I recently completed 4 weeks of cooking through the Accademia Riaci in Florence, Italy. While I feel like I learned a lot, there were a lot of pros and cons to the program that I need to vent about, so grab a glass of wine and get comfortable. This one’s going to take a while.
First of all, I did not get the idea to cook in Florence from the show Master Of None. I have been told that season one ended with an Indian guy moving to Tuscany to learn to cook. I didn’t see it. I didn’t hear about it until after I’d signed up. I came up with this idea entirely on my own. Normally I’d try to claim that he stole the idea from me, but I think the episode aired long before I started making my plans. OK, now that that’s off my chest, we can move on.
The Accademia Riaci has programs for all kinds of artistic pursuits, from cooking to shoe making and from drawing to jewelry design. Programs range from single day “learn a little about something” to 2 year certification programs for professionals. The academy is based (sort of) in Florence. I say sort of because there are a lot of things that tie it to Japan. As far as I’ve been able to learn, the parent company is Japanese, which helps to explain the large number of Japanese students participating in the various classes. When you email them with questions, they respond during Japanese business hours, not Italian hours. And when you send in your money, you have to wire it to a Japanese bank, which was very concerning to me. Until I actually started the class, I think a few of my friends were expecting that I got scammed.
I signed up for the Italian Home Cooking class, which runs from 1 to 16 weeks, however long you want to attend, in one week blocks. I signed up for 4 weeks because it’s a nice round number and I could say that I studied cooking for a month. (Yes, many of my decisions are that simplistic.) Each week is different from the others, and the instructor factors in what you’ve already seen when she plans the recipes for each day.
Payment for the class also included lodging accommodations, which I forewent in favor of finding my own place to stay. Finding my own place was more expensive, but it ended up being the smart choice, since the accommodations provided are apparently dorm-style in rooms without air conditioning. In July, Florence can get into the mid-90’s during the day, and the sun doesn’t set until nearly 9:00P. Some of my classmates who took advantage of the lodging option were faced with a choice: broil each night in the heat of the room or open the window to try to cool off the room but then get eaten by mosquitoes. Apparently one student would hose himself off liberally with Off and then wake up in the middle of the night to reapply. Every morning, he’d tell us how many new bites he’d gotten overnight and the number was always in the double digits. I’ll take a hotel room with air conditioning any day.
Class was scheduled to run from 9:30A – 1:30P, Monday through Thursday. On the first morning of the class, we were supposed to meet the translator at the school. There, I met two other students, an Indian guy from San Francisco named Rohil (I asked and he said that he didn’t watch Master of None, either), a half-Japanese half-Taiwanese guy from Pennsylvania named Sho, as well as the translator, who will remain nameless for now because she was pretty bad at her job. Sho went into the school to deal with paperwork while the translator, Rohil, and I went to the Mercato Central. (Tangent: During the 4th week of the class, I caught Sho trying to chop something with the back side of the knife. 4 weeks of cooking school, and he still couldn’t tell which was the sharp end.)
The central market is a warehouse building with two floors; the lower story is a farmer’s market with fresh vegetables, several butchers and fishmongers, bakers, and everything else you could want to cook at home. The top floor is all food stalls and restaurants, more geared towards tourists, although there’s some really good stuff there at a reasonable price. If you’re ever in Florence, it’s absolutely worth checking out, and I highly recommend getting a meal there. Since we were at the market for a cooking class, we were to tour the lower floor and learn how to properly shop for quality ingredients. That’s what the website said was going to happen. Instead, Martina (yeah, I decided to use her name) walked us around, pointing at various booths and literally describing the stores. “This is where you get meat.” “This is where you get fish.” “This is where you get olive oil.” Like we’re either blind or stupid. Basically, she walked us around for 45 minutes, narrating what we were looking at. It felt like we were on a kid’s tv show. “Here’s a carrot.” “Here’s a cow.” “Can you tell me what sound a cow makes?” OK, she didn’t say the last one, but it was heavily implied.
After 45 minutes of mind-numbing prattle, we went back to the school to get Sho. We then went to a newsstand to buy bus tickets. Apparently our classes were not to be held at the school itself. After a 15 minute bus ride, we got off in a residential neighborhood and walked to where the class is held. “But wait!” you may be saying. “Why is there a professional cooking school in a residential neighborhood?” Well, you’re making the same assumption that I did: that this is a professional school. While I did pay for the class, and they accepted my money in exchange for lessons, that’s about as close to a “professional” class as it got. The class is held in a home. Specifically, the instructor’s home. While we were learning, there was apparently an architecture class being held in one of the other rooms by her husband or roommate or brother or something. Her kitchen was small, very small by American standards. The counter was about 8 feet in length and included the sink and stove (which was two burners put on top of the counter and connected to a gas line). The oven appeared to be a large toaster oven under the counter (which I didn’t see at first because it was hidden by a few bottles of oil) and the fridge is almost exactly what you had in your college dorm.
Before I signed up for the class, I asked if the class was hands on. They said Yes, which I took to mean that we’d each get to make the dishes from start to finish for each class. Apparently they meant that we’d help prep the ingredients while the instructor, Gaia, did the actual cooking. So while I got pretty good at mincing and dicing and peeling vegetables without a peeler (apparently Italy doesn’t have ‘peeler’ technology yet), I didn’t actually do any cooking. One problem that we identified early on is that Gaia picks the recipes based on what’s available and fresh at the market that morning. So when we get to class, there are no printed recipes or anything to work from. Just bowls of ingredients on the dining table (where we do all of our work) and a handwritten menu. For example, we made gnocchi twice without any potatoes because the potatoes that day weren’t any good. I always thought gnocchi required potatoes, but either I was wrong, or they’re playing fast and loose with the vocabulary.
The class was taught entirely in Italian. Fortunately, we had a translator. Unfortunately, it was Martina. For every 3 sentences that Gaia said, Martina would translate one. Either Gaia was verbose as hell or Martina was skipping things, and I quickly realized it was the latter. My Spanish is still decent, so I can understand a little Italian. I caught Martina in a few mistakes where she either mistranslated something (pull the pasta from the water 2 minutes before it’s done versus 2 minutes after it’s done) or she just straight up made things up that Gaia didn’t say. Neither case would be a big problem if Martina was also a chef, but as far as I can tell, she’s underqualified to be a fry cook at McDonald’s. Several times, she’d be typing on her phone and completely miss what Gaia was saying, and I’d have to get Gaia to repeat what she said so Martina could listen the second time and translate.
I should also mention that there was a fourth student, a Japanese woman named Yuka. Because Yuka speaks no English and minimal Italian, she gets her own translator. So when Gaia speaks, Martina is translating into English for the English-speaking students and Yuka’s translator is translating into Japanese. Gaia’s not great about pausing to give the translators time to do their thing, so at times there are 3 different languages being spoken at the same time. It sounds like the United Nations in the kitchen. Meanwhile, I still don’t know what freaking recipe we’re supposed to be working on, because that got lost in the translation. Yuka was in the class for the first three weeks. The fourth week, we got a new Japanese student; a 13 year old Japanese girl who had as much interest in cooking as I do in Antarctic yodeling. I don’t know why she was there, but because she wasn’t paying attention half of the time, her translator didn’t bother translating, so that was a little less background noise in the room.
And, since this is a home cooking course, it was presented in the way that a home cook would do it: she eyeballs everything. Gaia got the ingredients for the recipe, cut off as much of each as she needed, then weighed it to tell us how much to use, rounding to make the numbers nice and neat. Partway through a dish, she’d say, “This needs basil,” she’d go out the back door to her garden, get some basil, and come back and throw it in the pot. I’m sitting there thinking, “Which dish did you just put that into? How much did you add? Why did you think basil was necessary? Why didn’t you wash it?” Meanwhile, Gaia and the two translators (that sounds like a terrible name for a band) had already moved on and were talking about something else. We were halfway through a zucchini recipe, and it was sauteeing nicely on the stove. Then Gaia said that we needed one pound of onions. I asked, “How much zucchini did we use?” Because there’s a ratio there. If you use one zucchini versus 10 pounds of zucchini, the amount of onions should change as well. For some reason, it never occurred to anyone that we need the amounts for all of the ingredients to be able to make the recipe correctly.
Over the course of the four weeks, the class got better. I think that knowing how the class is formatted and what the various strengths and weaknesses were for Gaia, the translator, and the students, helped me figure out how to maximize what I got out of the class. Rohil did only two weeks with the course, Yuka started a few weeks before I did and did three weeks with us. Other students each came and went after one or two weeks, which added an interesting dynamic to the class. Each week’s menu was different, and Gaia was open to making changes to the menu based on what we were interested in learning. About 80% of the recipes were decent. Nothing I’d be happy with in a restaurant, but good enough for a home cooked meal. Another 10% were terrible. We made cuttlefish boiled in spinach. Yeah, you read that right. You know how when you cook spinach, it releases a lot of water? That’s the water we boiled the cuttlefish in. I could probably phrase it differently to make it sound tasty, but I think that would be a disservice to you, my loyal reader. On the other hand, we’ve made some dishes that were worth their weight in gold. A lasagna where we made the pasta sheets, made the ragu, and made the bechamel, all from scratch. A peach tiramisu that was light and summery. Profiteroles stuffed with sweet cream, drizzled with chocolate. A lemon mousse served using the lemon shell as a bowl. These are the recipes that made the class worth taking. And I gained a lot of appreciation for using quality ingredients that are in season and local.
The class was fun, once I got into the swing of things, but there are limits to what you can learn in a cooking class when you’re not able to actually, you know, cook. Gaia really knows a lot about Florentine cooking and Italian cooking in general. Any question that was asked was quickly answered, including reference to the history of Italy and why things were done that way. All in all, it was a good experience and I’m glad I did it. Especially since it put me in a position of having to decide whether I wanted to be miserable for a month because the class wasn’t what I expected or if I wanted to let go of my expectations and learning to accept and enjoy the class for what it was. I chose the latter, and enjoyed myself as a result.
I’m sure I learned a lot about Italian cooking other than just the recipes themselves, but I won’t know until I actually start doing some cooking. And, knowing me, I’ll probably think that I know more than I do and I’ll start a small grease fire. That’s OK. Even in Florence, the heart of true Tuscan cuisine, there are restaurants that deliver pizza.
