Other Christmas ideas for your presents

Still looking for the latest presents? Are you already planning the shops you will visit this weekend to look for some great Christmas idea? Here i am to help you out.

If last week i told you about the great Maxi Cubes of Pastificio dei Campi, available directly on our website, this time i will give you another idea for your presents.

What about a Christmas hamper filled with the best italian product available on the market? We are sure this will be a present that will make everyone happy and, especially in these times, spend on food is always a good idea. 

And if you are looking for great italian products, i will suggest you to go to Food in the City or to Melograno Deli.

Food in the city is a warehouse based in St. John's wood (London) but it's also a great website where you can order directly online. The hampers you can see here is just and example and you can ask for a bespoke one. Over £40 the delivery is free. 

Have a look and you will remain amazed by the quality of their products. 

Melograno Deli instead is in Holland Park (London) and they are also specialized on italian brands but they also have cheeses, cold cuts and lots of other typical products.

"Our hampers are made with acacia wood accessories (cheeseboards or salad servers) and they can be made up either by us, or with products of the customers choosing."

At this point, I can just suggest you to have a look at the London map and enjoy your weekend of italian delicatessen... and don't forget to add our pasta to your shopping.

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An online unique offer for pasta lovers

As you probably know today is Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving that since 2005 has been recognized as the most successful for sales online. In these days in fact is starting the real Christmas shopping and always more people are doing it online. Quick, easy and no-stress the online shopping  is definitely the best s solution.

And do you know that you can buy even our pasta online? Not just on foodinthecity as  lots already know, but even directly on our website where in fact you won’t just find the normal pasta packages, but some special Maxi pasta Cube available just from our online shop.

What are the Maxi Cube Pastificio dei Campi? For those who has never seen them before, just let me tell you that are the best and more original food present you can give to a real pasta lover:  it's a giant box, always in the shape of a cube, like all the boxes of Pastificio dei Campi, which contains various kinds of pasta.
There is the Maxi Cube tasting, with 5 pounds of pasta Gragnano PGI bronze drawn and slowly dried at low temperature, in 10 very different formats, which represent the most famous Pastificio dei Campi shapes: paccheri, broken candles, ziti, penne rigate, orecchiette, ribbed tubes, spaghetti, linguine. And there is the Custom Cube Maxi, for who knows what he loves and wants to choose in total freedom  the shapes to be included (for a total of 4 kg).
And it’s not finished yet. After the success of last year also the Maxi Cube Selection is on sale again: a gourmet kit, consisting of 4 kg of pasta Pastificio dei Campi, a bottle of extra virgin olive oil DOP from the Sorrentina Peninsula  L’Archangelo and the tomatoes Miracle of San Gennaro by Sabatino Abagnale.
For more information please see our online shop and good Cyber Monday to everyone!

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We are in Foodies 2012 & Sua Eccellenza Italia

While in London we were busy organizing our presence at Masterchef live, in Italy Pastificio dei Campi was achieving a space in some great publications: Foodies 2012 and Sua Eccellenza Italia.

Foodies 2012 is a guide created by the Gambero Rosso, one of the most famous Italian food and wine magazine, designed for connoisseurs of the 3rd millennium, for an audience of fans who not only look for great restaurants, but also street food of high quality, specialty food producers, and so on.

We are happy to announce that this year Pastificio dei Campi has been added to the guide as one of the artisanal producer selected by the editors.

Then, Sua Eccellenza Italia, is instead a gold book released by Gambero Rosso for its celebration of his 25 years anniversary and dedicated to all the most famous symbols of the Food & Wine in Italy: there are small producers, artisans and shopkeepers; the great chefs and the brands that in the world are synonymous of Italian flair. The great chefs and innkeepers of tradition. These and those in a book of 800 pages that tells the good and beautiful in Italy. We are glad to be part of this amazing publications too.

All this just awards are the fruits of our commitment in making a product truly special and unique, following the old italian traditions and only the best ingredients available in the country.

This is to cheers with you all for our success and we hope you will enjoy our products too.

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Old english sausages ragu'

It’s again the time of the year when it’s tradition to cook and eat sausages all around UK: from the 31^st of October to the 6^th of November it was “the sausage week”. If you have been out on the 5^th of November for the bonfire night, you probably know that the traditional dish of the day is bangers and mash, but lots are the recipe you can find with sausages… even in the italian cuisine.

So for my weekend I decide to treat me with a new pasta recipe: Penne a candela with sausages ragu’.

For the occasion I went in a specialized butcher near Marylebone: The Ginger Pig… no other name could be more right for the product I was looking top buy. The shop was full of costumers and the smell of the sausages I bought it was irresistible. I choose the Old English Sausage, just made with english pork and herbs.

Here is the recipe for 3-4 people:

- 350/400 gr of  pasta: we hardly recommend Penne a Candela Pastificio dei Campi

- 3 sausages

- A jar of peeled tomatoes

- Half onion

- olive oil

- A glass of red wine

- Salt and pepper

- Fresh rosemary

Place some oil on the bottom of a pot, and soon after the finely chopped onion. Let it cook a bit and then add the sausage. Take off the skin and mince it in the pot. Let it get brown and then add the wine slowly. Then add the tomatoes, salt and pepper. Let simmer, stirring occasionally for about half an hour.

Prepare the pasta al dente then drain it and toss it in the sauce for a few minutes before serving. Add some Parmesan if you like but I can tell you that without is divine anyway!

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It's out now with lots of tips.

 
Written by Rose Prince columnist for the Telegraph and expert of food, markets and gastronomy, the Good Produce Guide 2012 it's really a little treasure... especially for someone like me, coming from abroad and with almost no knowledge about english traditional producers. I can tell you one or two things about italian food and typical regional products but it's not the same for the english ones.
 
So I really enjoyed reading through the various categories of this book from markets to deli, from butcher(always hard to find here) and bakery or artisanal producers.

I mean I have already my faithful italian delis ( Melograno and Foodinthecity ), but is always good to know where else you can buy good food if you are in the other side of the city!  And I have particularly appreciated for this reason the map that comes at the end of the book ( that I would just divide in color to make it easier to read) and that can guide you in the different areas of London and UK.
 
And what to say about the list of seasonal english products and the festival calendar? Great! And if in the future i will visit some other english place I'll easily bring this with me or i will check before to go to discover all the best food from the nation.

So yesterday i put the guide under test and I had a look at all the places around Covent Garden, where I was and I found not 1 but 3 great places for a really good cup in the afternoon: these were Drury coffee near Leicester square, the Tea palace in Covent Garden Market and finally Monmouth Caffe that I listened lots of time but that I actually never tried yet! So I went there and it was great: fresh coffe beans and great pastries… irresistible!

Do you want to pick the best of what UK can offer, or you just want to have good food that you can trust in... Let this guide inspire you! And if you are looking for a 100% italian and artisanal PGI pasta, don't forget us ;)

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6 of Italy’s greatest chefs all together in just one day!

Tomorrow, Tuesday 18 th of October returns Identita’ London, this time in Shoreditch,
at the Town Hall Hotel & Apartments, to show again the extreme gastronomic variety of our country through famous chefs and artisanal traditional products.

Chosen by Identità London specifically for its unique design features, the large room and several other luxury suites will be allocated to the main sponsors and partners of Identita' who will each offer unique events tastes and flavours of Italy.

Paolo Marchi, founder of the event and Italian food editor says, “I do not know of another cuisine style that has been so misrepresented and I feel that the true energy of what is Italian gastronomy today is missing.”- “Identita London therefore, shall endeavor to explain the fundamental principles of today’s Italian cuisine. Using the extraordinary and almost inexhaustible resources of regional cuisines, interpreted in a contemporary way, chefs will demonstrate their craft, their thoughts and experiences to showcase their personal evolution of Italian gastronomy side by side with like-minded producers”.

And these will be:
MASSIMO BOTTURA - Modena
ANTONINO CANNAVACCIUOLO - Orta San Giulio (Novara)
PAOLO LOPRIORE - Siena
DAVIDE OLDANI - Cornaredo (Milan)
DAVIDE SCABIN - Rivoli (Turin)
CICCIO SULTANO - Ragusa

Identità Golose is also a restaurants guide and some week ago have just come out the 5th edition that incorporates some of the best restaurants  in Italy, some in Europe and some selected ones in New York, Sao Paolo and even Sidney. Last year wrote about some new English places Jasper Gerard, from the Daily Telegraph. in the 2012 edition you will find instead Sudi Pigott from The Times, Saturday Express, Time Magazine.

Are you dreaming about another day of high quality italian food in London? Have fun at Identita' London then!

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All around UK... until the 2nd of October

After the cheese festival  just finished in Italy, I was surprised to see that even in UK it's time to speak about cheese.

Normally a strong matter for the french, in the latest years also the english have developed a good passion for cheeses: the fact is that english consume a big amount of cheese but they are less used to look and try different types of cheese and maybe they finish to buy always the same cheddar (favourite cheese for the 98% of the british households). Instead some of the english cheeses are getting really famous for their special taste.

If last year I was speaking about the Cornish Blue, a very peculiar young blue cheese that won lots of prizes, this year, waiting for some more english highlights, I will tell you what has happened in Italy 10 days ago.

From the 16th to the 19th of September Slow food has in fact organized a cheese festival  basically dedicated to all the precious traditional italian cheeses, the ones protected by the association because rare to find and made following the very original way, with the old instruments, and taking the same time it was taken in the past. Some amazing cheeses were present to the event and lots of other seminaries and interesting tasting of dairy products took place in that occasion. 

So what now in this british cheese week? Different event will be held all around UK to know and enjoy the cheese produced here. I want to highlight especially the one at the Cardiff Castle, that on on the website looks fantastic or the one at the National trust.

Do you want to know more about english cheeses? Then have a look at this map: it's great and it has  been made by the  british cheese board, " the voice of British cheese and dedicated to educating the British public about eating cheese as part of a balanced diet".

And get ready for my next Pastificio dei Campi recipe probably made with one of the english cheeses I will discover during these days.

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