A Master Class with Fulvio Pierangelini

This week I went to a master class where we spent three hours learning how to make ravioli and then another couple of hours sampling the results. The course - ”Ravioli and the Art of Surprise” - was held at the Richemond Hotel in Geneva and the chef teaching it was Fulvio Pierangelini, variously Michelin-starred, named Italy’s Best Chef, a regular on world Best Chef listings… and newly appointed consultant chef to the Rocco Forte hotel group which owns the Richemond.

That means that Pierangelini flies around the world working with the executive chefs at some ten Rocco Forte hotels which like the Richemond have Italian restaurants, imprinting his special style on the menus and the cooking.

When the Forte group took (and made) over the five-star Richemond they named their restaurant Sapori, which means tastes, flavors, in Italian - but ”too many people thought it sounded Japanese and would show up for sushi,” says Pierangelini. So the restaurant has been re-baptized Le Jardin, which is what it was called under the previous hotel owners, however the food served there now is resolutely and deliciously Italian.

The master class begins

Nine foodies, one third of them men, showed up at the appointed hour, 5 p.m. on a Monday, for a full immersion experience on how to make ravioli pasta and different types of fillings, various ways of cutting or shaping ravioli - and then enjoying a several-course, ravioli-based meal that was anything but repetitive or boring and included a ravioli dessert yet didn’t make you feel stuffed.

Fulvio Pierangelini was there to meet and greet, instantly recognizable from media photos because of his glasses, tousled brown hair, and trademark navy and white striped apron. Roman-born, the 57-year-old self-taught chef has a degree in political science and did some graduate work at the Hautes Etudes Internationales (HEI) so he is no stranger to Geneva.

While I can see why Pierangelini has a reputation for being temperamental - anything food related has to be just so when he’s around, and you’ll hear from him if it isn’t - what marked him more as he chatted in French, English and Italian with participants before class was a great generous love, appetite, curiosity he seems to bring to life in general, a liking for people, and a terrific sense of humor. He has an earthy (although by no means Ramsay-esque) way with language, and wore items of clothing - a blue and white striped shirt with cufflinks, elegant brown suede tassel moccasins - that a banker would wear, except he wore them in his own casual way, with his shirt tails out over his jeans.

The class was held in a bouquet-decked conference room where mobile kitchen units and an Imperia Restaurant electric pasta machine had been set up. After donning stylish brown aprons with the hotel logo on them, we took our places around a table equipped with pads and pencils and settled down for the maestro’s intro.

About ravioli

A great part of the appeal of a raviolo (that’s un raviolo, due ravioli), Pierangelini says, is that it contains something inside that we can’t see. A mystery, or surprise, element. But there isn’t anything inherently ”Italian” about ravioli - small stuffed pouches or parcels are known in all world cuisines.

The Italian part  comes in here: Italian cooking has its roots in country cooking, with different regional accents. ”It’s spontaneous cookery. People used what they had to hand.” And they had flour, eggs, ricotta (inexpensive whey cheese); fillings could be drummed up from virtually anything, gathered items like borage or other herbs, some wild asparagus perhaps, even nettles.

Absolutely essential for fine ravioli, Pierangelini says, is making the right kind of pasta, using (to produce a kilo of dough) 800 grams of flour, 200 grams of semolina, whole eggs and egg yellow. He could not be more specific than that because ingredients are never entirely the same - the flour might be very dry, or not; eggs are different sizes, so you might need more or less whole ones, or yolks. This is a basic recipe; there are obviously others.

Number 1 in the Pierangelini cooking credo: Pay attention to your ingredients. Select them with the utmost care. Get to know them. Treat them with respect and love. And part of that is using as little machinery with them as possible. Ravioli dough MUST be mixed and kneaded by hand.

A sticky business, that, and it’s not nearly as easy as it looks to knead the dough into a beautiful even dome, in fact no class participant managed it. All our efforts had to be reworked by Pierangelini himself, Roberto Benvegnù, the Richemond’s executive chef, or their two Italian assistants.

We made two other kinds of dough, one with squid ink to create black pasta, and one with cornmeal to give a polenta-y feel to it. For the black pasta, it was okay to wear rubber gloves but otherwise it was bare hands.

The pasta machine

Next came cutting off a slice of dough and inserting it into the Imperia Restaurant electric pasta machine. ”The first few runs, keep folding the dough in half when you do this,” says Pierangelini. Over and over, the same piece goes through the rollers, becoming thinner and thinner and more elongated while retaining a lovely even width.

Again, course participants turn out to be quite klutzy at this by comparison to the pros, getting misshapen, wrinkled and even holey results.

Pierangelini keeps insisting on putting full heart and attention into everything we do, and gentleness, making his point at one stage by doing an amusing impression of a certain British TV chef wringing the water out of some ingredient by squeezing it the way you would a washcloth - an act of violence, as far as Pierangelini is concerned.

A profile about Pierangelini I once read in the German Süddeutsche Zeitung came back to me. It was entitled ”Der Kartoffelflüsterer” (The Potato Whisperer) and I could see now just why this was such a great title: it is a perfect description of Pierangelini’s relationship to food.

Fillings, cutting and folding

Moving on to some fillings. For time reasons it wasn’t possible to prepare our own spinach, mascarpone, ricotta, parmesan and oil mix, or boil potatoes (”in their jackets, always”) then peel and grate them for the mash filling that would go into the polenta pasta. But we did learn how to make a tomato filling from tomatoes that had been oven-dried with basil and thyme, and an artichoke filling sauteed in olive oil that included the stems, well peeled down to the tender central part - ”the stems have more complex tastes than the hearts.”

There were also some sweetened, cooked, julienned red peppers in oil on hand which we filled into squares of paper-thin filo pastry: this artisanally made filo meant for baklava and beurek was the only store-bought ingredient anywhere in evidence.

Next step: cutting and filling the rest of the ravioli. There were different ways of doing this. You could cut squares, and then either put a spoonful of filling on the middle of each, or use a pastry (piping) bag to put the filling on. You then folded over the square, pressed the dough down around the filling to make sure to get all the air out - absolutely primordial, says Pierangelini - and then used a roulette to trim away excess dough and get a half-moon shape with that typical ravioli edge.

But there are infinite possibilities, Pierangelini explains: one is taking a small round form and quite simply cutting the filled dough out with it, so that you have ravioli that look like little hats. After we’d filled the squid ink pasta with artichoke filling, we shaped them like that. You could also place filling at intervals on a really long strip of dough, place another strip on top of that, then do the necessary patting and roulette cutting.

This went well enough, although trying out some variations - different tortelloni folds and creating fagotini (parcels) - proved to require much more nimble-fingered practice than any of us course participants possessed. We would have been better suited to making trece or caramelle, which can be much coarser - they resemble candy wrappers, something in the middle and then no-nonsense twists to either side.

Good to remember: whether it’s agnolotti, tortelli, tortellini (smaller tortelloni), cappelletti, mezzelune, perle, perline - and the list goes on - here’s the thing: if it’s stuffed, no matter what the name, it’s ravioli, even if we mostly only associate square or rectangular stuffed pasta with serrated edges with that name.

Aperitivo

All the above took some three hours. It was not possible to make the whole quantity of pasta we needed for dinner in that time, so as we turned to hors d’oeuvre and prosecco, Roberto and team got down to some serious ravioli-making.

An unabashed plate of mortadella and bread, and ricotta with olive oil and honey drizzled over it that we helped ourselves to with forks (this was actually a very beautiful dish to look at because of the contrast of the amber honey with the light green of the olive oil Pierangelini has made especially for him) exemplified the Number 2 Pierangelini cooking rule magnificently well: keep it simple. No need for fancy recipes or luxurious ingredients - and remember Rule 1:  just the very best, selected with care, and ”whispered to” so it tastes like a million dollars.

A tavola

Eating our handiwork turned out to be another whole class in itself. We had dinner in the restaurant, joined by the Richemond’s genial food and beverage director Leonardo Temperini whose brainchild the master classes are. Pierangelini was half there, half not there when he was supervising kitchen activity.

The only ravioli that were served as a pasta dish were the spinach-filled half-moons that came laid out flat on the plate drizzled with melted butter and delicately sprinkled with parmesan. For the first time ever, I was aware of, and could appreciate, just how important it is to get the type and thickness of pasta just right in relation to the amount of filling, and to select pasta types and fillings that enhance each other. From this perspective the very thought of a can of meat-filled, soggy-pasta ”ravioli” drowned in ghastly tomato sauce - after all, what ravioli still evoke for many, still today - was in culinary terms at least a galloping obscenity.

As for the other dishes, they had one raviolo, repeat a raviolo, per person, that was used as decoration and contrast/accent to: (A) langoustine (raviolo filled with the dried tomato and herb mix); (B) turbot (hat-shaped black raviolo filled with artichoke); and (C) salt cod puree (the polenta-y potato filled raviolo).  Very fine purees are one of Pierangelini’s signature items; his chickpea puree was one of the things that initially made him famous. Well, here it was puree of salt cod that was so good it had little unconscious ”uuuums” coming out of everybody around the table.

And finally: several oven baked filo ravioli with the sweet red pepper filling were served as dessert.

Yes, a perception changer

The subtlety of the contrasts and textures in Pierangelini’s cooking are among the most unusual and refined I have ever tasted. Onion and garlicky tastes are avoided, and it is not the sort of food that you want to grind pepper or salt over: it has a kind of built-in perfect balance that make such things seem too blatant, too grainy and coarse. It’s the sort of food where you just want to lick the plate clean, help yourself to one of those black squid ink rolls that are a Pierangelini specialty and mop up every last bit of sauce - because while the artistic play with colors and arrangement makes the dishes beautiful to look at, this food is not pretentious or precious. It feels familiar, wholesome, satisfying. The ingredients are mostly very humble.

Pierangelini sticks close to tradition, using only very few ingredients that aren’t traditionally used in Italian cooking (he likes to use scallops, for example), and yet his interpretation - in cooking, in presenting, and in menu composition - is completely new and different.

There’s one possibly apocryphal story about Pierangelini, included in many articles written about him, to the effect that he once told a client at the Gambero Rosso (Red Shrimp), the Michelin-starred restaurant he ran in San Vincenzo (Italy) for many years, that her child, for whom she had ordered spaghetti with tomato sauce, was too young to ”understand” that dish.

At the end of the master class dinner, after sampling what after all will just be a small part of Pierangelini’s dishes and ravioli repertoire, I realized the remark made sense - while the child would probably respond to just plain old delicious food, he or she would not be able to marvel at the miracle of taking as ubiquitous, standard and ”basic” a dish as spaghetti and tomato sauce and (1) putting it on the menu of a Michelin restaurant and (2) understanding how to bring out the intrinsic nobility - how to sense, then coax and whisper it out in the act of preparing it - so that it had a rightful place there.

Frankly, after this experience, I don’t think many of us adults ”understand” spaghetti, or ravioli for that matter, but taking Pierangelini’s course made me feel I was getting there, at least on the ravioli front.

So: did the course  ”Ravioli and the Art of Surprise” live up to its billing ? For me, resoundingly, in many more ways than I could have imagined. I don’t see myself starting to make my own pasta any time soon, but in terms of ”ravioli appreciation”, getting a sense of the intricacy of the subject, learning Pierangelini’s approach to selecting and handling ingredients, composing a menu - and not least as a source of ideas - it was just terrific.

PS

For the three hour class and the dinner, the price was 260 Swiss francs, including aperitifs, wines, water and coffee. I call that value for money. Fulvio Pierangelini will be giving another cooking class on April 28, 2010, called ”Risotto and Spring”. No more than 15 people can be accommodated, so reserve now at the number below.

To get a feel for Pierangelini’s credo of coaxing the max out of simple things and making them become heavenly delicious in the process, why not go to ”Italian-style family lunches” that Le Jardin is planning from January 31 through June 27, 2010. On the menu: ”Geneva’s best lasagne”, roast free-range chicken with mashed potatoes, and vanilla ice cream. Price without beverages is 60 Swiss francs per adult; the charge for children under 12 is .30 Swiss francs per centimeter of height. It goes without saying that these are Pierangelini-inspired meals, as interpreted by Roberto Benvegnù and team; Pierangelini will not be present.

Ask for the Richemond’s new ”Les Rendez-Vous Gourmands” brochure, chock full of foodie events, including some tasting dinners at which Fulvio Pierangelini will be present.

For more info and reservations, call Switzerland (0)22 715 71 01. More about the hotel at www.lerichemond.com.

Visual courtesy of Le Richemond, Geneva