When I told Mr NQN that we were attending a Barilla cooking class he answered “Oh cool, am I teaching it?” You see whenever I go away my darling husband subsists solely on Barilla pasta and sauce. Every night he sticks his hand into the box of goodies that Barilla have kindly supplied him with and picks out a pasta and sauce. So he considers himself a bit of an expert cook as far as pasta cooking is concerned (and yes I know, it’s just boiling water and adding pasta and then sauce but let’s not ruin the moment for him please? ).

Chef Luca Ciano

We arrive at the Annandale location where pictures of Barilla’s chefs line the walls. Each class has a maximum of 16 students with ours having 12. There is antipasto and a glass of Prosecco waiting for us and the class goes for 2.5 hours. Each class has a theme and because Easter is almost upon us, tonight’s theme is Easter with dishes such as torta pasquilina (egg pie), pappardelle pasta with goat ragu & chestnuts and colomba with mascarpone & brandy cream.

The chef Luca Ciano who greets everyone with his friendly and personable manner tells us that he will be demonstrating one dish (which we will be eating) and then demonstrating two others which we will then go back to our benches to recreate. He tell us that in Italy, Easter is second only to Christmas in popularity. Eggs and roasted lamb or goat are common elements there (lamb as a symbol of birth and the shepherd) and the official Easter cake is the Eastern Dove or Colomba which represents peace.

Luca who goes back home to Italy twice a year to keep abreast of trends, starts off by showing us how to make a ragu. Now being a Barilla class they do talk about their product but this is actually the only recipe that they give that has Barilla products. And Mr NQN gets a bit nervous as the poor dear honestly thought that we were going to a class where we boiled pasta and put the sauce on top. I know, you can laugh, I did!

Here the two products that they use are the Napoletana sauce which has been cooked down and he tells us is made of 100% Italian tomatoes and the egg pappardelle. He starts off with the soffritto base which is made up of onions, garlic and carrots and provide a base for the sauce. A ragu can cook for hours if you start the sauce from scratch but he tells us that this recipe can be done and dusted within an hour.

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I am sitting in the Green Room of Quay and a comely dessert winks at me from a plate. A voice to my right says

“Peter Gilmore is my pimp”

The voice belongs to Quay owner John Fink. Apparently this dessert possesses magical powers and he has used it many times to charm a date. But I shan’t get ahead of myself. Allow me to rewind a little.

Earlier that evening, we are seated in front of the upstairs kitchen in the Green Room of Quay restaurant, ranked #27 in the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. I am a guest of Electrolux and one of a lucky bunch of people who are privy enough to attend a masterclass with Peter Gilmore. Gilmore is the new ambassador for Electrolux along with long standing ambassador Tetsuya Wakuda. The upstairs kitchen in the Green Room has been fitted out as a domestic kitchen with an Electrolux induction cooktop and steam oven.

Chef Peter Gilmore

This evening we are being shown how to make a dish that will appear on an upcoming menu as well as a dish that he considers one of his signature dishes. He starts by popping a large crab claw in the steam oven which he places in a vacuum sealed bag to keep the juices in and to reduce mess.

Gilmore inhales the aroma of the summer truffle

He then produces a summer truffle-these are usually thought of as lesser truffles with the winter truffles being the prize at $2,000 a kilo. The summer truffles this year though are wonderfully fragrant and much better priced at $800-$900 a kilo. He shaves it into some milk heating in a saucepan and to this he adds to some eggs to make a custard. He then takes a small round dish and pours a little in it and wraps this in some cling wrap and places this in the steam oven to steam it to a wobbly, delicate texture.

White squash grown specially for them in the Blue Mountains

Next up is some white squash. He uses a Japanese mandolin to slice the squash paper thinly and he will then briefly blanch it and brush it with oil. He tells us of how he has a farmer in the Blue Mountains that grows special produce for him. The farmer started off growing things exclusively for Quay but they became so popular they have now expanded to supply to other restaurants. Gilmore uses a fashion analogy and explains that there are some things that for the first season the farmer will grow an item exclusively for Quay but for seasons thereafter they can sell the same item to the other restaurants.

Cracking the crab claw

Prising out all of the meat

It’s time to deal with the large crab claw. To make an amuse bouche for the crowd of seventeen of us, he wraps it in a teatowel and hits it with the knife to crack the shell. He extracts about 100grams of meat from the crab and separates it into small pieces. He separates some eggs and whisks the whites and adds these and the yolks mixed with crab to them and folds the whole mixture so that it retains the fluffiness of the whites while still combining the components.

Adding the crab and egg mixture to the 100C oil

He then takes these to the induction cooktop which is set to setting 2 which takes the saucepans of oil to 100C and gently poaches them in the oil. The oil isn’t crackling or sizzling and he gently turns them over to cook on the other side where they end up a pale yellow shade.

The dish!

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My dream job list at some stage of my life has read:

Personal shopper

Chocolatier

Taste tester

Can you see a common thread? The need to consume! So when I was offered a place at any of the Fisher & Paykel Sydney Cooking School classes I naturally chose the chocolate one. That afternoon, when Mr NQN and I were on our way, we spied the temperature which read 37C. *gulp* “That won’t be very good for the chocolate” I tell him.

We reach there and it’s a small class with a teacher Brad Reiher who is a pastry chef at Dolcetti and a facilitator Brett who usually teaches the classes like the very popular Duck & Pinot class. Some classes are more interactive whereas others are a bit more sit back and learn like this one. Today we are going to learn some background of how to make chocolate truffles, some basics and a ganache filling for a chocolate brulee tart. The class is a mix of basics like tempering chocolate along with some very handy tips.

First of all Brad shows us his chocolate machine which keeps chocolate at a constant temperature. For chocolatiers who make dozens of chocolates at one go, it is important to keep chocolate at a consistent temperature. This machine is from Europe and doesn’t use a water bath underneath it which is an advantage as water seizes chocolate.

We start with a  basic ganache. A ganache which is a filling for truffles is a mixture of chocolate and cream. Here they use two types of chocolate: Callabaut and Cacao Barry. Temperature is very  important for chocolate making and we take the cream to a boiling point and then pour it over the chocolate. However Brad tells us that we shouldn’t start stirring straight away and we should let it melt first. Stirring or whisking it reduces the temperature of the chocolate ganache mixture and to give it a little more warmth, he puts it on top of the saucepan that held the cream and then stirs it until just combined, never over mixing it.

The recipe for ganache should always be the same, however if the weather is hotter you can change the amount of cream to be less and if it is colder, you can add a little more cream. If you were using this ganache to ice a cake you would need to refrigerate this overnight to get the consistency that you want. Also Brad points out that you infuse the cream with basil using basil leaves and then strain the cream, then the basil leaves will absorb some of the cream and you always need to ensure that you have the correct amount of cream after infusing and straining. These pastry chefs are very precise!

We then get started on the truffles. Brad tells us that chocolate molds need to be polished between uses with cotton wool balls in order for the chocolates to pop out easily. They never use soap or detergent to wash the molds, simply hot water and at first glance the molds may look clean but once you rub them with cotton wool, the chocolate that is left on becomes apparent.

We first need to temper the chocolate. All couverture chocolate needs to be tempered in order to get the glossy look and that crisp snap when you bite into it and the glossy top. And did you know that with truffles, they only use tempered chocolate on the top that shows? The bottom of the chocolate isn’t tempered so you can use chocolate that is at a slightly higher temperature in order to fill in the gaps after you pipe the ganache in.

To temper dark chocolate you really need an electronic thermometer. Brad tells us that it’s almost impossible to do this otherwise although some people that are expert in it can tell with a lip test but this takes years to do and a lot of practice. A candy thermometer will not do the job as it doesn’t get precise enough and mostly works on higher temperatures.

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