Emily Bridgewater heads to a famous TV manor for a personal cookery lesson with celebrity Italian chef Aldo Zilli.
Making your own pasta is a tricky business, so you may as well just open a packet of the dried stuff and be done. Right?
This was precisely my opinion, and with good reason. Too many times I have wrestled with the pasta-making machine, only to end up with a kitchen that could host a party for Kate Moss; all white powder and very little food.
However, I am a changed woman – and I don’t even need to fish that pasta machine out of the bin.
My change of heart is all thanks to a cookery master class in the gorgeous setting of Cricket St Thomas Hotel in Somerset – one of Warner Leisure Hotels’ stunning historic properties.
Of course, everything seems that little bit easier when your tutor is top Italian chef Aldo Zilli, best known for his fish restaurant in Soho, London. He’s also something of a TV personality having appeared on ITV’s Celebrity Fit Club where he shed two-and-a-half stone, and has since become an advocate of healthy Mediterranean eating.
But anyone imagining a jolly Italian can think again – Zilli is a taskmaster, who takes his food seriously and expects the same from his students.
“My name is Aldo Zilli,” he said at the start of the day-long tutorial. “But if you didn’t know that already, you shouldn’t be here!” He was only half joking.
The course took place in Fennochi’s, the hotel’s contemporary Italian restaurant, and included a comprehensive guide to making pasta, using just three ingredients and a rolling pin. Quite a revelation.
Zilli demonstrated the process, insisting on the best free-range organic eggs, grade 00 flour, and semolina to help firm the dough before sending students off to their work stations to give it a go for themselves. There was a fair bit of good-humoured competition as to who could roll the sheerest pasta, which we then rolled and sliced into silky tagliatelle, and shaped into spinach and ricotta-filled tortellini.
During the morning session our group also had a chance to prepare seafood – filleting seabass, shelling a queen scallop and cleaning squid. It was messy and there is no room for squeamishness, but I found it immensely satisfying and will certainly be more confident when prepping fish in my own kitchen.
Fennochi’s talented chefs whisked our ingredients off to the kitchen and turned them into a sumptuous lunch, which we enjoyed with wine and chat with Zilli.
