THE BRIEF A full day Italian cookery course, from 10am to 4pm, concentrating on easy Italian meals - real food that you can prepare at home. The cookery school is behind Caldesi, the Italian restaurant in Marylebone, set back from the main street, on a cobbled drive. It is an old stable and the large wooden front doors and their multitude of little windows give the big room a light and airy feel. A large square table dominates the kitchen, laid out with chopping boards and vegetable knives at regular intervals for the 15 or so pupils. The day’s ingredients are placed on the table, so that as each recipe is explained, we are all able to pitch in and prepare the different elements.
On one side of the room is a coffee machine, where the cooking attendants, who clear the plates and wash up, make us coffee as we arrive, and serve biscotti. On another side there is a large kitchen island with a hob on it, where Katie Caldesi, wife of the restaurant proprietor Giancarlo Caldesi, and chef Stefano Borella show us novices how it’s done. Most of the class are cookery enthusiasts, and many have done cookery courses before.
ON THE MENU What’s not on the menu would be a more pertinent question. We made basic tomato sauce, carbonara, frittata, steak tagliatelle with rocket, salmon with pistachio and honey crust, leek risotto with walnut pesto, Tuscan ragu, Arrosto misto (like a pot roast), chicken with lemon, cannellini bean mash, sauteed cavolo nero, roast potatoes, chocolate mousse and baci di dama or “ladies kisses” which are miniature chocolate biscuits. And then we ate it all.
QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE When it comes to Italian food it can be easy to stick to the same old tried and tested. Knocking up a carbonara or bolognese can become second nature, and the interesting flourishes or elements which make it truly Italian are forgotten. This course injects some real Italian flavour in to those old favourites, plus adding a few new hits to your repertoire. After coffee and biscotti, Katie and Stefano, an entertaining double act, helped us prep the ingredients for the recipes. Leeks were chopped, with useful tips on how to get grit out of the vegetables and chickens de-boned under the expert guidance of Stefano.
There was a fair amount of prep to be done, but this kept us all busy and taught us some new skills long the way. Simple things such as the correct way to use a knife sharpener and how to slice an onion meant I was learning useful skills which I will use in my kitchen at home every day.
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Once the prep was finished we moved over to the hob, while the attendants reconfigured the square table in to an L-shape, and laid it up with vases of hyacinths and place settings for our lunch. At the hob there was an emphasis on cooking s-l-o-w-l-y which brings out the natural sweetness of ingredients, rather than a quick blitz on a high heat, which is a more English way of doing it.
The importance of good quality and large amounts of oil and salt are constantly bought home to us as we see how much of each chef Stefano uses! But he explains it’s better to cook with salt than put it on food once it is cooked, as it has a more delicate flavour and anyway, much of it is lost when the cooking water is thrown out.
As each dish is cooked it is laid out and we’re invited to help ourselves and sit down at the table. A welcome chance to taste the fruit of our labour and chat to our classmates.
TOP TIPS Always add more oil than you think, the same goes for salt (obviously the latter is not for the health conscious).
Add pasta to the sauce, rather than sauce to the pasta.
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If tomatoes are out of season, use tinned. The tinned variety are picked when they are plentiful, ripe and delicious, far better than an anaemic winter tomato.
Don’t peel potatoes or carrots unless you want to. Carrot skin is so thin it makes no difference to the flavour or texture, and potato skin is a perfectly valid addition to Italian cooking, it doesn’t mean you’re lazy!
Pancetta is nice, but if you can’t get it, good quality streaky smoked bacon is exactly the same thing.
COURSE DETAILS A one-day (10am-4pm) Easy Italian cookery course costs £150 per person including lunch and wine. Shorter midday courses start at £90, with lessons on seasonal ingredients and trattoria-style cooking for friends and family, among the many classes available. Levels vary from beginners to intermediate. There is also another Caldesi cookery school, Katie’s kitchen, in Gerrard’s Cross, Bucks.
La Cucina Caldesi, 4 Cross Keys Close, London, W1U 2DG, 0207 487 0750/6/8, www.caldesi.com