Discover the Best Italian Cooking Classes in Los Angeles
Whether your Italian heritage, taste for Neapolitan pizza, or desire for a culinary career drives your passion for Italian cooking, your learning journey promises to take you beyond familiarity with a few dishes. From chicken Milanese to pesto alla Genovese, the iconic cuisine interweaves Italy’s geography, history, language, and traditions into mouth-watering meals as loaded with meaning as they are with nutrition.
Learning Italian cooking at a high level involves the study of recipes and their cultural significance, as well as mastering many techniques unique to the cuisine. Pasta making, mozzarella making, and the precise timing of an al dente noodle are just a few skills you will master. Luckily for you, Italian cooking has a reputation for being so much fun, many classes double as social events featuring sit-down dinners and wine.
Why You Should Learn Italian Cooking in Los Angeles
As a city renowned for its Italian heritage and discerning palate for gourmet cuisine, Los Angeles is an ideal setting to learn how to cook Italian food. You may be among the 310,000 Italian-Americans living in LA and want to learn Italian cooking to connect with your heritage. Or you may be an Angeleno who has developed a taste for Italian food through regular trips to Little Italy or annual visits to Taste of Italy and other Italian food festivals in the area.
You can learn to cook mouth-watering pastas at home to cut down on your restaurant spending, or your mastery of sauces may be helpful in your career as a professional chef in one of the fine dining institutions of LA. Either way, you’ll find Los Angeles one of the most convenient cities to learn Italian cooking, thanks to the ease of finding tomatoes and basil in LA’s more than fifty farmers’ markets. Meanwhile, harder-to-find ingredients are easy to locate at one of the city's many Italian grocery stores and specialty markets.
In-Person Italian Cooking Classes in Los Angeles
Los Angeles is overflowing with opportunities to learn Italian cooking in-person. Culinary arts schools, college community education departments, and Italian heritage centers are just a few places you can find classes to build your skills while making friends with like-minded classmates.
Conveniently located near UCLA, Chef Eric’s Culinary Classroom features a diverse schedule of recreational classes and programming for professional chefs. Italian Cuisine is an Italian cooking class for beginners suitable for ages 15 and up. Chef Eric will guide you in making torta salata, fresh pasta all’Amatriciana, homemade fettuccine with carbonara sauce, and chicken cacciatore.
And for more experience in Chef Eric’s kitchen, you can’t go wrong with Homemade Pastas and Sauces, where you will learn all about various types of pastas and sauces and how to make them from scratch. The menu includes red wine sausage ragu tagliatelle, herb garlic turkey medallion linguine, wild mushroom ricotta ravioli, marinara angel hair, garlic mushroom bowties, and homemade ricotta cheese.
CocuSocial is a community of professional chefs that offers a wide range of social cooking, baking, and wine-tasting events. CocuSocial partners with local restaurants and hotels to ensure accessibility and a delightful experience for all customers. CocuSocial’s Classic Handmade Pasta is a 21-and-up class thanks to the opportunity to purchase drinks in the Beverly Hills venue. Chef Adrianna welcomes you to learn how to make linguini and classic marinara from scratch with recipes you’ll easily be able to recreate at home.
VPN Americas is the American branch of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN), an international non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and defending true Neapolitan pizza. Their Inglewood location is the perfect place to master the art of authentic Neapolitan pizza, from sourcing the freshest ingredient to the precision and tradition behind every step of assembling and baking the savory pie.
If you want to open your own Neapolitan pizzeria, VPN Americas’ Professional Pizza Course is the place to start. The course includes five days of classes divided into four sections: the theoretical period, the workshop period, a tour of a cheese-making factory, and examinations. You will leave the course knowing virtually all there is to know about Neapolitan pizza, from its history to its vital toppings to every technique you need to prepare and bake your pizzas.
Fondazione Italia’s mission is to promote Italian language and culture education in Southern California. While their primary focus is supporting Italian language education for children as well as adults, they are also known for their Italian book and cinema clubs, children’s Italy-themed camps, and, of course, Italian cooking classes.
Easy Italian Cooking is a beginner’s class hosted in their Burbank home on North 5th Street. Anyone age 16 and up is welcome to join this workshop, where you will learn to make Italian antipasti, pizza, focaccia, tiramisu, and gnocchi while learning to speak Italian at the same time.
Since 1946, Mt. San Antonio College has provided high-quality educational opportunities at affordable prices from its campus in Walnut, California. Their Community and Personal Enrichment Education department invites their LA neighbors to fee-based classes in various life-enriching topics.
The Mt. San Antonio course Authentic Southern Italy Pasta Recipes will teach you how to create nourishing home-cooked pasta with Mediterranean pantry staples. Chef Vincenzo Croce designed the class with busy people on a budget in mind, as all the recipes are fast and affordable. In addition to building your kitchen skills and recipe repertoire, you’ll also learn the cultural significance of the dishes you create. Chef Vincenzo will collect a $30 materials fee on the first day of class.
Virtual Italian Cooking Classes
When you want the perks of a live teacher but don’t have the time for a commute, virtual Italian cooking classes could be the best option for you. In an online class, you join a community of classmates just as you would in an in-person class, but each participates from the comfort of their home. One potential drawback to online Italian cooking classes is the need to provide your own supplies and ingredients, but you are likely to already have many of the kitchen supplies in your home.
Living in LA doesn’t have to prevent you from taking advantage of Home Cooking New York’s class on creating your own Northern Italian Dinner. The menu features pan-roasted lemon-rosemary chicken, creamy polenta Parmigiano, and garlicky roasted broccoli rabe. Your shopping list includes ingredients for four servings, but you can adjust the recipe to feed everyone in your household.
If you’re looking for an Italian cooking class focusing on the art of pasta, check out the Ravioli and Filled Pasta Workshop. Offered by The Good Food Project from their home in NYC, this class teaches you to make fettuccine, linguine, ravioli, mezzaluna, and tortellini. Like the Northern Italian Dinner class, this workshop requires you to provide your own supplies and ingredients.
Private Group Italian Cooking Classes in Los Angeles
Would you like to schedule a private Italian cooking class as an exciting team-building activity for your business or organization? CourseHorse is your one-stop connection to Italian cooking classes for private groups in Los Angeles.
When planning your private Italian cooking class or workshop, you may want to zero in on a specific skill, like making mozzarella or gnocchi. You can book classes in these areas and more with CourseHorse.
You and your team can learn to make light and fluffy gnocchi from home in the Italian cooking class, Virtual Gnocchi Making. CourseHorse will coordinate all the details for you for a team of up to 500, including shipping harder-to-find ingredients directly to each class participant. Gluten-free flour is even available upon request.
If you prefer a private Italian cooking class on Virtual Mozzarella Making, CourseHorse can hook you up with a class for teams of up to 50. Your instructor will demonstrate the intricate dance of timing that turns milk into the silky staple of Italian cooking. Your team will then create their own balls of delicate mozzarella cheese with milk, citric acid, and rennet. The latter two harder-to-find ingredients can be shipped directly to participants for a small fee.
If you don’t see the perfect private Italian cooking class for your team on CourseHorse’s website, don’t worry: CourseHorse is available to turn your dream course or workshop into reality. Use the contact form on their website to start the conversation about what you’re looking for in your organization’s Italian cooking class. Or, if you prefer, schedule a 15-minute phone call with an expert who will connect you with the best instructor and curriculum for your needs.
Once the CourseHorse Team knows what you’re looking for in a private group class, they will take care of all the details and send you confirmation within 24 hours. Even if you don’t know how many of your team members will participate yet, you can go ahead and book that Italian cooking class with CourseHorse and change your number of students up to a week before the class date.
When CourseHorse coordinates your virtual group class, they recommend Zoom, but they can accommodate Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx if preferred. Some classes can also be arranged to meet with you in person in the location of your choice.
CourseHorse will never charge you a booking fee. However, for a one-time fee of $150, CourseHorse will customize your curriculum with the recipes, ingredients, games, or other activities you may wish to incorporate into your business’s team-building event.
