Pasta making is as simple as one, two, eat at Cibus

• Name + address: Cibus cooking class, 5360 Canotek Rd.

• Diet: All pasta contains gluten

• Cost: $77

• Wheelchair accessibility: Yes

• Website: www.cibus.ca

After the second time meeting the chef/owner of Cibus, Cristian Lepore, he offered me a place in his pasta making class.

I knew his work from when he cooked at the now defunct Orto Trattoria and remembering how delicious his pasta was, I felt it foolish to refuse the offer.

He began by addressing the types of flour he uses and talked about ratios of eggs to flour weight. There are also pastas that require no eggs at all and some that use only the yolks. An example would be an egg fettuccine that is often made with as many as 40 yolks to 1 kg of flour.

What we learned by watching and doing, is that pasta making is far less onerous than people think and working the dough is like a little trip back to your childhood when your hands were sticky and messy most of the time.

One woman declared that she found it so therapeutic that she wanted to “quit my job and just make pasta all day.” In fairness, she does work for the federal government.

The other great thing about pasta making is that nothing is wasted. Have a few irregularly shaped trimmings after your pasta is cut? Chop those into smaller bits and save them for your next chicken soup or pasta e fagioli.

At the pasta rolling machine we each took turns feeding the dough through and while we all were newbies, things went smoothly for everyone. Yours truly however can’t help but cock things up when using devices, so several attempts were required to push the dough through evenly.

The nice thing was that even a clown can’t get this process wrong because pasta dough is rather forgiving and in the end my pasta was better than everybody's. Okay maybe that’s a lie. It was, however, indistinguishable from anyone else’s.

At one point during the three hour class, Cristian had made for us two pizzas to share. Non-alcoholic drinks were offered and we were invited to guess which pizza had been made with his soon-to-be-famous gluten-free crust. Only one person got it right.

The gluten-free pie was impressive and everyone wanted to know how that dough had been made. That was not going to happen. Cristian revealed that it had taken him three months of recipe testing to get the proper ratios of the various flours to achieve just the right consistency for this pizza dough. In the world of gluten-free, this quality of recipe remains a well-guarded secret.

With the pasta made, it was on to the final stage where we made two sauces: an amatriciana tomato sauce using guanciale (cured pork jowl) for the fettuccine, and a gorgonzola cream sauce for the potato gnocchi. Each of us would later take two large containers of pasta home.

The evening passed quickly and with Cristian steady at the helm, it was a convivial class where the attendants had their confidences boosted. This is a value proposition for anyone becoming interested in Italian cuisine and for the small cost, the experience is rich in generosity of spirit.

Cristian offers his classes just once a month but private cooking classes can also be organized.

If interested, it’s advisable to register straight away and note that Cristian will be away during the month of August.

• The Italian grocer Farmer’s Pick has a good selection of gluten-free pasta, often on sale.

• The Imperia pasta machine used in this cooking class can be found at Preston Hardware

• Aware House Chef has a useful comparison of gluten free pasta