piece of pasta over the “pettine” (pictured below) with a small piece of wood (a pencil and a comb might work); very thin sheets can be dried slightly (quite the process, which I will cover in a future post). I could go on and on, but will keep this post mostly to the dough and the subsequent rolling. I will do some more posts on the cool shapes and delicious fillings I learned that day. Check out the pictures below for some gratuitous pasta porn.

Sabina shows how to roll garganelli off of the pettine.

The proper width for tagliatelle.

Sabina rolls the tagliatelle into 50 gram portions.

Farfalle.

All pasta that wasn’t going to be eaten right away was dried slightly on a rack.

Ricotta ravioli.

The one and only Tagliatelle Bolognese.

Tortellini in Brodo: one of the best things I had in all of Italy.

The professionals bust out 500 tortellini for a catering order.

If you’re ever in Bologna: eat pasta, drink coffee, gorge on gelato, take naps, drink wine, look at big old churches and take a class at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese. That’s what I did and I loved every second of it.