Viola Buitoni, featuring Baia Pasta
Saturday, June 18, 2016, 12:00 pm - 12:45 pm
Stop by the CUESA Classroom for a cooking demo featuring the seasonal bounty of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. This demo will highlight a producer-chef relationship forged and sustained at the farmers market, featuring Baia Pasta.
Viola Buitoni, a direct descendant of the famed pasta and chocolate family, hails fromPerugia, in the heart of Umbria. She came to the US in 1985 for a business degree, but soon after graduation found herself drawn back into the genetic passion for food. Having found a new passion in sharing through teaching and writing, today Viola collaborates with various cooking school in the Bay Area, including Cavallo Point, SF Cooking School, Ramekins and 18 Reasons, is a contributing country editor for the newly launched Allrecipes.it, and holds yearly seminars within the Winter Fancy Food Show for the Legends from Europe.
Both Renato Sardo and Dario Barbone hail from the northern Italian region of Piemonte, where eating quality, seasonal food is a way of life. In a combined retail and production space in Oakland, they make around 300 pounds of pasta per day at Baia Pasta, using traditional Italian techniques to transform high-quality American grains, such as durum wheat and spelt, into a variety of short cuts of pasta.
Dario and Renato are intimately involved in every step of the pasta-making process, from the creation of each batch of dough to the maintenance of the Italian machine that extrudes each pasta shape. The dough is kept cool when mixed then passed through brass dies, which help create a rough surface that is perfect for holding sauce, and it is dried slowly at low temperatures to preserve protein and gluten content and flavor.
All demos take place in the CUESA Classroom (under the white tents in front of the Ferry Building) and are free to the public, with recipes and samples for all.