Learning some english recipes and enjoying food... as usual

Last week a friend of mine invited me to a professional cooking class... I couldn’t believe it! I love learning from professional chefs and more in England where they cook different things from the ones I used to see cooked in my italian family.

The plan was to prepare a 3 courses meal in less than 1 hour almost and ... To eat it all together! Just great!

So I went to L'Atelier Des Chefs, an amazing place near Oxford Circus, very little from outside, but very well organized internally: there are 2 big kitchens, one on the street level and another downstairs and lots of cooking tools available to use in the class but especially to buy. A very cosy place with nice and welcoming people!
So we started our class around 11,30 with a Prosecco glass, gently offered, and the 3 courses meal was composed by the following recipes:

Pea soup with crisp pancetta and garlic croutons
Crisp fillet of sea bass with braised fennel and brown shrimp vélouté
Chocolate and praline cream with espresso coffee emulsion and hazelnut financiers

We started with the preparation of the basic ingredients: cutting finely the onion, garlic, mint & chives, peeling the bread, and putting the potatoes to roast in the oven. And all these easy tasks were all quite difficult if you wanted to follow the chef's lesson: first thing he showed us how to properly cut the ingredients and it's so much more difficult of what I could have never thought!

Then we mixed some of the ingredients to prepare a very rich sauce for the veloute’ while the other group was starting to deal with the mousse and financiers biscuits. This mousse made with the praline cream and the hazelnut dough for the biscuits were just great!

Finally, the financiers in the oven and the cream in the fridge, we places the fish to cook in the pan with just a little bit of oil, the fennel to boil and we started to prepare  the soup, cooking the peas and frying the bread.

It was a really funny day and of course I don’t tell you how much good the food was! I loved my peas soup and the veloute’ was great, But for me the real revelation were the financiers biscuits, very similar to the "Magdalene", that I used to eat when I was little and that I loved sooo much! Now I even cooked them by my self!!! Great place and great experience!

And you? Have you ever been to some professional cookery class?

Comment (0)

Some rules you absolutely need to follow.

I have already given you some truly Italian pasta recipes, some have been easier, some longer and some a bit particular.

However I will now take a step back just to make sure that you know the first basic, but so important ground stones of the Italian kitchen. By this, what I’m trying to say is: this post will be a basic but important learning session you just can’t miss.

First of all let’s take a big saucepan or stockpot, large enough to contain all the pasta you like to cook. This rule is especially important in case you are preparing long pasta. Fill up the pot with 1 liter of water for every 100 gr of pasta. All this water is to allow the pasta to not stick to each other and to maintain a constant temperature during the cooking process. When the water starts to boil add 10-12gr of salt (the big grains one) per liter. Don’t add it before the water starts to boil; salty water takes longer time before it starts to boil.

After a couple minutes you can add the pasta and increase the heat to maintain the water boiling. Now, let’s stir, it’s better to use a wooden spoon when stirring and to do it a couple of times during the process. This is an important part of the pasta cooking process since the pasta needs to be emerged in the water in order not to stick to one another.

Based on the shape and quality of the pasta, the cooking time will be different. It’s normally written on the bag but the cooking time also depends on your individual taste too. If the pasta is not Pastificio dei Campi, I always try it some minutes before the time indicated on the bag in order to not have it over cooked. With the pasta from Gragnano, you can be sure that at that time the pasta will be “al dente”, which means not too hard but not overcooked… just perfect!

However you can break the pasta with a fork and try it before draining it, just in case. Never add cold water at the end: that removes the starch that helps hold the sauce.

Now the pasta is ready to be combined with the Italian sauce of your choice. There are, as you already know, some too choose from. My tip for the part is to continue to keep an eye on the blog and you will have lots of nice ideas for your favourite pasta sauce. For now, at least you know the secret for the perfect start.

Comment (0)

From TV to markets, from food events to food bloggers... it's all about enjoyment!

This morning on Stylist, the free press magazine you get in the tube here in the UK, I read an article called "Food for Thought".

Basically the journalist brings to the attention how much the food culture has grown up in the latest 10 years in the UK, how much more attention and care there is about the food English people eat, the care they put to feed their children, the interest in the food they can find around, the traditions, recipes and enjoying food all together.
This is all quite new for an italian point of view: in every italian family you have a mother or granny ready to cook for you and pass you all the food learnings you need. We grow up knowing which are the best traditional ways to put ingredients together and to make a nice dinner for friends without use ready meal stuff. Pasta is in our DNA.

So when I came to London I straight away realized this difference, already in the supermarket, where you have lots of  ready meals and not so many fresh products as in Italy we are used to. But certainly is true in these years, the food culture is increasing a lot: in TV it's full of cooking programs that teach you how to do everything from some simple stuff to very complicate recipes. Chefs here are seen like big stars and publish books, present TV programs, run all different kind of restaurants, have magazines, make interviews and even have the power to bring an argument like the food at school on the main agenda of the government (this is what Jamie Oliver did). There is even an italian chef always in Tv, young, funny and with a very strong accent, Gino D'Acampo. It's impossible to close the TV when he starts his recipes.

All this is great. Being witness of all these changes is great, and see how much people are enjoying to take their time to buy nice fresh and healthy products and cook them or even discover the particularities of the food from other countries. In Italy we have various restaurants with cuisine from Asia, or India or even Africa, but these are really rare. Here it's an explosion of tastes and flavours when you go around in the streets of London.
Lots of events are coming up as well about food, from festivals with the best restaurants showing their dishes, to local events to know different typical products from a lot of countries. From Italian cooking courses, like the one in Cucina Caldesi, that's look amazing,  to the food bloggers... they are definetly the mirror of this growing passion in UK. Check the blog of Lizzie, Niamh, Meemalee, Helen, Ms Marmite lover and there are even guys like Dan or Nick... and you will see what I'm speaking about: real food lovers.

This is exactly the aim of this blog, helping you knowing a bit more of the Italian culture, good ways to cook italian food, where to find the best products and events connected with our traditions and enjoy all this in the best way ever.

Loving food is the new English moto! What about yours or your relationship with food ?

Comment (0)