Orecchiette are shaped with a knife, not a mould. The dough is dragged across a wooden board with a blunt blade, flipped over the thumb, and left to dry in the shape of a small ear. No machine in Puglia has replaced the gesture.
Polignano a Mare sits on a limestone shelf sixty metres above the Adriatic, thirty-four kilometres south of Bari. Its old town is built over sea caves, and the Roman Via Traiana once crossed the ravine here on a bridge still standing at the edge of the centro storico. The regional kitchen developed in the same conditions that shaped the town: little rain, thin soil, hard durum wheat. Semola di grano duro rimacinata and water — no egg, no butter — produced a pasta that could be dried, stored, and carried. Cucina povera is the standard term for this economy of scarcity, and it explains almost everything on a Pugliese table. A polignano a mare pasta making cooking class with drink is, in practice, an hour spent inside that logic.
What is taught here is regional rather than national. Orecchiette, cavatelli, strascinati and, in some kitchens, hand-stretched focaccia barese with its cherry tomatoes and Cellina olives. Each shape corresponds to a sauce: cima di rapa for orecchiette, ragù for cavatelli, tomato and cacioricotta for strascinati. The pairing is not decorative. The rough, unpolished surface left by hand-rolling holds sauce in a way extruded pasta does not — the reason bronze dies are still prized commercially.
The drink element is equally regional. Puglia produces more wine by volume than any other Italian region: Primitivo from Manduria, Negroamaro from the Salento, the pale rosati of the Murgia. Limoncello, though Campanian by origin, is poured at the close of a meal across the south. Several polignano a mare pasta making cooking class with drink tours conclude with exactly that sequence — table wine through the meal, a chilled digestivo after.
The town itself has become a food destination in the last two decades, drawing visitors who arrive for the cliffs of Lama Monachile and stay for the kitchens. Home cooks, agriturismi and small studios now teach what was once transmitted only between generations. Booking a polignano a mare pasta making cooking class with drink ticket places a traveller briefly inside a domestic tradition that predates the town's tourism entirely — and outlasts it.
2 hr
