Learning – Page 2 – food by sole

26th May 2022

I finished the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines!

Six different bottles of red wine, labelled with numbers one to six, for a tasting

If you were wondering where have I been and why have things been so quiet lately: it’s been because I was fully committed to the cause of studying for this course.

There’s no other way around this: either you go full-on or you just can’t retain the information 😬

I actually had the exam last Saturday but I have spent the week decompressing.

I still don’t know if I have passed the exam or not—they take a few weeks to come back with the results. So who knows if I will have to go back and re-study everything! 😆🤪

It’s very liberating to just BE DONE with it, but it is also very strange to not be thinking of what lessons I should be studying at every single moment of the day, including while you’re sleeping—I had not dreamed about wine before, but I have had a lot of weird dreams about wines and grapes and production methods during the last months! It sure shows how intense it is.

In the meantime: was it worth it?

7th April 20228th April 2022

Unconventional wines

Six glasses of different red wines, for a tasting

I had the chance to taste a lot of wines last week. And I mean a lot!

9th March 202216th March 2022

A visit to Requena

We visited Requena last month. Why not? It’s good to do something different and get out of our Russafa capsule!

Plus it has something that we’re deeply interested in: wines, and we got to try the new high speed train line from Valencia—or, new to us at least, as it’s been running for a while now. Double bonus!

2nd February 2022

First attempt at making Altamura bread: I made a rock

As I mentioned, I have a stash of Italian flours at home and I’m attempting to make breads in different Italian styles. There’s more than pizza, ciabatta and focaccia!

My first attempt was to make a bread in the style of the pane di Altamura. But I was too impatient and didn’t wait until my semi-dormant starter was sufficiently lively again, so I made a nice looking rustic rock. It smells amazing, but it didn’t rise a lot, so it’s quite compact inside (it can be eaten in thin slices, haha!)

A look inside the Altamura bread: it is too dense

That said I got to practice handling the dough and folding it, so there will be less new concepts to learn at once the next time I attempt making this.

25th January 2022

Fermentation: it’s everywhere

I was reading about how wine is produced and it struck me that fermentation is involved in many products I enjoy.

Note: this will probably not be a TOTALLY SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE article, because my engineering degree is in Computer Science and I did not study much Biology (but I did study Chemistry!). Regardless, I wanted to share the patterns I’ve noticed, because I found them so interesting!