Here’s the thing about hand-made pasta … there are so many things that can go wrong during the process, it’s a wonder any pasta ever actually makes it to the table. And yet it does and it’s enjoyed by people everywhere, in countless delicious ways, every day.

Warm hands

Fortunately there are cooking schools here where you can learn to make good pasta from scratch. The Culinary Institute of Bologna or CIBO (clever really as cibo is also the Italian word for food) is one of them. I went along looking forward to the class but knowing nothing about making pasta; by the end I knew that producing a perfect pasta requires experience, technique and a fair whack of instinct.

But let’s start with some of those things that can impact how your pasta turns out: of course the type of flour makes a difference, but also the size of the eggs you use, the weather – temperature, humidity, whether or not it’s raining outside, whether your hands are generally warm or cold, the surface on which you roll out the dough, how long you leave it to rest, how long you leave it to dry.

The trick to rolling

At every stage of the process you’re employing technique, but also making decisions based on a whole range of factors that seem to have little to do with what’s actually on the bench in front of you. In pasta making, you can follow the recipe precisely and still end up with a disaster.

Lovely (and patient) Lucia

Fortunately for me, though, I had the wonderful Lucia to guide me through. (It also helped that I was in a class of one and so had the benefit of her full attention).

When Lucia explains why you only ever start with three-quarters of the flour, or how the flour you’re incorporating can melt if your hands are too warm, or that rolling your dough on wood helps to give it texture, it starts to make sense. So much so that I ended up producing what looked like some pretty reasonable pasta.

Ready for the pot

But of course, the proof is on the plate. And it turned out the Tagliatelle (al Ragù) and Pappardelle (con Funghi) were pretty good … certainly Greg enjoyed the leftovers but now he’s placed an order for Tortellini in Brodo and Ravioli Ricotta e Spinaci. What did I do with Lucia’s phone number?

On the plate

Pretty happy with the end result