The american resistance to measuring ingredients never ceases to amaze me. I suspect that this has something to do with the original immigrants and pioneers travelling to a new land with as little as possible. As old-fashioned balance scales are very heavy, and require a series of weights, packing this in the suitcase would not have been an option. For some reason, in the centuries since, measuring by weight still hasn’t caught on. There is some sort of vicious circle in play where books and magazines don’t print weights because people generally don’t have scales, and people don’t buy scales because the recipes don’t require it!

For some ingredients, volume makes sense – sugar is pretty easy to measure in a cup. However, when it comes to something like flour, the room for error is huge. Even professional chefs have been known to fill a cup of flour with anything from 3.5 to 7 ounces of flour. It is a relatively safe assumption that most recipes mean a cup of flour to weigh 5 oz, unless they specify otherwise.

Butter is also measured in cups or tablespoons. This convention makes no sense at all until you realise that american butter is sold in sticks of 4oz, or half a cup, and marked on the wrapper into tablespoons. When interpreting an american recipe, use the following conversions:

1 cup = 8 fl oz = 32 tbsp
1/2 cup = 4 oz butter = 8 tbsp

2 cups = 16 fl oz = 1 american pint
4 cups = 32 fl oz = 1 quart

Now, armed with this information, you can have a look at some good American food websites. Epicurious is one of the best, containing it’s own recipes as well as those from Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines, two of the top food magazines in the U.S.

Tante Marie’s, where I am at culinary school, also has good recipes from Mary Risley’s book on the site.

The other major sites worth mentioning are Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen – the former being the magazine and the latter the TV show from the same people. These people exhaustively test recipes and equipment to work out the best way to do things. Some parts of the site require subscription, but it’s worth looking at the free stuff that’s there, and keeping an eye out for the magazine too.

So, I just promised that I wouldn’t talk you through everything we do each day – and now I’m going to break that rule, and tell you what we did today. What can I say – I make these rules so that I can enjoy breaking them.

Today’s workshop was on pasta – we made fresh egg pasta and 3 different sauces that we then had for lunch. Now, I’m sure you have heard this before somewhere, but making pasta isn’t hard. However, this time I want you to believe it – it really isn’t. In fact, it’s not much more difficult than making playdough.

Having said that, there is a caveat – you need a pasta maker. Nothing else will do unless you really want to get to work with a rolling pin. However, they are not expensive – John Lewis has one for £35, and in the US they are between $30 and $80 depending on how many accessories you get. Imperia is a good make – it’s has interchangeable cutting attachments, which is useful.

Pasta dough is a lot like bread dough – a very simple mixture:
1) The ingredients are flour, water, salt, plus optional fat. Eggs can provide both fat and water.
2) The dough is kneaded in both cases, to develop the gluten and make the dough stretchy. Fat in the dough gets between the gluten strands and makes the dough more silky.
However, in the case of pasta, you don’t have to worry about yeast, or rising, or baking, making things *much* simpler.

The steps in making pasta are as follows:

• Combine the ingredients into a dough. This can be done equally well in a food processor or mixer as on a counter. It’s better to leave out some of the flour, as it can always be added in later.
• Knead the dough (like kneading bread dough) until it is a smooth ball. Add extra flour to prevent it sticking, but not so much that the dough dries out. This can also be done in a processor or mixer.
• Rest the dough. This is important as it allows the gluten in the dough (which you just developed into nice stretchy strands) to relax, making the dough easier to manage later on.
• Knead the dough further to make it smooth and silky. For this use the widest setting of a pasta machine, feeding it through several times until it feels super-smooth. Dust the dough with flour each time to prevent it sticking in the machine. If you don’t have a pasta machine, you should knead it by hand for about 10 minutes until the same consistency is reached, and rest it after this instead. The dough should be quite stiff and solid.
• Roll the dough out by feeding it through the pasta machine one setting at a time, to make it thinner and thinner, or by using a rolling pin and plenty of elbow grease. If the pasta ribbon gets too long, cut it in half and continue one piece at a time.
• When it is thin enough (apparently fettucine and other flat noodles should be thin enough to see through when it is done), use the appropriate cutter attachment to slice into noodles or whatever other shape you need. Filled pasta is trickier and waits for another time.
• Dry the pasta for at least 30 minutes, with the pieces separated, before cooking just like dried pasta, but for a shorter time.

And that’s it. Smooth, silky, tasty pasta dough. Ideal for light, creamy sauces and delicate vegetables like asparagus. For a more complete description, try the links below, or your favourite recipe book. Italian cooking books will be a good starting place, and Jamie Oliver is keen on making fresh pasta (not surprising given his time at the River Cafe).

A recipe for fresh pasta from Epicurious.

Jamie Oliver’s basic pasta recipe on his website.

The recipe we used today at Tante Marie’s was 8oz all-purpose flour (plain flour is fine too), 2 large eggs, 1 tsp olive oil and a pinch of salt. We didn’t use all this flour, but keep the surplus to hand to flour things as you go.

The basic curriculum for us follows classical French cuisine, with Californian twists sprinkled throughout. But what Nathan wants to know is, why do the French always have to get involved?

One of the main reasons that we (and almost every other cooking school) follow French haute-cuisine is that it the only national cuisine that has been codified. The idea was to create a definition of what a French chef to be able to do and thereby create a profession. By ensuring that all chefs met this standard, they could maintain the quality and make sure that chefs were paid appropriately. The result of this was to generate a list of standard dishes, sauces and preparations that should be within the repetoire of a French chef. In this way, if a chef from Normandy were to say “Make me a mornay sauce” to a chef from Bordeaux (or Boston), he would get what he expected, and not some regional variation.

Many people were involved in the gradual codification and organisation of French cookery, including La Varenne, Antoine Careme and Brillat-Savarin. Auguste Escoffier simplified their work and out on the final touches, which he then recorded in Le Guide Culinaire – still used by chefs today.

Of course, a lot of these sacred rules and standards were overturned in the wave of Nouvelle Cuisine, but that’s another story.

So it has been 2 weeks at cooking school – and I have been very remiss in my blog posts. This is partly because I have been exhausted every evening after classes, and partly because I wasn’t sure of the best way to write about this.

One of the things about learning how to portion a roast chicken, say, or cook a stirred custard sauce is that these techniques are hard to describe, but much easier to learn by watching and doing. This is of course, one of the reasons that I am in cooking school in the first place! However, it would make for a pretty dull read if I just described everything we did each day. And I’m sure that many of you are not that interested in the ins and outs of the cooking in any case. So instead, I will try to write around what we are doing, to give you a flavour of what is going on, without all the detail.

Just so you know, I am at Tante Marie’s Cooking School, based in North Beach, San Francisco. They do evening courses and also let people come int o join in the cooking school classes on a one-off basis, so look them up if you are coming to visit. We generally cook in the mornings, and eat what we have prepared for lunch, then have a demonstration of the next day’s dishes in the afternoon.