Tiramisù
Step 1
Separate egg whites, whisk them, and then fold them into the yolk and sugar that’d been beaten together.
Step 2
Bathe sponge fingers in coffee
Step 3
Layer sponge fingers with cream
Pasta for Busiate alla Norma
Step 1
Weigh out flour and semolina. Marilù divided the dough into 3 and then demonstrated how we should knead it.
Step 2
We then kept the kneaded mixture under a bowl as we took off a little piece to roll. Roll out and cut. This is a cheat sheet thing to do at home. I left a bit of my dough out and I was surprised how quick it dried out and became impossible to work with. When Marilù wasn’t looking, I put it aside – I hope she didn’t notice [emoji of face for this].
Step 3
Shape the pasta with stick. This was a little more tricky than it sounds, but tremendous fun as we grappled with inconsistent shapes of pasta. The idea of rolling it out with a stick is to make a hole in the centre. I’ve heard elsewhere that this helps the sauce stick more to the pasta.
Gnocchi
Step 1
Gnocchi starts with heating the butter and milk in a saucepan before adding the semolina. The secret is to make sure this is hot, too hot almost to knead after the semolina has been added. Fortunately for us, this was still in the demonstration part, and we could see steam rise of the dough as Marilù kneaded.
Step 2
We gave the dough a bit of a knead before we rolled it out. As before, the rolling out is the point where the gnocchi is won or lost: too thick and it has that gluggy glutinous feel; too thin, it becomes overcooked. And the same goes for how long you cut it.
Step 3
Gnocchi is synonymous with its shape. Those corrugated grooves that encourage sauce to fill them. But getting those grooves takes a bit of practice. It’s a case of pushing your thumb into the dough without pushing too hard, and rolling it down the wooden gnocchi shaper.
At first our attempts were laughable. But with practice we got there. By the end we were demons, pushing it down, shaping it, and chucking it on the wire drying tray like we were experts.
Lunch at End
The sauces were pre-prepared, and it was just a case of heating them up as the pasta cooked. The Sicilian way of cooking pasta is with a huge saucepan filled with water, and letting it get to a proper rolling boil before the pasta is put in. Our pasta took 5 minutes to cook.
