Day 17

Today was a good day in a lot of ways...it completely sucked in some. We got up early today to make our second group trip out of the city. Today's destination was Perugia about an hour North of Orvieto. It is still in the Umbria region. Our group is going to be attending chocolate school at the Perugina Chocolate factory. We left from the restaurant at 7, but we stopped a few places so we didn't make it to the factory till around 10. The company itself appears to have corporate connections to nestle and to Calebaut, which we use at school. The school they run there is for anyone, its open to tourists to come through and run through a chocolate demo. So some of the stuff we did a lot of us were already familiar with. It was a lot of fun though. We all got aprons with the school of chocolate logo on them to take home. We started out by melting some white chocolate with some cream in a pan. They had a great set up for the purpose of these classes. We had many individual stations with drawers underneath with all the equipment and then on top there was about 5 feet of counter space per station and 2 induction burners. Most of us had a station all to ourselves. I ended up just sharing a space with a friend of mine and we split the duties. Once the white chocolate was melted we added some limoncello, which for those that don't know is a lemon liqueor that is popular here. Even at the restaurant, Carlo makes his own every year. It is very easy to make, but takes practice to get it just right. So the white chocolate-limoncello would be our filling for our chocolates. The school already had a pot of melted chocolate all ready for us on one of the burners, but first we would have to lower the temperature to around 90 degrees, or 32 degrees celcius. This is to temper the chocolate so it works better for chocolates. Once it was at the right temperature, we poured it into plastic molds with rose shapes. When they were filled we turned it over and let the chocolate pour out of the molds. This is a cool trick I have seen before, because not all of the chocolate drips out, leaving you a perfect shell shaped to the molds inside. The molds went into the fridge while we worked quickly on another chocolate which was just simply mixing some of the tempered chocolate with some cereal to make decorative chocolates for garnishes. Soon after that, our molds were ready so we piped the white chocolate filling into them and then covered the molds in the chocolate again and smoothed the top off to give ourselves the bottoms to our shells. They went off to the fridge briefly again and then we got them out and just tapped them out of the molds for rose shaped chocolates. We all got display bags to put them in to take home. I still haven't even tried them, I'll save them for later. For completing the course we all got certificates that of course none of us can read, but they are nice. We got to walk through the factory after that on a catwalk that went through the top of the factory in a circle so we could see some of what was going on. There were ton's of Willy Wonka references, that's for sure. We made a stop at the giftshop afterwards and then it was back on the bus for our next destination, lunch. We ate at a small restaurant that I am not sure how the Chef ever found. It was all great though. Everything was handmade including 30 portions of spaghetti for our group. They also made some fried rissotto croquettes with a bit of lemon zest in them that were awesome. The main course though was some grilled pork chops and ribs. Anything off the grill to our group was very welcome because its something we have all been missing. It was a great lunch. We left there and made a short trip to a local winery next which is one of the largest producers in Italy and they export to the US a lot. We met a guy from New York that was there on business for a wine company. We have been to so many wineries though its the same thing, just on a grander scale. However the coolest thing was a room they have in a deep large cellar where they have almost no lights on to protect the wine. They have a special environmentally controlled room that we weren't even able to go into. There they housed over the many years some of their most perfect vintages. If they find they have a good year, they will reserve 1000 bottles or so and put them there for future tastings. Then if they have special events they can have wine tastings and comparisons, perhaps just to compare a 2009 to a 1975. They had bottles going back as far as 1962, but there weren't many of those left. Next stop was a wine tasting to sample some of the wines produced at that vineyard. I couldn't really enjoy it though because of my cold though, my throat was hurting so bad today I couldn't even swallow water without a ton of pain. After the tasting we went to a wine and olive oil museum which was very interesting. The museum used to be a private collection of a wealthy family, but they opened it up the public and it is quite extensive. It had everything from tools to cultivate the grapes, harvest, crush, produce wine and grappa, even tons of artwork, pitchers and some very cool wine glasses. We finished up there just in time for our dinner reservation. Tonight we were dining at a very expensive 5 star restaurant. We all felt awkward walking in there because none of us were dressed for it, but Chef Polegri didn't seem worried about it. The restaurant was in a fancy spa and hotel, one of the very few spas for hundreds of miles from what we were told. They have an odd chocolate package where you can have a hot tub full of melted chocolate to relax in or chocolate showers....like I said, weird. Dinner was great, the service was excellent. We had 3 waiters serving us and you could tell that their training was extensive. They served us 4 courses. The first was prosciutto with a bread salad, second was a rissotto prepared with red wine and cheese which was excellent, the main course was a roasted guinea hen with stuffed tomatoes and eggplant, the guinea hen was ridiculously tender and delicious. For dessert was a semifredo with a presentation that was extremely well thought out and beautiful, ill post pictures soon. The only problem of the night is that some us were embarrassed by some of our groups behavior. There was maybe a little too much wine had during the tasting and at lunch, so their talking got a little loud and inappropriate for a 5 star restaurant. I can only hope that the waiters didn't understand them. We left there around 9:30 pm and got on the bus to head back home. There was even more wine drinking on the bus which got loud and sucked cause I was feeling terrible and just wanted to sleep. The group made it home though. I went straight home, took some strong medicine and went to sleep, it was a very long day.