• 4 private cooking classes (2-2½ hours) followed by lunch
• 1 private and 1 group wine appreciation class (1 hour each)
• Private gastronomic walking tour (2 hours)
• 1 group cooking class (2 hours) followed by meal
• Recipes before each lesson
• Apron

 Accommodations

Apicius offers housing options (for an additional fee, of course), but my husband and I decided to rent an apartment in town for the week for €300.
 

Kitchen and Equipment

The kitchen my private classes took place in was fine, but the equipment was sometimes laughably bad, particularly considering that Apicius is a professional cooking school. First of all, there aren’t enough of everything to go around, so my teacher kept leaving to find spatulas or bowls or whatever in other kitchens, and other teachers regularly came into our room to scavenge. Second, a number of items were either ancient (the egg beater) or ridiculous (a rubber spatula that was not only partially melted, but also large enough to scrape out an industrial-sized mixer). Third, everything that went into the oven was placed in disposable aluminum trays, which at first I appreciated, thinking that would make it easy to transport the leftovers to my apartment, but that turned out not to be the case (see below).
 

Classes and Food

My teacher was a professional chef whom I liked very much. Her accent was a bit difficult to decipher at times, and her knowledge of vegetarianism was a little shaky, but she was fun and interesting. I loved doing nearly all of the cooking myself, including kneading, rolling out, and cutting pasta; making three kinds of gnocchi (potato, Roman, and Parisian); and working on other great recipes. I did more cooking at Apicius than the other two programs combined.

The major downside to Apicius is that some years ago, a student apparently gave some leftover food to a homeless person who got sick and the school got in trouble. So now, for “insurance reasons,” not one crumb of food can be taken off the premises, not even when there are piles of leftovers (which, incidentally, the student has not only cooked but paid for). On my last day, I called the director to ask for an exception because we’d made so much that I couldn’t even taste one bite of the chocolate mousse cake for dessert, and she said no.
 

Gastronomic Walking Tour

This included stops at some famous (to Florentines) but untouristed shops, including a little sandwich place specializing in truffle dips, an osteria, and a gourmet deli and wine bar. I enjoyed it so much that I took my husband on the same tour later that afternoon.
 

Expectations vs Reality

I chose to do private classes only after making sure that the school would be able to accommodate my vegetarian diet. We exchanged several emails on the subject, so it was something of a shock to get there and find meat recipes mixed in with the vegetarian ones. This was easily fixed, but I found it pretty bizarre after so much discussion about what I wanted to cook.

I pretty much knew that I’d be doing a lot more cooking in private classes, but I had been worried that I might have to spend a lot of time watching. Not so – I did most of it myself, which was great. My teacher was fairly familiar with vegetarianism, though not perfect – she added gelatin to the first dessert we made before I could stop her, and was going to add lard to another recipe. When I asked her not to, she said said ok, but then said, “I guess I can’t use butter either.” I explained the difference, but she didn’t really understand.

What really disappointed me was the “all food must remain on premises” rule. While I can understand the school’s worries about liability, I’m certain that Apicius could purchase insurance or something, just as take-out restaurants do, to allow students to take food home. While I didn’t expect to be treated like royalty, I did expect that paying a premium for private classes would mean that the school would make every reasonable effort to make me happy, but this little altercation on the last day was extremely disappointing. I ended up having to go back several hours later to eat the dessert, and I noticed that the director was avoiding me, as if out of fear that I would complain.

And what really gets me about that is that the food is cooked in take out containers, so either they just throw it all away (which would be amazing, considering that Apicius prides itself on being part of the Slow Food mentality, which I can’t help but equate with environmental responsibility), or else the staff takes it home themselves, which is just wrong. Either way, it kind of ruined the whole experience for me.

Overall score: 7/10

Italian cooking programs

• 6 nights accommodation in a local cottage
• Daily breakfast in the local café
• 3 cooking sessions (2 hours each) followed by lunch
• 2 dinners, including one with wine tasting
• Guided tour of Rome
• Visits to nearby villages
• Olive oil tour and tasting session
• Transportation to/from train station
• Recipes before each lesson
• Welcome gift (a lovely kitchen towel from a nearby village)

Accommodations

Toffia © LKL

Toffia is a beautiful hilltop village, and my cottage was adorable. Good size, small but usable kitchen, washing machine, everything I needed. The bed was pretty bad – more a big, soft cushion than an actual mattress, but overall I was pretty happy. There was also a lovely private garden looking out over the valley.
 

Kitchen and equipment

The owners use their home kitchen for the cooking classes, and it was ok. There was plenty of room, but some of the equipment was a bit lacking. For example, we used serrated steak knives as paring knives, and one of them had a bent tip to boot. It’s not and isn’t meant to be a professional kitchen, but a decent paring knife is a pretty essential tool in any home kitchen, in my opinion. And because it’s in the owners’ home, their young daughter wandered in at one point and spent 5 minutes playing with the fresh pasta we’d just finished cutting, which nearly killed my appetite.
 

Classes and food

The recipes were traditional: mushroom risotto, eggplant parmigiana, pesto. I was disappointed by the latter, as pesto is one of the easiest things in the world to make. Yes it’s delicious, but I don’t need a cooking class to learn how to make something that is basically just thrown in the food processor and ground up. The best thing we did made was fresh pasta the truly traditional way – we kneaded the dough, rolled it out with a rolling pin, and cut it by hand, which was interesting and fun.

Fresh tagliatelle © LKL

Before arriving in Toffia, I’d been under the impression that I would be with a group of students. I knew we wouldn’t be staying in the same place, but I thought there would be others in the village. This turned out not to be the case. I was the only student for the week, but there were some day trippers. Two students came one day, and four came another. They all took the train from Rome, spent the day with us cooking and visiting the area, and then left in the late afternoon.

I was happy to be with some other students, but on the day when there were 5 of us, it was too many. The kitchen was plenty big, but the recipes just weren’t complicated enough for 5 students plus the teacher. We basically took turns performing various tasks, which was boring. As at Organic Tuscany, I understand that the schools are trying to maximize their profit margin, but it comes at the expense of a truly rewarding cooking class where the student is actually cooking as opposed to doing prep work, or watching others cook.
 

Olivone, the largest olive tree in Europe (Canneto, Italy) © LKL

Local visits and tours

The villages we visited were lovely, but the weather was uncooperative. We got rained out twice, and once that happened, there was no option but to return “home” – there were no indoor activities. The tour of Rome was interesting but quite short – a couple of hours in a less touristed part of Rome.
 

Expectations vs Reality

Convivio Rome was part two of my three-part Italian cooking experience, and after my week of fantastic food in Organic Tuscany, my expectations were very high. While Convivio Rome’s food was good and the teacher, Guido, was very nice, the recipes weren’t all that amazing. I was also disappointed in the lack of other students, as the village was very small and once classes and any visits were over, there was literally nothing to do but go back to my cottage and read. I know that some people would love having a week free from any obligation, but I had so much free time that I was bored: at least 2 hours in the morning, since breakfast wasn’t until 10, and then after lunch when there was a visit or some other activity, it lasted a couple of hours (if it wasn’t raining), and then it was back to the cottage again – there was just too much time. I read four novels, which I just don’t need to travel to a remote village in Italy to do. In the end, I was bored and lonely, and when my husband came down the last night to see the village, he had to pay €60 to stay in the cottage with me, a fee that I found astonishing, plus €30 for the wine tasting dinner, which also seemed high.

In the end, even though Convivio Rome’s program was considerably cheaper than Organic Tuscany, I think the latter was a better value. There was an additional cooking class, an additional night’s lodging, more lunches/dinners, better food, and more tours/visits, not to mention the comraderie of being with a group of people.

On the other hand, I can see that for daytrippers, Convivio Rome could be really fun, because during the 7 hours or so they are in Toffia, something is happening pretty much the entire time.

Overall score: 6/10

• 7 nights accommodation in a 19th-century villa
• 4 cooking sessions (2-3 hours each) followed by meals
• 5 additional meals
• Baskets of breakfast items to be shared among the group
• Guided walking tours of Florence and Siena
• Visits to two local farms and a potter
• Olive oil tasting session
• Wine tasting session
• Apron
• Recipe e-book (after departure)

Participants are required to rent a car to get to the offsite visits, so that is another charge to keep in mind. The director helps arrange car sharing.
 

Accommodations

Pool and countryside © LKL

The villa, on a 340-acre organic olive and grape farm with a lovely pool and spectacular views, was more or less what I expected – not incredible, not shabby. Others in my group had much higher expections – at least one was annoyed that we didn’t have maid service. I found this particularly bizarre, as Organic Tuscany was one of the cheapest programs I found during months of research, so I never expected anything like that. There are programs that cost up to €5,000, and I imagine that the high end includes 5-star accommodations with luxury services and much more. For a fraction of that, I felt I got what I paid for.

However, I was surprised by the fact that the villa is only one housing unit among many on the property. I, along with most of the other cooking participants, had been under the impression that we would be the only guests on the farm, but in fact there were at least a dozen other people spread around in various apartments and guest rooms. The website doesn’t actually say that the cooking program is the only thing going on, but it certainly doesn’t spell out just how many other guests there will be.

One other surprise: the director told me via email I’d almost certainly have a bathroom to myself, or else at most I’d have to share with one other female. In fact, there were three of us sharing a bathroom. In addition, the size of the rooms varied tremendously – mine was barely large enough for the king-size bed and an armoire, while another room was twice as big. As far as I know, we all paid the same fee, so this didn’t seem quite fair.
 

Kitchen and equipment

The kitchen was large, with ample counter space. There were plenty of nice wooden cutting boards (many with a lip on one end so that they would “lock” onto the edge counter and not move around), all sizes of mixing bowls, pots and pans… everything we needed. The big oven/stove was apparently a bit fussy, but we students didn’t do much with it; we stayed mainly at the countertop burners while the teachers dealt with the oven. The dishwashing corner was manned by a third staff member, which allowed us to concentrate on cooking rather than cleaning.
 

Classes and food

The food was excellent – some of the best I’ve ever eaten, much less cooked, including a simple but delicious eggplant parmigiana, three kids of risotto, various crostini, soups, salads, and traditional desserts. The two teachers* were terrific: extremely friendly and knowledgeable. But I was bothered by a couple of things in the classes.

Hard at work © LKL

First of all, the website promises no more than 8 students, to allow each student a “chance to try their hand at every technique.” We had 9, but even 8 would have been too many. While the kitchen is very large, we were making so many different dishes at once that I was never able to be involved in more than 2 or 3 during any given session, and even then I felt more like an underling being assigned tasks (cut these onions, peel those potatoes, keep an eye on that sauce) than a participant in a teaching situation. Out of the 20 or so dishes we made over the course of the week, the nine of us all took part in only two: fresh pasta and gnocchi. Everything else was divided up – three students worked on the dessert, two did this, two others did that, all at the same time. And I don’t think I worked on a single dish from start to finish. In my opinion, 6 students would have made for a far better experience. Indeed, on the page of the site that talks about one-day classes, the participants are limited to 6, and that is what I was expecting, not realizing that one-day classes and the classes in the week-long program had different descriptions.

Secondly, and this is somewhat related to the first point, the director of the program refuses to allow students to have the recipes before or even during the class, because, as I understand it, she feels we’d be paying attention to them rather than to the teacher. I disagree with this for many reasons, but the most important are (1) if I’d had the recipes, I’d have had a better idea of what was going on around me while doing all of those piecemeal tasks, and (2) if the student wants the recipe, the student should get the recipe. People have different learning styles, and perhaps the director’s works well without recipes, but my learning style is visual, and seeing the recipe would have helped cement what we were doing in my mind. In addition, it would have been helpful to be able to jot notes about variations between what the recipes say and what we did during the class. Now that I have the recipes, I’ve noticed some discrepancies, but can’t always remember what we actually did.
 

Breakfast

The website says there are “shared baskets of organic breakfast goodies (bread, milk, juice, tea, coffee, fruit, honey, biscuits, oats, yogurt etc)” which, while not explicit, sounded to me like there would be enough for breakfast for the week. This was not the case – once we ran out after a few days, we had to buy groceries for the rest of the week.
 

Walking tours, Local visits, Tasting sessions

The other Organic Tuscany staff, including the guides for the two walking tours, were excellent. I really enjoyed the tours and the visits to the potter’s studio and the local farms, particularly the biodynamic farm Poggio Antico, whose cheeses were simply wonderful. The olive oil and wine tasting sessions were led by one of the sweetest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. She was truly delightful, and I wish we could have done more with her.
 

Expectations vs Reality

Teacher/Chef Tina with torta di mele (apple cake) © LKL

Organic Tuscany was part one of my three-part Italian cooking experience, and the most important thing for me was the food. In that, my expections were exceeded. I felt that the food we cooked as well as nearly all the food at other meals was truly spectacular.** I was also more than happy with the teachers and other staff, walking tours, and local visits. Additionally, while I knew that the farm and all the food would be organic, upon arriving I was happily surprised to learn that virtually all waste is either composted or recycled. As a strong believer in the inter-connectedness of vegetarianism, organics, and environmentalism, I particularly appreciated this conscientiousness.

Things that failed to meet my expectations were breakfast, the number of students, the lack of recipes until after the end of the program, and the shared bathroom. And I’m disappointed that our Organic Tuscany aprons aren’t organic, as cotton is one of the most heavily pesticided crops on the planet, requiring nearly 25% of all the insecticides used in the world. (Source: Pesticide Action Network)

Overall score: 9/10
 

*The cooking teachers, Tina and Manuela, also offer day classes at their own cooking school: Authentic Tuscany

**In the interests of fairness, I’ll share this: some students felt that there was too much salt and/or too much garlic. And several complained that there was too much food, period – a complaint which I found particularly bizarre as there is an easy solution. I can see complaining about bad food, or not enough food – those are things you can’t do anything about. But too much food? Don’t eat it.

Program 1: Organic Tuscany (Certaldo)
Program 2: Convivio Rome (Toffia)
Program 3: Apicius Culinary Institute (Florence)