What’s Cooking?
Design by Alex Povis. Photo by Judd Demaline.
Domenica Marchetti sprinkles some flour over the countertop. “The first thing you do when you make homemade pasta,” she says to her 14 pupils, “is you take off your jewelry.” The class chuckles, but the point is clear: making fresh ricotta gnocchi will be messy.
Marchetti unwraps cheesecloth from an airy ball of buttermilk ricotta, which her class made that very Saturday morning.
“Why don’t you guys watch me do it, and then you can get started. I want to be sure I can show you how to do it properly,” she says, instructing students to turn to page 215 of her cookbook, Preserving Italy, for the gnocchi recipe, which uses ricotta, a fresh Italian cheese, instead of potatoes. “Now,” she says, looking at the class from behind an instructor’s counter at the front of the classroom, “what I want to point out on the recipe, is it says about one cup of flour, plus more for the work surface, and as needed to stiffen the dough. The amount you’re going to add to the dough will really vary based on your ricotta, based on the humidity of the room – based on a lot of factors.” Marchetti says ricotta and gnocchi with an Italian accent, the result of summers spent with her mother, aunts and extended family in Italy.
Students are itching to touch their portions of buttermilk ricotta, yet watch Marchetti intently as she fluffs the soft cheese with a fork before mixing it with freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, eggs, salt and white pepper, plus “a little grating of nutmeg.” When it’s all combined, she moves the ball of dough to her floured work surface, adds more flour to the countertop and begins to incorporate it into the dough.
She kneads effortlessly. True, the ricotta dough is much softer than bread or pizza dough, but it’s something the students realize they cannot replicate just yet; a few try her fluid rocking motion, but it’s better to focus less on doing exactly as the instructor does and try to get the hang of what works for them. Her technique comes from years of kneading: Watching her work, you understand why Marchetti says making pasta is therapeutic. She talks as she kneads, checking every once in a while to see how the dough is shaping up.
“The tomato sauce is bubbling away; you should go check it out after we’re done. It’s cooking down, but it’s got a way to go,” she says of the 70 pounds of tomatoes the class peeled and diced earlier in the afternoon for sauce to pair with the gnocchi; it’s simmering a few hundred feet away from the classroom in an industrial-sized pot in a commercial kitchen.
Now that they’ve watched Marchetti make her ricotta dough, students begin mixing up their own. “If there’s any tricky pasta recipe, this is it, because you really can’t measure the amount of flour,” Marchetti says. While students are kneading, cautiously sprinkling more flour as they go, Marchetti comes around to each cooking station to let them feel the texture of her dough. “It’s like a baby’s bottom!” a woman jokes, though it’s an apt description. The ricotta dough can’t be too dry, or the gnocchi will be too hard. Too wet, and the pasta will dissolve when boiled in water.
Once Marchetti is satisfied with everyone’s dough, she demonstrates how to cut off a piece with a pastry scraper, sprinkle it with more flour, and carefully roll it out into a finger-sized rope. Then, she cuts off little pillows, about three-fourths of an inch, and sprinkles them with flour again. The trickiest part of this generally tricky process seems to be the final stage. Marchetti holds up a fork so everyone can see, and rolls each gnocchi down the tines to give the pasta its signature indentations.
When all the gnocchi are rolled, they’re spread on a rimmed sheet pan. Marchetti will take them to the commercial kitchen to cook, but for the most part, they’re done. The class sighs: It’s almost time for dinner. After two days, peeling 70 pounds of local tomatoes, hand-cutting seven pounds of homemade pasta and rolling five pounds of ricotta into gnocchi, among other things, the hands-on part of the weekend has finally come to a close.
The weekend in late July when Marchetti instructed students how to make ricotta gnocchi wasn’t her first time in St. Albans, Missouri, just 35 miles west of St. Louis. (And, for the record, she likes St. Louis-style pizza.) Months earlier, in April, she taught the very first class at the new International Choux Co. at the Inns at St. Albans.
In February, International Choux Co. began offering weekend-long intensive classes in mastering seafood, cooking with the seasons, Italian preserving and seasonal desserts. The classes are playfully termed “culinary camps,” because each is a weekend-long, deep-dive into a given subject. Most camps feature a cookbook author giving students a look not only into their recipes but their cooking techniques, histories and just about anything else they couldn’t fit in their books. Including accommodations at the Inns – a beautiful, rustic venue often used for weddings and special events – a weekend runs around $500. Still, that’s certainly less than a week in Italy, and only an hour away from Downtown St. Louis. That's what brought Marchetti to St. Albans.