Making Pasta, and Making Friends
What happens when one of our associate editors takes a pasta class taught by our creative director?
PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA
“This is great granny bonding,” Marianne Hoover says as she and a dozen other retirees hand-press orecchiette during a mid-day pasta-making class at La Roche University in McCandless.
The bite-sized morsels are colloquially known as “priest’s ears” for their concave shape. “Nun’s ears” would be a more fitting nickname given that the lesson is taking place at the Sister Candace Introcaso Center for Lifelong Learning. The university was founded in 1963 by the Sisters of Divine Providence. Introcaso, La Roche’s seventh president, spent the last years of her life researching intergenerational campus communities. Her namesake center was established in 2021, giving people of all ages a chance to learn something new in a variety of workshops and classes.
Topics range from astronomy, storytelling and podcast creation to knitting, Spanish wines and water aerobics. You can even take a deep dive into Billy Joel lyrics and The Cold War.
Huck Beard, Pittsburgh Magazine’s longtime creative director, moonlights as a sfoglino, a fancy word for pasta maker. He invited me to sit in on The Story of Pasta: From Hearth to Feast, a four-part beginner series that covers essential doughs, hand-shaped pastas, filled delicacies and baked dishes.
As a carbohydrate-lovin’ Italian, I jumped at the chance to once again use my noodle on a college campus. Since I’m also a calamity in the kitchen, I dropped my dough ball on the floor.
Luckily, Beard’s teaching style isn’t all fire and brimstone. The Florida native has been teaching for five years. He encourages his students (and clumsy co-workers) with a kindness that’s amplified by the Southern lilt in his voice.
With a $60 materials fee from each student, he provides all of the ingredients, good vibes and kitchen gadgets that make pasta-making a fun and therapeutic activity. My fellow foodies and I spent the afternoon playing with extruders, gnocchi boards, ravioli molds, bench scrapers and brass pasta wheels all while chatting up a storm.
“Huck’s a great teacher when he can get a word in,” attendee Chris Hollinger says with a laugh. “It’s been an absolute joy.”
The Gibsonia resident plans to take courses in watercolor painting and Italian films during the next term, but, on this day, she’s learning the proper way to knead dough.
A pound makes enough pasta to serve up to four people — or just me. Maybe my next Lifelong Learning experience should be a fitness class.
