Tuesday was more or less a recovery day/sightseeing day. The girls worked out a bit in the morning while Dave just stayed home (who made the right choice?). We had breakfast scheduled for 9 am with the B&B and it was nothing fancy, just a continental breakfast, which Europeans love, but Dave hates (he wants the full omelet and bacon, etc. — you know, an American breakfast… in Europe). We spent a majority of the day toggling between walking around the tiny (hilly) town of Alberobello, and going back to the Airbnb, to get out of the heat.
The trulli, or cute brick coned buildings in Alberobello, were extremely beautiful and you can definitely see the Arabic influence here. The entire town was made of them and Dave heard somewhere that the roofs were made of these bricks they could easily disassemble to avoid taxes since they weren’t really houses, because “there were no roofs.”
Around 2 pm we wanted to enjoy a drink along the main street (a “spritz” as Anna would say). We found a place that wasn’t busy; Dave and Anna ordered Aperol Spritz and Tsana ordered a Lemon Soda, but after waiting more than 15 minutes for our two-ingredient drinks we realized why not a lot of people were there - the server came once and never came again! We bailed, and walked a few blocks away to find a better restaurant where we had Caprese and got our longed-for drinks. It was a very relaxing day and afternoon.
Around 3:30 we got our bikes out of the trulli “garage” (aka a little storage unit used to house the owner of our B&B’s trinkets she sells) to bike the 10 minutes over to our cooking class.
Side note: the man who helped us with our bikes every time was Mimo and he was fantastic. Outside of the “reception” area (which was really a store that sold dish towels), he had a plastic chair, with his name labeled on it, like the celebrity he is, and he drives a red Vespa to and fro every day. And once in a while, he opens the storage area for people to put their bikes. The man has it made!
Back to the pasta class… We, of course, had to bike uphill to get there, but we made it! The cooking class was in a little resort outside of town, and was in a beautiful outdoor kitchen open to wind and bird sounds. It also had a pool and with the 85 degree weather, we definitely waded in as far as we could without getting everything wet - it was lovely.
The class got off to a rough start since our instructor was also in charge of checking people in (running in and out of our lesson to help others), but after 2 parties checked in, we got rolling making focaccia dough and orecchiette dough. The focaccia dough rose very fast, and we made 2 types, a local Alberobello type with raisins, black olives, tomatoes (of course), and onions that cooked upside down, like a pineapple upside down cake, and then another with oregano, tomatoes, and salt, which you cooked the good old fashioned way.
After we prepared the bread and stuck that in the oven we got down to making the orecchiette, which is the main pasta shape of the region (among two others). It took us a bit to get it down, which involved cutting off a chunk of dough and then using a knife to smear it against the table and then flipping it inside out over your thumb to create a little ear. We made around 40-50 each, over the course of like 30 minutes, much slower than the teacher’s Nonna, who can do 60 a minute!!
Once we finished making the pasta, the teacher opened up 2 bottles of wine and sent us off to explore/sit by the pool, so she could prepare everything else. Dave and Anna sipped some rosé and white wine and Tsana drank some apricot juice.
20 minutes later we were sitting down to one of the most epic meals of our lives. The orecchiette was served with a simple tomato sauce and then we had the 2 types of focaccia served with a huge bowl of stracciatella, the inside part of burrata, and mozzarella as well as a softer cheese (which we forgot the name), oh my goodness it was delicious.
After completely stuffing ourselves, we biked home, downhill this time which was quite enjoyable (especially as Dave and Anna already had a few glasses of wine in them), and sat up on our roof deck to finish off the wine from dinner (yes, we asked for the bottle “to go” - don’t judge). After 30 minutes up there we realized a major mistake we made today… We haven’t had gelato yet! So around 8:30 we headed out to keep our streak going to a place the pasta woman recommended.
After eating way more food than we all should have we came back home and headed to bed, all carbed up and ready for our ride to Ostuni tomorrow (28 miles…).