Cooking in Italy How to Bake in Florence by Student Mia Bonet
A selection of pastries from La Loggia, our favorite cafe. Photo by Mia Bonet
It’s nearing Christmas, Florence is becoming colder and lights are being strung up between buildings. It feels more like a winter wonderland than anything back home in Florida - where Christmas decorations are often no more than a sunburnt shirtless Santa on the beach. The thing I missed most from home was my mom’s soft gingerbread. It’s sweet and has a kick of spice. The entire month of December (and I’ll admit sometimes late November…) our house is filled with the smell of nutmeg and brown sugar. I knew what I had to do to cure my homesickness.
Baking in Florence is hard for Americans. It’s difficult to find ingredients because of the differences in cooking styles, not to mention the language barrier. For example, you have to know Italian to read what’s in the sausage you’re buying, which white cheese on the rack is cheddar, or if the brown spice you picked is allspice or nutmeg. Another issue is not having as much knowledge as the locals. I didn’t know about the Mercato Centrale, (Florence’s central market where you can find all kinds of fresh ingredients), until halfway through my first semester. You could always go to Vivi Market, a foreign foods store, to get your American cake mix fix, but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it. For me, I was missing one ingredient: molasses. I learned how to ask for it at stores and quickly realized it wasn’t carried here. I asked my teachers if it was even a thing here and they just confirmed my suspicions. There is no molasses in mainstream stores in Italy (if only I had known about Natura Sì, a health food store in Via Masaccio, where they do sell molasses!). I decided to make it myself from a guide online. It was the key ingredient for the soft and sweet cookies I wanted so badly. Sadly, it ended up being more of a burnt caramel. I still tried to work it into my dough but it quickly turned into a hot ball of sugar with a greasy butter coating - I couldn’t even stir it. Me and my friends started laughing, this is how a lot of our baking went. Cinnamon rolls would fall apart in the oven, crepes I’ve made a thousand times would suddenly feel like rubber, the snickerdoodle dough would taste great and then we would coat it and realize that in Italy cinnamon tastes like sand because it is usually sold unsweetened! The list goes on. We decided to make chocolate chip cookies instead, and grabbed stracciatella gelato from Vivoli downstairs. Not everything will turn out your way, especially not while in Italy - and you always have to be prepared with an equally as sweet Plan B.
More Than Just Ramen by Student Jordyn John
When you tell someone that you’re living in Italy, the first thing they’ll probably ask about is the food. The reason why is obvious: Italian food is absolutely delicious. What many people forget, though, is that I’m in Italy for college. Before anything else, I am a college student―and everyone knows how college students eat. We like our food fast, cheap, and easy, which created some interesting dishes when combined with authentic Italian food. I love going to the Mercato Centrale on weekends and buying fresh pasta, fruits, and vegetables. I lay out all of the ingredients on my tiny kitchen table and get inventing. Lemon blueberry ricotta cake, cherry babka, and rosemary focaccia are just a few things I whipped up over the course of my time in Italy. Of course, this isn’t to say that my roommates and I don’t enjoy our fair share of ramen. We even found ways to elevate the cheap noodles with our own eggs, meats, and spices. If there’s one thing that living in Italy taught me, it’s that food is an art and its possibilities are limited only by your own creativity. Although I had a thousand “limitations” placed on me (such as unfamiliarity and scarcity of ingredients), Italy made me grow as a cook in the long run. Now that I’m back in America, I’m constantly using what I learned in Italy to cook and bake here!
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