A day in the life of a typical student at The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy
Granted, she's more charming that most of us but we chose Elisa as our typical student, and then had our film crew follow her for the day to give insight into the typical day at one of our week-long courses. Elisa is Italo-American but we could have chosen one of the two young English ladies, a woman from Greece or Canada, etc.
The Awaiting Table Lecce, Italy
One week of pure culinary and cultural bliss in the South of Italy at THE AWAITING TABLE Cooking School.
Cooking school Puglia - The Awaiting Table
Welcome to The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy.
We’re passionately, profoundly, even pathologically pugliese.
With us, you won’t just see the place we love, you’ll cannonball into it– into our traditions, into the kitchen and into Southern Italian life, taking your own place around the generous table.
Sure, you’ll learn our regional recipes and develop a crush on our local grape varietals, but you’ll go deeper, learning to see the history, local culture, climate, migration patterns and indigenous viticulture practices, as the more beautiful and intriguing elements of everything you’ll put in your mouth.
And it’s also more fun, when you sidestep the clichès and really go deep.
The Awaiting Table Lecce, Italy
One week of pure culinary and cultural bliss in the South of Italy at THE AWAITING TABLE Cooking School.
Cooking in Italy - Geography and the cooking of the Salento
Cooking in Italy: Geography and the cooking of the Salento
No two people seem to agree on just where the Salento ends, and the rest of Puglia begins. So, who is right? - Con Salentoweb.Tv Media partner
Cooking With Silvestro Silvestori at The Awaiting Table in Lecce, Italy
During a trip to Italy, we headed to Lecce for a cooking class with The Awaiting Table. Owner and multi-talented Silvestro Silvestori led us through the lovely city; churches, wine bars, restaurants, markets, and street vendors are all a part of the Lecce's spectacular energy.
Silvestro walked us to the market to gather our ingredients for the evening’s class then walked us back to his kitchen, where we all worked together to create lovely pasta called sombreroni (Mexican hats). We also created a fresh fennel salad, a braised chicken dish with olives and wine reduction, and a dessert similar to biscotti made with whole almonds.
Read more at:
Introducing The Awaiting Table Cookery School
Culinary vacations at The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy, offer more than just cookery courses in Puglia, Italy: each cooking vacation gives our students the ability to cook like an Italian for a week, following Pugliese recipes, cooking with locally sourced food, making pasta by hand and drinking wine from the Salento. The perfect Italian cooking holiday includes the healthy, yet succulent dishes of the Mediterranean Diet.
Learn about a typical cooking school , vacation week or see our course calendar to choose the right cookery programme for you.
The Awaiting Table Cookery School logo is everywhere in Lecce now!
These shootings are just some bites of our future promotional video. Stay tuned to see the full version!
whom you'll meet at our Lecce school.
At our cookery school in Lecce, Italy, these are some of the people that will be tickled to meet you.
l'emiluccia
silvestro and emiluccia: true love always!
In cucina con Rosa - Cooking with Rosa in our kitchen in Lecce
Third in the series, this video is decidely silent, to show the food of the Salento, without the need for language.
This is the same fish market we use for all our week-long classes.
in praise of smaller fish
Many are turned off of smaller fish due to a misguided notion that they are hard to cook and eat. Here at our cooking school in Italy, we prove the opposite, in less than 120 seconds
Puglia, the new Tuscany?
For the last 13 years journalists have been calling la Puglia 'The New Tuscany'. Are they right?
awaitingtable.com
Music:
- We Tigers:
- Ottoni Animati:
from our site, awaitingtable.com
This is the sort version of our introductory video that lives on our homepage. The longer version gives the web address as well.
Cooking in Italy: geology and the wine of the salento
Most of us would argue that the definition of a great wine is when it comes from a specific place, and that it couldn’t from anyplace else. But is that true of culture, or just the land? And what about architecture? And building materials?
All of this is answered in less than 4 minutes. Con Salentoweb.Tv Media partner
A recent course at the castle
a local professor of agronomy discusses how the historic poor were reduced to the eating of weeds, but how that turned out to be one of the healthiest diets on the planet. Then a cooking lesson, followed by lunch on the baron's stone balcony. At the castle.
Art and Cooking in Puglia: Maccagnani ed i Carciofi
Con Salentoweb.Tv Media partner
A day in the kitchen at the castle in Southern Italy
Held in a 16th century castello 40 minutes south of Lecce, our week long cookery courses at the castle are larger than life celebrations – imagine yourself at a long table enjoying extravagant country lunches, overflowing with Southern Italian familial tradition. Each meal, you’ll learn the history and culture of the region and how that drives our cuisine, then we move into the kitchen and using your own hands, turn theory into practise. Whether it’s making fresh pasta from scratch nearly every meal, grilling sea bass over olive wood embers or covering impossibly ripe fruit with impossibly fresh ricotta, it’s always hands on, all the learning re-enforced by doing.
Daily, you’ll visit the herb garden, and depending on the season, fill your cradling apron with rosemary, lavender, bay, sage and basil. You’ll pick fruit from the baron’s hundreds of fruit trees and we’ll burn off lunch by walking the stone walls among the nearby olive groves, a neighbour’s overly-friendly dog tagging along with us.
What often surprises our guests is that the castle grounds make up a quarter of the historic centre of a small Southern Italian town – exit the kitchen door and you’re at the fountain in the main piazza. You’ll get to know Serena our greengrocer, Armando the butcher, and we’ll visit our local olive oil producer in her gorgeous palazzo, giving you a chance to take some extra virgin olive oil home with you.
But it will be your time around the chalkboard learning about wine, in the kitchen putting your knowledge to work, and at the table on the baron’s stone loggia that you’ll cherish most. You’re likely to find your next favourite grape here. You’ll make friends from foreign countries. And Southern Italy will never be the same for you again.
Our birthday course: Making the Southern Italian tomato sauce
in early September, every year, we celebrate the week by choosing it as the one that we make our annual tomato sauce. It’s an all day affair, with ice cold beer providing the inspiration keep stirring the giant cauldrons of simmering tomato sauce. Then we take the bottling stations an form systems, the whole thing producing well over three hundred bottles, enough for the entire year. Then we take to the baron’s pool. We grill out a little more than our other courses and of course we linger over the meal in the baron’s wine cellar, the chill a welcome break from the late summer sun (literally, ‘lion son’, in Italian).
We’ll make fresh pasta from scratch nearly every meal, we’ll lunch on intriguing local summer salads, and take to roasting local DOP potatoes until they perfect little roasted nuggets, perfumed with the local extra virgin. We’ll simmer summer fruits in sweet wine and serve them over impossibly-fresh ricotta, and linger over the local sparkling wine, deep in the refreshing cool stone of the baron’s private underground olive mill. If cooking in a castle and finishing your meals by bobbing in the baron’s pool sounds good to you, this just might be your perfect course.
The Awaiting Table Cookery School - our staff
Silvestro, Anna, Desi, Mauro & Paola are members of a big family called The Awaiting Table Cookery School