Making a pretty penne

YUMMY: Sam Deiter’s proud "baby". [Photos by Antony Otera/Shanghai Star]

Star in the kitchen

Shanghai Star decided to sharpen its Italian cooking skills at an Expat Cucina class one recent Sunday. In attendance are six wannabe Gordon Ramsays and Nigella Lawsons.

Four of us are expats. There are three women and three men.

"The classes are always pretty balanced gender-wise and there’s always a mixture of expats and locals," Ingrosso explains.

 Each of us has our own cooking station complete with a pair of induction hotplates spaced evenly around a huge state-of-the-art kitchen counter in the Living Kitchen showroom on Kaixuan Road. It’s a setup that would have Mr Ramsay salivating with envy.

Today we’re making Italian short ribs in wine and cream sauce and a side of mashed potato. Ingrosso takes us through the paces, from seasoning the short ribs with salt and pepper to cutting the potatoes in manageable chunks to boil in one pan while we sear our meat in another.

Standing there within arm’s length of my fellow chefs-in-the-making, I feel like a member of a well-drilled orchestra. The six of us prod our quickly browning ribs in time to Ingrosso’s steady flow of encouraging words. Each of us is transfixed by the process, yet we move in unison to our seasoned conductor’s gestures.

Before long, the sound of short ribs -— happily sizzling away in concert in our pans -— reaches a crescendo. Standing at the hotplates to my immediate right is Clare Torralba.

A Philippines expat managing global business for a German chemical firm, Clare first heard about Expat Cucina from friends. She says she has always had an interest in Italian cooking. “My favorite Expat Cucina class so far has been the pizza-making one,” she gushes.

"I’ve made several pizzas at home already and I’ve now stopped ordering them online." Sam Deiter, a 31-year-old Senior Technical Artist for video game company Virtuos, busies himself mashing his potatoes with a red electric mixer he says is identical to the one his mom uses back home in the US.

"The instructor is super-friendly and really knows her stuff," he says, while scraping the mashed potato from the mixer’s hook device.

"And you meet some crazy interesting people here. In one class I met a retired investment banker, a marine biologist, and a molecular biologist!"