Hotel Loveno Pasta-Making Class

One of our best experiences so far on this trip has been learning how to prepare fresh pasta from scratch.

But before I describe our pasta-making class, I should talk about how unseasonably warm it has been here this past week. We were expecting cool autumn mid-60/mid-70 temperatures for our September stay. But instead the temperatures have been getting up into the mid-80s some days. With the humidity, we get pretty sweaty while hiking or walking. So yesterday (the hottest day so far) we took a day off from exploring and instead headed to the beach so that we could cool off in the lake.

There are several free public beach areas in Menaggio and other towns along the lake. Just bring your own towel, a bathing suit, and some sturdy water shoes (the beaches here are rocky, not sandy -- ouch!). But Menaggio has a really nice Lido Beach Club, where for a small fee you can rent sunchairs and umbrellas, so we headed over that way instead. We swam a bit, read a bit, and had lunch and drinks at the little kiosk bar. It was a really pleasant way to spend a hot day, and we felt really refreshed afterwards.

So today we did some more uphill walking to tour around the hamlet of Loveno. The hotel where we took our pasta class is located here; it's about a 15 minute slow walk uphill to get to the hotel. But the city of Menaggio has a self-guided walk you can take that walks you up through and around the older part of the Loveno town.

My impression of Loveno is that it is a very scenic suburb of Menaggio. We walked past several beautiful houses with epic views of the mountains and the lake. We also met a very friendly cat sunning herself on the cobblestones and looking like she owned the place.

One particularly striking villa that we saw was Villa Valsecchi, a private home built in the Art Nouveau style. The pastel green walls are festooned with flowers, vines, and smiling faces. It was a nice contrast to the more simply decorated classical-looking villas we've been seeing elsewhere on the lake.

From the upper hills of Loveno it's a really pretty walk back down to Menaggio through a forested path that was once a mule track leading between Loveno and Nobiallo. The track is nicknamed Via degli Sposi ("track of the newlyweds") because newly married couples used to walk the path after the wedding ceremony.

Down in Nobiallo, the walk takes you over a 600-year-old stone bridge to a church called the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Pace (Lady of Peace).

But of course the highlight of the day was our lunchtime cooking class back up in Loveno, at the Hotel Loveno. The setting was gorgeous -- a large sunny room with a big picture window looking out over the lake.

Our instructor was the charismatic hotel owner, Paolo. He is a chef and sommelier and gives pasta making lessons throughout the summer season. He was a wonderful and patient teacher. Our class of six students learned how to make two kinds of pasta dough. In southern Italy, the typical dough (pasta bianca) is made with just semola flour, water, and maybe salt. This dough can be used to make small shapes that don't hold any filling, like orechiette, cavatelli, and strozzapretti. Northern Italian pasta dough (pasta all'uovo) uses '00' flour and an egg and is versatile enough to make long pasta like tagliatelle as well as filled pastas like tortellini or ravioli.

After preparing both types of dough, we had to let the egg pasta rest for a bit, so we started off by shaping orechiette with the pasta bianca dough. Orechiette pasta gets its name because it is shaped like little ears (orecchio is Italian for "ear"). The rough surface of the pasta and the little curve of the the cup is good at holding onto the sauce. The key is to keep them all the same size and thickness so that they cook at the same rate.

The second dough was well-rested by the time we finished shaping all our little orechiette. We started by rolling out the egg dough into a long strip. Then we fed that strip into the rollers of a hand-cranked pasta machine to roll it even flatter. Then we cut that strip in half and rolled it through the machine once again at an even thinner setting.

Finally, on the same machine, we ran the long thin strip of dough through the cutting side to slice it into long tagliatelle noodles. Each set of noodles gets tossed with more '00' flour so that the noodles don't stick together. You make a little nest of pasta and that will be what you boil for a few minutes to make one serving of pasta.

We all got our chance to roll out the pasta and use the fun hand-crank machine with Paolo watching and helping as needed. Paolo also showed us how to make a few other pasta shapes, like farfalle (literally "butterflies" -- the little bow-tie shaped pasta) and agnolotti (small meat-filled dumplings that can be cooked in broth or vegetable-filled and cooked in a sage butter sauce).

We then handed off our fresh pasta to the hotel chefs to prepare and moved outside to a beautifully set table in the hotel's garden.

Paolo made sure we had plenty of wine and good bread, and we were served our tagliatelle bolognese first. Paolo explained that while he could teach us how to make pasta in one short afternoon, to learn to make a real Italian bolognese sauce would take all day. The hearty red sauce uses good pureed canned San Marzano or homegrown tomatoes, and is cooked down with olive oil, carrots, celery, onions, and meat for 2-4 hours. After the heavy tagliatelle we were also served our little orechiette with a light pesto sauce (blended basil, olive oil, pine nuts, parmigiano and/or peccorino cheese and maybe a hint of garlic). It was delicious!

After our hearty lunch we were served a sweet slice of tiramisu and got a chance to savor the last of the wine while taking in the beautiful view. Paolo's class was a fantastic experience and I would highly recommend it if you are ever in this corner of the world!