It’s Complicated

Who goes to a French cooking school for a class in Italian pasta making, taught by a pastry chef from The Netherlands? That would be me. And I brought Janet along with me.

When Janet told me we would have four days in Nice, three without any scheduled activities, I decided it was high time I quit whining about my inability to make a proper ravioli and do something about it. And Nice was as good a place as any. A cooking class.

I tried to find a group pasta making class, but there were none available during our time there. What I did find was a cooking school called Les Petits Farcis. When I entered it in Google to translate, it came back with “Little Stuffed Ones.” Seems like one of those phrases that means more to the locals who speak the language than it does to tourists who do not. Which, it turns out, it is. When I asked Claude what it meant the answer was that Les Petits Farcis is a beloved classic Niçoise home cooked dish of veggies stuffed with whatever leftovers you happen to have in the kitchen: meat, rice, and of course garlic, topped with breadcrumbs and baked until the tops are golden. The name suggests a school that leans into that homey, grandmother’s-kitchen identity rather than haute cuisine. Anyway, that’s what we found.

Les Petits Farcis offered private classes, and pasta making was one of the choices. It would be expensive, anything travel related with the word “private” in it is, but I felt it would be worth the money. So, I booked it.

The school has several cooking instructors, and the one assigned to teaching me and Janet how to make ravioli was Chef Friso, from The Netherlands. His resume was both impressive and intimidating. He had previously worked as the pastry chef in a Michelin star restaurant. When I asked how he ended up in a cooking school in Nice, Chef Friso told me he met a girl. Isn’t that always the case? They got married, started a family, and he traded in a prestigious career as a professional chef for the slightly less hectic but significantly less stressful lifestyle of a private personal chef to the rich and famous. And the French Riviera has plenty of those. The cooking school was his hobby, and I have to say he was way more patient than I expected given his background.

When I decided to include Janet in the class, I had ulterior motives. Secretly I hoped it would allow me to co-opt her into being my sous chef whenever I make ravioli at home. We both enjoyed the experience very much, and I think she learned as much as I did. She certainly demonstrated an affinity for pasta making. And as she is fond of reminding me, she learned to cook long before I did.

I have to say I wasn’t expecting to find an Italian pasta class as an option in a French cooking school in Nice. What I quickly learned is that Niçoise cuisine was, and is, best understood as a borderland Mediterranean cuisine. Prior to becoming part of France in 1860, Nice belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and its cooking retains a distinctly northern Italian character. Finally, I had the opportunity to learn how to make ravioli without the filling busting through the seams and leaking into the pot when I cooked it, leaving me to serve perfectly shaped but empty ravioli. Basically, glorified noodles.

The class started with me and Janet making a pesto the old-fashioned way. My job: mince some fresh garlic, pick fresh basil off plants in the classroom and shred them by hand. Janet got to pulverize it all in a mortar and pestle, along with a healthy dose of olive oil. The mortar was one of those heavy granite jobs with a substantial stone club-shaped pestle. Janet enjoyed it so much she promised to get me a set for Christmas this year, though I got the sense she would be the one to use it. But, since I liked the results I decided I was OK with that. I’ve tried making pesto in my food processor and never came close to the flavors Janet got from her fresh ground-by-hand pesto.

When Chef Friso asked how I usually make pasta dough, I was a bit embarrassed to tell him I use a food processor. He was kind about it. He informed me I would make the pasta dough in his class by hand, but he did admit there wasn’t much of a difference between that and the kitchen aid stand mixer with a dough hook he uses for big jobs. My food processor on the other hand was not très bien.

The plan called for making a lot of pasta, so while I made a batch of dough by hand, Chef Friso made up a batch in the mixer. I was surprised when we both finished at about the same time. I thought for sure the mixer would be faster. Both batches of dough were easy to work with and held together when rolled out thinner than my food processor-made dough at home.

Prior to our class, Chef Friso had made up a batch of black dough using squid ink. He wanted to show us how to use different colored dough together to liven up the results and I’m guessing he figured I would make a mess working with squid ink. He would be right.

He planned to teach us proper technique for making three separate batches of filled pasta, as well as the sauces to go along with them. At the end of class, graduation meant eating what we created — strong motivation for paying attention.

The three types of pasta Chef Friso set out to teach us were ravioli, agnolotti, and tortellini. The ravioli and tortellini would be stuffed with a creamy artichoke filling Chef Friso had previously whipped up, and the agnolotti would be filled with a ricotta and parmesan filling that he had me make. That filling was almost identical to the filling I use for my own agnolotti so at least I got one thing right.

I made the agnolotti while Janet made the tortellini. She got the tortellini because her smaller hands and thumbs allowed her to more easily twirl and pinch the dough together to get the proper shape. The ravioli was the most complicated of the pastas we would be making, so that was something the three of us worked on together. We would be combining the squid ink dough with regular dough to make checkerboard black and white ravioli.

The agnolotti was pretty straightforward. I already found it to be the easiest of the filled pastas to make, though Chef Friso tweaked my technique a bit, showing me how a piping bag makes it easier to lay out the filling in a more consistent and even bead than my practice of using a spoon.

For the ravioli, I was expecting to learn some magical technique that would transform my clumsy approach into perfection. I learned there is no magical technique, and perfection only comes from making many batches, failing, and trying again. No magic, but there are a few tricks of the trade. One trick is making sure to get the dough right, and using a food processor to mix it doesn’t cut it. I also had to lose the shortcuts I had gotten used to when filling and sealing the ravioli. So much for my Italian ravioli mold. Darned thing never worked anyway.

Chef Friso's fix to my problem ravioli was simple. Mix the dough by hand, or with the Kitchen Aid mixer. Not in a food processor. Chef Friso had us roll our pasta out to a couple of settings thinner than I use at home, and I was amazed at how well the dough held together.

The pliability of the dough made all the difference when it came to forming the top row of pasta dough over the filling and getting it to seal properly to the bottom row of dough. Both were my biggest headaches when I used the dough I made with a food processor. Problem solved.

Once we had the row of pasta dough filled and sealed, Chef Friso showed us another trick for cleanly cutting the ravioli. He used a round cookie cutter to cut each raviolo rather than the ravioli mold and pizza cutter approach I normally use. His trick: press the cutter partway in while using your other hand to work the air out from under the filling before punching all the way through. No trapped air pockets, no exploding ravioli.

There was one magic bit of technique Chef Friso taught me and Janet, and that was how to remove air pockets if you discovered them after you’ve sealed and cut your pasta. Which is what happens to most of my ravioli. Take a toothpick and prick the pasta at the air pocket. Gently squeeze the air out as you slowly remove the toothpick. By the time the toothpick is removed the air pocket is gone and as you pull the toothpick out the dough self-seals. Most of the time. It won’t salvage every raviolo with an air pocket, but it will save most.

The sauces were an unexpected bonus, though it made sense since the whole point of the class was to eat what we made. The basil pesto went with the ravioli, along with some arugula and shaved parmesan. We sliced, then blistered some fresh multi-colored cherry tomatoes in a sauté pan with olive oil, and that became a simple yet tasty sauce for the tortellini. For the agnolotti we made a brown butter, mushroom and sage sauce, which turned out to be much easier than when I tried it at home. My problem? Reacting too slow. Once the butter foams and starts to brown, it’s time to take the pan off the heat. The threshold between a properly made brown butter sauce and a burnt sauce is just a few seconds of cook time. Three simple but flavorful sauces that complimented the pasta without overwhelming it.

Seeing three plates of freshly made filled and perfectly formed pasta was almost as rewarding as eating them. I think the tourists passing by outside of the schools must have agreed. They couldn’t help but stop and stare through the windows at us with envy as we enjoyed our pasta meal.

I didn’t jump right into making pasta when we returned from our trip, but within a week of getting home I did make some agnolotti, and then some ravioli.

It would be a fitting end to this story to be able to share that my agnolotti came out perfectly. They did not. But they were better. Much better.

A week later I made a batch of ravioli, and this time the results were much better. My recipe, which uses a mushroom cream sauce instead of the basil pesto, and Chef Friso’s technique resulted in my first ever batch of perfectly formed ravioli. I only had to use the toothpick treatment on one, and it worked like a charm. The ravioli held up nicely in the simmering water I cooked them with, and the sauce I cooked up was tasty and a rich substitution for the brown butter sage sauce Chef Friso used.

I have a new confidence in my pasta making skills. My pasta filling stayed inside the ravioli, so I got a real squirt of ricotta to mix in my mouth with the rich, creamy mushroom sauce. That sensation and flavor combo is what filled pasta is all about.

A Maryland home cook and his wife, a French cooking school in Nice, Italian pasta making, and a former professional pastry chef from The Netherlands. That’s what I love about travel. It brings people together from all over the world in unexpected ways. And every now and then you get to eat something really tasty.