MERCATO CENTRALE Love at the first sight would be the best saying for the Mercato Centrale for me. If cooking and eating are your passions, you would fall in love with Mercato Centrale easily. As a student chef, this is the best place to get to know the Tuscan ingredients. As a market lover, it’s a paradise. As an art admirer,it’s a living beauty of the 19th century. On the ground floor, you can find fresh vegetables, meats, a great selection of wine , food souvenirs like great Tuscan olive oil,dry pasta or Cantucci. Anything Tuscan,you name it,they have it. If you feel like trying some local food, perhaps walking […]
The 1st week of my Toscana Home cuisine couse has started. After the 2 months of real hard work in the intense professional chef course, cooking in a Granny’s kitchen is a total relaxation to me. We cooked 4 dishes a day and had that home made meal together. Changing from Cooking in a big professional kitchen to a homey kitchen is a different experience. But I do love both. One lazy afternoon, I baked an apple tart and let it sit on the window frame to cool down. Outside the window was a blooming rose garden. I could see the green hill with Cypress trees in the back ground. […]
This week has been really special to me. We started off the week with a visit to a wine cellar. It was a perfect day under the Tuscan sky. The day was fresh and sunny. The garden was full of roses and herbs.I could smell rosemary and lavenders while we were walking in the garden. Such a relaxing atmosphere to study wine and olive oil making. Now I know the differences of extra vergin olive oil and normal olive oil. It takes up to 300 kg of olives to get 40 liters of olive oil! Then we did some wine and olive oil tasting. Yet after the class we all […]
It’s been another productive week for us. This week we went to Parma to study how parmigiana cheese and prosciutto are made in the factory. It was really interesting! Studying in a moutain of parmigiana was for sure an experience of a life time. In our cooking lessons, we had a sausage making day, a pizza day and the last one of this week was dessert making. Such a sweet and happy ending! I have never thought I would be able to make homemade sausages by myself. Oh… What a hard work though… I had to mix the meat together with spices and beated all ingredients with my 2 hands […]
