About Us

Our mission is to offer you the cooking vacation of a lifetime

A Cooking School in Italy That Go Beyond the Expected

 

__________________________________________________________________________________

Our Story

Welcome to Mama Isa's Cooking School!

Our Mission is to serve as a reference and basis for those who wished to learn the high art of Italian Cooking.

The love and real passion of Italian Regional Cuisine are what drove chef Isa to start her homey little cooking school.

 

It all started with our passion for cooking when chef Isa was a little girl

She has enjoyed cooking, pasta, bread, and pizza making, for her family since she was 8 years old.

She was born in Venice and was educated at Ca' Foscari University where she gained her B.A. with laude and a degree and a master in History.

For many years she worked as historian and researcher. Her mother and her grandmother "nonna" have influenced her greatly, they were her greatest teachers.

 

Mama Isa is a chef, a cooking Class teacher, a food historian, and a "sfoglina" a pasta specialist

 

Italy is the home of fresh egg pasta, which we call "sfoglia" (pronounced ‘sfo-lee-ah’). You need lots of patience and practice!

"Sfoglina" is a woman (or if a man "sfoglino") who have mastered this old way and tradition - a unique specialization - where special skills are passed down from one generation to the next.

The "sfoglina" or "sfoglino" is a maker of fresh pasta sheets by hand with a large wooden board and a very long rolling pin, called in Italy 'mattarello'.

Making fresh pasta by hand requires carefully chosen pasta tools, equipments, and particular ingredients.

Not a bamboo board but a special wooden board (Chef Isa loves beech tree pasta board).

But rolling the pasta dough is a special key. The super porous wooden board helps control the moisture of the dough.

Every pasta needs a different flour quality and a different type: because every flour has different grind and protein content.

 

Isa's Family and Friends over the years have tried to convince Isa to open a cooking school for people coming to Italy. Finally her passions of the culinary arts arrived also for the public. Opens the “cooking classes” with the goal to teach the fantastic Regional Italian Food to her clients.

She is teaching old recipes - inspired by seasonality and tradition - to people coming from all over the world to cook authentic Italian food.

And of course chef Isa is not only a Chef, a Food Historian, and a Teacher but a sfoglina.

She is the only-one sfoglina in Veneto! With chef Isa you can learn the art of making pasta from scratch in Italy.

 

“Food is a living tradition!” Chef Isa says.

She is an accomplished home cook and a traditional food chef. Check   Mama Isa's Food Blog "Buon Appetito" (one of the best food blogs about the Italian Cooking)

 

“Simplicity is the final achievement”

Being a cooking class teacher means working a lot!

She often revisits her family memories.

That's the key to success!

Her inspiration comes from family, history, and passion. That's all!

 

 

 

 

 

“What I loved the most was helping my mother make potato gnocchi and shaped them with a traditional Parmigiano grater,” Chef Isa says. “It was very hypnotizing to watch her make the potato gnocchi dough, cut them, and shape the gnocchi. Her movements were very precise that it looked like she was dancing, gnocchi dancing, simply incredible..”

 

Our interests are on the history of food, on the traditional Italian Regional Cuisine, based on local and fresh products, farm to table. Chef Isa loves cooking with local cheeses, cereals, fresh vegetables, meat, fresh shellfish and fresh fish wild-caught. As historian, she believes that the traditional Italian Regional Cuisine is a manifestation of Intangible Cultural Heritage. 

 

 

 

Isa is determined to teach her guests basic cooking skills. She has the ability to teach guests and the ability to effectively demonstrate the science and the art of Italian Regional Cooking.

 

 

 

“My duty is to transmit to the next generation everything I have learned and experienced,” Chef Isa says. “Teaching a cooking class is a great way to share my culinary expertise, in the spirit of sharing and hospitality! It's important to me that my guests leave my cooking classes feeling satisfied on several different levels: sight, smell, taste. I strive to wow and impress my guests at each opportunity. One of the greatest feelings for me is to see their expressions when they take a bite of what we have prepared during the cooking class.”

Chef Isa loves this famous quote: “This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!” - Julia Child.

It's so true! She repeats this quote at her cooking classes, of course!!!!

 

 

 

 

Our Philosophy and Approach

Italian food and cooking is among the most palate - pleasing culinary traditions of the world.

Not only the Italian Food is restorative for the soul but "buono" good for you!

For millennia the Italians have fought poverty and hunger, creating many different types of dishes only with many different types of grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits.

It is now clear that the Italian diet is one of the best diets in the world, with very low rates of heart diseases and long life expectancies.

Our cooking school follows this model and the Italian Diet with its Food Pyramid is essential.

We dislike the the industrial and mass produced food and we promote the excellence: "authentic" or "typical" ingredients, and only artisanal and traditional products.

We will help you to discover this incredible food tradition.

We promote the Italian International Organization "Slow Food" that launches local initiatives to sustain the high quality production at risk of extinction, recovering traditional processing methods.

We will explore different fields, traditions, recipes, techiniqeus, cooking styles. We will teach you why is important the diverse culinary mosaic in our country and why we have a deep attachment about our local culinary identity.

During our cooking classes you never risk getting bored.

And, last but not the least, The New York Times, Fodor's, Fox News (and more ) named us one of the 10 top cooking classes in Italy.

 

 

Why Is Home Cooking So Important?

• Cooking is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your diet;

• Homecooked food is the best way to be sure of what you are eating;

• If you choose the ingredients (fresh veggies, fresh fruits, meat or fish from the farm market), the quality of the food will be much better;

• Home cooking links you to nature, it links you to your bodies;

• As Michael Pollan said - on the benefits of homecooking on “The Boston Globe”: “Cooking gave us the meal and the meal gave us civilization”.

 

 

 

Keeping Family Traditions Alive

Chef Isa says:

• “My mother and my grandmother are classic Italian Regional Cooks, without ever worked in a restaurant ot having gone to a cooking school”.

• “Cooking, pasta making, pizza making, bread making from scratch and great food were a part of their life”.

• “They were always making fresh homemade pasta, canning tomatoes, making homemade Italian bread or real pizza from scratch, and making delicious desserts or the famous family recipes for gelatos”.

• “I always had to help with everything that happened in the family kitchen”.

• “So I learned so much from "mamma Paola" and "nonna Elisa". But i wanted to get as far away from to be a chef or a cook as I could, so I went to University to be a historian”.

• “But their legacy of food, recipes and cooking passed down to me”.

• “Only many years later I was surprised to find that I really enjoyed - not only cooking or making bread and pasta from scratch - but sharing with other people and teaching the art of cooking”.

• “My family recipes are a way of keeping my ancestry alive, as well as a part of myself. I am teaching not only recipes but keeping cooking flavors, home traditions, and cooking memories alive”.

• “Family recipes are the nursery of my traditional cooking”.

 

 

 

 

IN GRATITUDE

Without the support and help of Mama Isa's family, this dream would never have come true.

Chef Isa says: “Their encouragement is so important to me. I would like to express my gratitude to my lovely beloved parents: their guidance and love are always with me. My dad once said to me - 'I will support you as far as you want'. These words are in my heart everyday. My parents are my life role models. I will never forget their perseverance, and their love.”