Sicilian Food Part Three: A mash-up of cooking school, palace peeping and literary greatness

My husband and I have been including cooking classes in our holidays since our second trip together. We both love food, and have always found cooking workshops a fantastic way to understand more about a place while honing our culinary skills. It seems we’ve been trend setters. What was once a relatively scarce option has moved on to the must-do list of modern travellers. Travel sites now overflow with options.

I’m not sure the expansion has been for the better.

The explosion in cooking experiences brings a host of instructors who may or may not have any real credentials, demonstrating a few recipes in spaces that may or may not be appropriately kitted out for a lesson. Many classes appear pitched to people who don’t cook much, and offer the same handful of dishes that everyone knows for the country in question. You’ll find the same pizza and tiramisu-making combo across Italy, for example, even though the first is a Neapolitan dish, the second from the northeast, and passionate locals would much rather have you eating their regional specialties. Despite the proliferation of options, I think it’s harder these days to find a really excellent experience than it was when cooking classes were relatively rare.

Extensive web research, however, can still reveal real jewels. This year it led me to the Duchess of Palma, Nicoletta Lanzi Tomasi, and her remarkable day of instruction, stories and good food in Palermo. 

This isn’t just a cooking class but an all-around experience. You start with a stroll through the market as the duchess explains the deep traditions of shopping here. Then it’s back to her family palazzo by the sea, a setting which immediately elevates this above your standard class. After a morning of cooking together you sit down to eat what you’ve produced in the palace’s dining room. The delights don’t end there. You’ll walk off some of that lunch touring the palazzo, once the home of Prince Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampadusa, author of what’s arguably the greatest of all Italian novels, The Leopard. Food, literature, elegant dining, art and architecture all in one day. I was in heaven.

The day starts in the courtyard of the palazzo on the edge of the Kalsa district. The impressive line of palaces of which this is one were built on old Spanish defensive walls facing the sea, stretching south from the famous Porta Felice. (Comprised of two baroque gatehouses, on either side of a road that forms the main spine of old Palermo and famously frame the setting sun, the Porta is amongst the most iconic symbols of Palermo.) You don’t linger long there, however, as you’ll be bundled into cars and whisked to Capo market. While Palermo’s other markets, Vucciria and Ballarò, have skewed more towards street food stalls and bars, Capo is still pretty much exclusively a functioning market for the locals with stall owners selling fruit, veg, fish, meat, and specialty ingredients. The duchess explained how there’s a sense of ownership between stall holders and their customers. In the Sicilian language you would say that you belong to each other. Vendors get to know you and your needs, and … once you become a regular customer … they would be mortally offended if you shopped anywhere else. You don’t handle the wares here; you tell the vendors what you want and they select for you. Meaning, of course, the regular customers will get the best.

Capo lies along a fairly dingy street overhung by 18th century buildings, their balconies festooned with laundry, football flags, plants and whatever doesn’t fit into the flats inside. Even on a sunny day, it feels like most of the light radiates from the beauties for sale, not from the sun above. Luscious shades of pink glowing atop bright white beds of ice in the fish stalls. Jars of honey catching and reflecting light like golden lanterns. Fruit and veg in every colour of the rainbow, all seeming far larger and more vibrant than what finally makes it to supermarket shelves in England.

Ingredients procured, we were bundled back into the cars waiting at the end of the street and returned to the palace. We went in a side door (the grand staircase was saved for our exit) and followed the Duchess through a warren of rooms. Some were small and functional, others more generously-proportioned sitting rooms. None particularly palatial in size but all furnished … elegantly but with a casual feel … with layers of art and antiques you only get from the accretion of many generations. There’s a passage in The Leopard where the young lovers go exploring in the family’s old palace and lose themselves in the bewildering labyrinth of rooms. I felt like I’d stepped not just into the author’s house, but into his novel.

We’d taken this route to get to the garden, a terrace about 50 feet wide and stretching the whole length of the palace, so densely planted with semi-tropical trees and vines it seemed impossible that we were in a big city. It also helps, of course, that the views from here are of the seafront and the mountains framing the northwest of Palermo’s bay. Traditional Sicilian tiles marked paths between the beds and water splashed into fountains occupied by rather majestic tortoises.

You could very happily curl up here with a good book for hours. But we were here to harvest herbs and edible flowers for lunch. The duchess established the format for the cooking session here, assigning different roles to individuals so the whole group was multi-tasking. It’s worth noting here that this is not a cooking class where each student does everything at his or her own workspace under the instruction of the leader. You may be in one room juicing oranges while someone else is peeling potatoes and another classmate is browning off onions. You’ll get recipes at the end, but if you’re looking for the kind of class that gets you “hands on” with every step of a recipe, this may make you a bit anxious.

The menu was seasonal (more aubergines, naturally) and of the region, though it turns out the duchess is originally from Venice. This made her stories even more interesting to me, as she reflected on the dramatic differences from her native region that she discovered when she first arrived here.

We started with polpette di melanzane, an aubergine-based take on meatballs perfect if you have an abundance of that purple vegetable … which seems to include everyone in Sicily in September … and an excellent vegetarian starter. You simply roast the whole aubergines until they go soft, scoop out the flesh, combine with herbs, seasoning, cheese, egg and breadcrumb. Then shape into balls, roll in bread crumbs and fry. I think this could also make an excellent side to simple preparations of meat or fish. The pasta course featured a sage and almond pesto; a useful reminder that you can play around with a lot more than basil here. Top tip: don’t add the oil until the very end, so you use only what the mixture needs get to the right consistency.

The main was stuffed calamari, something I’d done before but it was useful to get professional tips. Formal instruction showed me that I’d been over-stuffing my version. I also learned that salted capers, rinsed and dried, are much nicer than the usual ones in brine if you can find them, and that sanding your pan with bread crumbs before frying the calamari helps them not to stick. We wandered south from Sicily to the island of Pantelleria for the inspiration for the accompanying potato salad; a sharp, vinegary version with red onions and more of those gorgeous salted capers.

Desert was a “gelo” of melon. Gelo is simply fruit juice and sugar, heated and thickened with corn flour (corn starch if you're speaking American). It’s presumably what inspired the American brand Jell-o, as the texture is almost identical. Rather stupidly, it never occurred to me that my recipe for watermelon gelo could be used for any fruit, and made into an elegant sweet. Here, we poured the thickened mixture into coup-style glasses that had been dusted with powdered cinnamon and then dressed the tops with edible flowers before putting the glasses in the fridge to set. The order of cooking, of course, was not necessarily the same as of eating, depending on the times needed to prepare. Dessert, for example, was the first thing we tackled because of the setting time.

One of the joys of these experiences is sitting down your classmates to share the fruits of your efforts. I’ve never had more fun with the eating part of a cooking class, because I’ve never wrapped one up in such lavish interiors. We sat down at a table set for 12 under impressive Venetian glass chandeliers. Proper china, glassware and cutlery had been laid out and the duchess’ assistant had changed into an old-style black and white maid’s uniform to serve. French doors stood open on either side of the room, the exterior ones showing off the sea view while interior faced a courtyard draped with plants. The furniture was grand, 19th-century stuff at home in the architecture, with silver gleaming from the sideboard and big display cabinets showing off an impressive array of glassware marked with the family crest. Landscapes and family portraits looked down on us. I felt distinctly under-dressed.

After an unhurried lunch, the duchess rose from the table and invited us to tour the palace. (You take your things with you at this point, as the tour also leads you out.)

As you wander through the ballroom, the library, a sitting room and several more streamlined, museum-like rooms, the duchess explains the history of the building, its connection to the famous author and how her husband ended up as the heir. Tomasi di Lampedusa didn’t have children, but adopted the younger son of some equally aristocratic cousins to ensure he had someone to pass his legacy on to. The adopted Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi would go on to marry Nicoletta, your host for the day, and was a giant in the cultural world. He ran several orchestras and opera houses, led the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and wrote several books. Back in Palermo, he restored this palace … heavily damaged in WWII … and helped to promote his adopted father’s legacy.

Here, you can see the original manuscript of the book, first editions, notes and excerpts that weren’t used, and the library where he did most of his work. There’s a portrait of the author’s father, who was the model for the prince who is the main character in the book. If you’ve read The Leopard, everything in these rooms will remind you of some aspect of the story. If you haven’t read it, don’t even dream of setting foot in Sicily without doing so. It unlocks the soul of this island. It also turns Cooking with the Duchess into the most unique culinary workshop I’ve ever experienced.

I predict that a day cooking with the duchess in The Leopard’s lair will become a much hotter ticket next year after Netflix brings out its new adaptation of the novel. So if you’re interested in joining her, get in touch well in advance.

An additional note: The duchess also offers rental apartments within the sprawling palace for tourists. I loved our B&B for its proximity to the opera but I'd be very tempted to try this on my next visit to Palermo,

Kookin Donosti shows off Basque culture through the kitchen

There are lots of lovely things to see and do in San Sebastián (Donostia in Basque), but let’s be honest. This place is all about the food. It has the highest concentration of Michelin stars per head of population in Europe. Even if you’re not eating at any of those revered institutions, the commitment to fine food cascades down. In many bars the once-humble pintxo, originally just a snack on a skewer or tasty bits on a piece of bread, has become a miniature masterpiece. People come here from all over the world to learn to cook. Everyone is obsessed by food. The only place in Europe with a similar culinary vibe is Copenhagen.

So it’s no surprise that I’ve been wanting to bring my half-Danish, fully epicurean husband to this culinary capital since my first look at a proper array of pintxos. The exquisite care taken with these small plates was a direct equivalent to Danish Smørrebrød. I knew he’d be a fan.

We did, indeed, have great fun following a trail of pintxo bars through the old town, hitting several favourites from my last trip. But our best culinary experience was a day at cooking school.

We find that there are few things better for getting a proper local understanding of a place than learning about its cuisine. Not just eating it, but shopping for it, getting your hands on the raw ingredients, and actively preparing it with someone who has a deep understanding of the intersection between food and people. Kookin Donosti, and chef Carlos Hurtado, are proof points validating the theory. We’ve taken a lot of cooking courses in our travels, and this was definitely one of the best.

We started with a tour of the market. This is a place in transition and will soon be a much better experience. As its economy shifted away from fishing, San Sebastián let its local market wither, allowing the grand old market building to stand empty while a reduced collection of market stalls moved to an uninspiring  basement next door. Barcelona’s Boqueria it is not. But a renovation of the old market building is under way, with plans to move the existing vendors and bring in more food-related diversions, bringing San Sebastián on par with famous markets like the Boqueria, Torvehallerne in Copenhagen or Borough in London. Until then, the stalls here are more than sufficient to meet Carlos’ teaching needs.

First came a vendor of nothing but salted cod, a staple of Iberian cuisine and a driver of European economies for centuries. There’s an enormous variety of options here, and we learned about different levels of quality, and re-hydration techniques, as Carlos bought what we were going to need for our first course. Moving on to a fresh fish stall to buy the hake for course two, we had a long conversation about what fish was local, what came in from elsewhere, and how to judge quality of different species. He’d already procured the beef for course three, but we paused in front of a butcher’s stall to talk all things pig and cow.

Then it was off for a 10 minute stroll to the kitchen classroom, one of the best-equipped we’ve experienced. It was obviously purpose built, with plenty of room for individual workstations and good quality pots and hobs. Though knives were just Ikea basics, they’d been carefully maintained and had an excellent edge. We retired to a table a few feet from the demonstration area to eat each course together with other students; just four in total for our session on Basque classics. I loved the alternating back and forth between cooking and eating. At other classes we’ve cooked everything and sat down at the end for multiple courses at once. This set up seemed much more entertaining and built the appetite for each new dish, while Carlos cleaned our cooking areas as we ate. (Cooking while someone else cleans up for me is almost worth the price of admission.) The close proximity of the dining table means we could also watch demonstrations as we ate and drank. Admittedly, we did less cooking and more watching as the day progressed and the drinks poured, with Carlos doing all the work for the pudding but the orange peels we'd prepped earlier. 

Our Basque menu started by using the re-hydrated salt cod in a tortilla with onions and green peppers. I wouldn’t have thought of fish in an omelette, but this was fantastic. Carlos demonstrated the classic Spanish flipping technique (using a plate to take the omelette completely out of the pan and put the wet side back on the bottom), but the best tip here was simply making sure the pan is piping hot before the eggs go in, then turning down the heat. 

Next came hake in a green sauce. Lesson: it’s really not that time consuming to make a sauce that transforms your dish. (Though stripping the leaves off the parsley stems is a bit fiddly.) And that a handful of steamed clams scattered atop a fish dish can elevate it to the next level. IF you can find fat and juicy fresh clams, of course. Few of us have a fish market like San Sebastián’s at hand, even in its currently humble state. 

The main course was a simple but magnificent ribeye (above, with chef Carlos), a testament to the beauty of great ingredients cooked well. We were familiar with all be basics of cooking beef but it’s good to get some key reminders. Let your meat sit out for a minimum of two hours to come up to room temperature. Render that fat to imbue flavour. Don’t salt ‘til it’s done. A single, large piece, cooked and shared, is easier to keep moist and succulent than individual steaks. This course also gave me a fresh appreciation for piquillo peppers. They ARE different, and worth finding and buying in their jars, for a perfect accompaniment to beef. 

The most revelatory course for me, however, was dessert. Every European culture has recipes to use up stale bread. Here, hunks of stale brioche … hard to go wrong when starting with that … are caramelised in sugar then soaked in a combination of milk and cream that’s been infused with orange skins and cinnamon. I was blown away by how much flavour the liquid took on, and how such simple ingredients combined into an elegant whole. This one is going straight on the dinner party roster. (Though finding whole loaves of un-sliced brioche may prove challenging.)

All that great food was complemented by Carlos’ commentary, and by matching drinks for each course. Basque cider made its second appearance on our trip, and this time we got to try the elongated pouring technique ourselves. I’m still not a fan. 

Once again, we found that the company of our fellow students was part of the appeal. People enthusiastic enough about local cuisine to spend half a day getting their hands on it tend to be great company. 

Kookin Donosti would be the first thing I’d book on a return trip to San Sebastián. They do a pintxos class that’s calling my name. In fact, this is a town that’s screaming out for something like the week-long residential class we did in Gascony. Kookin is still a young company. If they expanded in that direction, it would be on our bucket list. 

This bechamel recipe is my prize Cretan souvenir

 Farmers looking for ways to diversify their revenue streams should take a look at the Cretan Olive Oil farm. I have rarely seen a better example of milking a property for all it's worth.

This relatively compact grove of trees between the main coastal road and the water just outside of Agios Nikolaos offers tourists a number of distractions. You can wander through their gardens to learn about Cretan herbs and their affect on health. You can sign up for a traditional Cretan pottery making workshop. In the shade of an old, open-sided barn, you can learn all about olive oil production, even helping to turn the original 19th-century olive press or raking olive pulp before the advance of the crushing millstone. If you're like us, of course, you'll be heading for the cooking class.

This is a homespun, informal session with a local who demonstrates the classics of the Greek home kitchen, There's no "chefiness", no written instructions and not a great deal of organisation. The instruction reminded me of Italian relatives handing down their techniques: nothing is measured, there are no specific recipes. There's only a general framework of a dish, which may change based on the availability of ingredients or your mood. Those who like to follow recipes line by line may find themselves a bit discombobulated, but the instructor is always at your elbow to assist. It's a great journey through the basics, you'll end up eating a massive lunch and for any like us whose resort package includes dining, it may be the closest you get to culinary authenticity on your whole trip. At 48.00€ per person it's also great value for money.

We took the meat course, which runs every Wednesday at 11:30. (There's a fish option on Mondays.) The centrepiece of the Wednesday class is traditional Cretan Moussaka, a Cretan salad with smoked pork, tzatziki, and sausage and onions. The web site also listed a cheese  pie with honey which we didn't do, thank heavens, because the waste was already epic. Each individual will be cooking a dish that serves four, and the salad and sausage dishes are as worthy of being a main course as the moussaka. When you sit down to eat at the end of the course you can hardly make a dent in what you've prepared, and they have no take-away containers. (If you're staying in the area and not on a dining package, bring materials to take away what you've cooked and you'll have at least three additional meals.)

The crazy abundance, as well as the recipe-free coaching, took me back to the Italian-American kitchens of my youth.

Our most valuable lesson of the day turned out to be an unusual, and promised to be foolproof, approach to bechamel. The difference is starting with something like a batter before engaging with any heat.

• Start by whisking together a half litre of milk and a whole egg
• Add 3/4 of a cup of butter, a good glug of olive oil and a cup and a half of strong white flour. Continue to whisk until reaching batter consistency
• Season to taste with salt, pepper and plenty of nutmeg
• Only now do you put it on the heat. Whisk while cooking until it thickens to something like stiff porridge
• Add about two cups of grated cheese. In Crete we used kefalotiri, a semi-dry goat’s cheese. Back home I used a mix of shredded mozzarella and pecorino

The other essential tip of the day: grate (rather than slicing) the cucumber for you tzatziki. Then salt it and let it sit for a while. Once the seasoning has had its water-extracting effect, squeeze the heck out of the veg, one handful at a time, before putting it into the yogurt. The drier you can get the cucumber, the thicker and more unctuous the sauce will be. I was interested to see her finish it off with a glug of balsamic vinegar and well as one of olive oil. This dish, and the sausage and peppers, shared a love of the agrodolce technique common in Sicilian cuisine.

One of the joys of cooking classes is often the company with whom you are dining at the end. People interested enough in food to spend part of their holiday on it tend to share other interests, and our conversation flowed merrily down diverse paths. The group was split between Germans and Brits, from young backpackers to mature travellers. 

I tried several of the recipes after returning home and they were just as good, and easy to produce, in my kitchen as in a balmy Cretan olive grove. While holiday is now a memory, the food can bring some of the atmosphere back at will.

Eat Osaka's cooking school offers some basics for enjoyment in Japan and re-creation back home

With the steady rise of food tourism has come a boom in one-off cooking classes that complement your sightseeing agenda. A decade ago it was rare to find such things outside of a handful of culinary capitals or luxury hotels; now the challenge is wading through online reviews to figure out which of the copious options is best suited for the serious cook.

Fortunately, an in-depth feature story on Eat Osaka guided my choice. The founding team of a Scottish husband and Japanese wife suggested and adept ability to cross cultures and teach in English, while a partnership with Tower Knives testified to high quality. Our experience matched the laudatory write-up.

The class takes place in a small house in a tiny backstreet behind the showy facades of Shinsekai. Most of this kind of older urban housing has been swept away by tower blocks, so it was a treat to experience one. It seemed similar to the Victorian two-up, two-downs so typical in Britain’s industrial towns, before renovation and expansion turned their cramped spaces into our staple urban housing. We didn’t see upstairs, but down was a tiny space comprising two rooms and a galley kitchen. Later, in Tokyo, we'd see a model of almost the exact same floorplan in the Edo Museum's section on post-war housing.

We entered into the standard area to take off and leave shoes (perhaps five feet long and two wide)just inside a sliding door. Once you change into slippers you can step up to room level. We left all our things in the first room before stepping into the second, as it's almost entirely filled by a high table/cooking area that comfortably accommodates eight students. Comfortable when concentrating on the space in front of you, but don’t swing your arm too far back or you risk putting your hand through a sliding screen. And tall people must mind their heads between every room; a lesson anyone over 6 feet learns quickly in Japan.

Most of the cooking took place on plug-in grills or hobs brought out as needed, since the kitchen was too small for much more than hand washing and noodle boiling.

Our instructor, Yasuko, was a bundle of energy and kept us going through the preparation of three dishes despite the heat rising. (Cold beer helped, as well.) Osakans promote the casual, constantly-partying nature of their town, including a rich legacy of street food. That's what we were concentrating on. Takoyaki, crispy balls of octopus and dough, are the most famous local treats, but the rapid flipping required to turn a layer of batter into individual balls is far too advanced for a basic class. We started with simpler fare, though some skill was definitely still required.

Our menu: kitsune udon, chicken yakitori and chopstick okonomiyaki. The second was the easiest and most likely to make it into the home cooking rotation, the third the tastiest though most challenging. And it was the first that showed me I can still learn things about my husband.

Miso soup is as ubiquitous to Japanese cuisine as bread is to start European meals. This often gets dropped in the West; if you order sushi or tempura, you'll just get those things. But in Japan, a bowl or cup of miso seems to come out as a side to pretty much every order. Sometimes it's a work of art, studded with interesting ingredients and served in an extravagant lidded bowl. Sometimes it's as basic as a slurp of broth with a few tofu cubes and a piece of seaweed. It's consumed at all three meals, and 75% of Japanese people drink miso at least once a day. It's the basis for udon, ramen and all the other noodle dishes that form the backbone of simple, everyday Japanese food. And my husband ... who, before this trip was confident he loved Japanese food ... hates it. Turns out he dislikes clear broths of any sort. Something I never knew, but now explains why he's never interested in any of the chicken soups I make. He's fine with stock as a base ingredient to make something else, but as a finished dish he doesn't like soups unless they are creamy, either literally or in texture.

Thus the kitsune udon was our only shared noodle experience in three weeks in Japan. I went on to slurp other variations, but we never made it to any of the ubiquitous noodle bars that many tourists make a mainstay of their visit.

Kitsune means "fox", though there's none of that particular vermin in the soup. It may bear the name because of its colour, or it could be linked to the shinto fox-god of luck and business. Whatever the origin, it's a Japanese favourite differentiated by thick, flat noodles and a fried piece of tofu. The process for making udon, it turns out, is almost exactly the same as making Italian pici: make dough, roll dough, fold accordion-style, cut thin ribbons, toss in a bit of flour to prevent sticking. The Japanese method has two important differences. Once made and wrapped in a double layer of plastic, Yasuko had us knead our ball of dough by marching on it. Then we "developed" it by wearing the stomped disc of dough next to our skin for half an hour. On that hot, humid night, it must have been like putting dough in a steamer. Whether that's a gimmick or a critical step, the finished noodles were excellent.

Yasuko's secret on the yakitori was a generous glug of Japanese whisky. My big lesson: cook low and slow with complete attention. All the sugar in the marinade makes it very easy to burn your meat skewers once you start cooking.

Okonomiyake was the most intriguing of the dishes. It's a pancake, filled with anything you can imagine, then cooked, rolled and topped with kewpie mayonnaise and a special okonomiyake sauce that delivers an intense umami hit. (Happily, both sauces are available online in the UK.) We made the version beloved of street festivals. The pancake starts normally, poured in a circle on a flat grill. You put a large shiso leaf on the grill first, giving the finished pancake a bit of tang and a finished look. Rather than flipping it, however, you roll it around two chopsticks that become the stick for the sausage-shaped treat above. The flipping was a test of manual dexterity, but not impossible once you get the hang of it. Tellingly, each student cook did better than the one before, learning from earlier examples.

After cooking our three dishes, we discovered there were benches underneath the work surfaces that pulled out, turning our student kitchen into a dining room. Our fellow cooks were one Australian and three other English, all using the rugby as en excuse to explore Japan. Conversation and beer flowed, our food was delicious and we all enjoyed the company until we wrapped up at 9:30. That's early enough to take in the lights of Shinsekai, and to perhaps get another drink somewhere. But we called it a night. There were more adventures to come.