Academia Barilla

The Academia Barilla, where we had 4 days of classes, is like the expensive vacation resort for culinary students and chefs. In this dreamland, this sparkling building of wonders, there is everything you always wanted in a kitchen and a learning environment. The kitchens are huge and immaculate, the tools you need always present themselves at hand, and dirty dishes magically disappear behind your back. All the ingredients are laid out before you, fresh and highest quality, any tedious steps like measuring and weighing already done. You simply come in and cook, cook for hours, never running out of clean spoons or pans, no matter how many you dirty. When you finish your culinary creations, you turn around to find one of the back counters is now a fully set dinner table, with bottles of cold water at every place. You sit down and enjoy what you’ve cooked, then whenever you like, you can leave- no clean up is required of you.
Exuberant descriptions aside, the Academia Barilla is an incredible facility, and was well used by us for the four days we were there. Our first day we were escorted on a tour through the labs, the main lecture/demonstration hall, and the tasting room- a room full of enclosed personal cubicles, designed specifically for tasting without outside stimuli interfering, each equipped with a comfortable chair, water fountain, and even special lighting (colored lights that offset whatever food is being tasted, to insure color is not effecting your perception). After a brief lecture in the lecture hall about what Academia Barilla is all about, we were lead downstairs for a little free time to explore the culinary library: over 100,000 cookbooks, thousands and thousands of menus, and some of the oldest and rarest culinary writing. I spent our spare half-hour slowly flipping through one of the many binders of old menus, menus from the 18th and 19th centuries, from Italy, France, England, even a few here and there from the U.S. There were menus from everyday family restaurants (plates of pasta for 0.30 lyra), menus from weddings and religious ceremonies, a menu for a duke’s luncheon, gold-edged and rolled up in an elaborate scroll case. I was surprised at how much of the menus I could understand, especially the ones in French, and at how simply they were written- many looked just like what you would read off an Italian-American family restaurant menu today.

Too quickly, it was time to leave the library and begin classes: our first day was themed around olive oil, and started with an olive oil tasting. Our teacher took us through the entire process of making olive oil, pointing out the countless things that could affect the flavor. Then we began tasting, a tablespoon or so of seven different oils from different regions. We smelled them, swished them around, studied the color and the clarity, then sipped a tiny bit and coated our mouths with it, pulling air through it up into our noses so that every tiny aroma and flavor could be noted. After discussing (rather ridiculously) what aromas we detected, from rotten leaves to pineapple juice to chocolate, we attempted to decode what it all meant. Green tints suggest there is more chlorophyll in the oil, and also more vitamins and minerals- however, thatmake it taste any better. If the oil is foggy, it probably hasn’t been purified or fully filtered, in which case it has more nutrients as well. If there are tannic notes, perhaps the olives were not sorted carefully enough, and there were stems or leaves in the pressing, or maybe they were treated too roughly, and the pits were damaged. Warm fruity flavors indicate a warm fall, with enough rain for plump olives. More acidity means a colder fall, perhaps drier as well, giving the trees less of a chance to store extra sugars and nutrients. What does it mean when you smell pineapple and chocolate in an oil? Well, no one could explain that one….
After our tasting, we proceeded to the lab for four hours of cooking with olive oils: we made a couple salads as starters, infused oil with pepperocini (hot peppers) for sauces, made a pasta with an olive oil base, and a roast rubbed in olive oil and herbs. All of them were delicious, and although we only made tasting plates of each, we all agreed that dinner at the hotel after class seemed unneeded.

Our second day was pasta. Just pasta, nothing but pasta. But what pasta we made: egg pasta for drying, fresh potato and spinach gnocchi, and a multitude of colored pastas. Squid ink pasta, tomato pasta, chocolate pasta, saffron pasta, more spinach pasta, all kneaded into balls of smooth playdough-esque colors. Then we were allowed to play with them, rolling out striped tagliatelle, black and orange farfalle, and crazy autumn-camouflage raviolis. Black-and-brown spaghetti with tomato sauce on top is in no way appetizing to look at, but we made and ate it eagerly nonetheless, attracted by the sheer novelty of it. The pasta day ended somewhat early, and we were allowed a little more sweet time in the library before heading back to the hotel for dinner.

The next day was the longest, and began with a cooking lab in the morning. We were cooking with meat, traditional and contemporary Italian recipes: a veal tartar (raw marinated veal) with Parmigiano mousse, lamb lollypops crusted in hazelnuts, a milk-braised pork roast, and osso bucco with saffron risotto. After finishing each dish, we all got to taste it before moving on– veal tartar is not what you think of when you want a snack at 10a.m, but it was undeniably good. In fact, all the dishes were undeniably good, and by the end of lab, we had each eaten more than a meal’s worth. Then lunch was served. After lunch, and another half-hour break spent in the library, we dove into cheese tasting. Eight cheeses later, it was time for another lab, cooking with (guess what?) cheese! We fried Scamorza, we baked Pecorino, we made deep-fried sandwiches of Sierasss and skewers of mozzarella, salads with fresh sheep’s cheese. I think we would’ve all died of a cheese overdose had the Barilla kitchen not produced a large pot of pumpkin soup out of nowhere to accompany the many cheese dishes. Needless to say, dinner was yet again utterly superfluous.

Our final day was the wine tasting. Class started, as always, at 10a.m. Our teacher looks like a teacher, but from the early 90s– he has thick glasses, unkempt hair, and a pale blue sweater with a collared shirt underneath. Appearances are quickly cast aside as he begins to talk, however, and I realize he is one of those people who has done everything, and now teaches only because it’s what he truly enjoys. He was a top manager for Mars (the candy bar, not the planet) in his prime, then moved to Italy and started his own small artisanal foods business, which he sold after eight years, so he could focus on consulting and teaching. He is a wine expert, which he slowly became along the way through his business, and out of personal interest. He gets very excited as he begins to really dive into our lecture on wine, and spurts information like an encyclopedia. We spend from 10a.m. to 1p.m. and from 2p.m. to 5p.m. in class, and we taste 6 wines in all. At one tasting per hour, there is a lot of lecture, but the time seems to fly: there are 400 different varieties of wine grape in Italy, so if you are going to spend an entire day on wines, this is the country to do it in. (to put that in perspective, the U.S. has a mere 35 varieties. France has 50.) The wines we taste are widely varied, starting with two whites, then moving through three reds and ending with a dessert wine (of the Moscato variety). One of the reds really counts as two tastings, because the teacher had accidentally gotten the same wine in two different vintages– a fortuitous mistake, he explains, since now we can do a comparison tasting to see how this wine ages, and what a difference two years in the bottle can make. After a day full of sniffing, swirling, sipping, and swishing, I’m more than ready for dinner, but less than ready to leave the Academia. I sneak in a few more minutes with the library, say goodbye to the staff, and head back to the hotel for the final dinner of our semester abroad.