Our Italian Food Lovers Chef Network has been now officially launched.
After introducing himself as a Chef and a food lover, today Chef Douglas D’Avico from Trattoria No. 10 in downtown Chicago will start sharing with us his Chef experience, and of course also his top recipes.

As we already anticipated, Chef D’Avico loves seafood, and his first recipe for the Guest Chef series at our blog is for a great antipasto: Octopus Carpaccio with Blood Oranges.

OCTOPUS CARPACCIO WITH BLOOD ORANGES

(a recipe by Chef Douglas D’Avico)
(serves 6-8 approx)

INGREDIENTS

- 2 lb Steamed or Boiled octopus
- 4 Limes, juiced
- 1 cup Academia Barilla Monti Iblei Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- 1/8 tablespoon Crushed Red Chili Flake
- 1 tablespoon Italian Flat Leaf Parsley, chopped
- Salt, to taste
- Fresh Ground Black Pepper, to taste
- 1 Bunch Hydro or Organic Watercress, Trimmed
- 2 Blood Oranges, segmented and juices saved
- 24 Caperberries, rinsed

PREPARATION

Remove the head and beak from the octopus and slice very thin on a mechanical slicer. Put the sliced octopus in a bowl and squeeze out excess water.

Take the juice from the limes, half of the olive oil, chili flake and chopped parsley and mix in the bowl with the sliced octopus. Mix well.

Season the octopus with salt and pepper to taste, make sure that you mix thoroughly before tasting. Cover and marinate over night or at least 2 hours before serving. You can adjust the seasoning to your liking if need be.

To serve, arrange the marinated octopus on a plate in a thin flat layer. Next mix the reserved blood orange juice and 3 tablespoons of the olive oil, season to taste. Mix with the trimmed water cress and divide

between the plates by placing a small amount in the center of each plate.

Garnish the plate with the caperberries and blood orange segments. Drizzle with a little bit of the olive oil and fresh ground pepper and serve.

CHEF TIPS

For a little extra flavor you can finish the plate by using the Academia Barilla Sea Salt flavored with Blood Orange.

Welcome to the Italian Food Lovers Chef Network series and to its official opening with the assignment of the first Guest Chef residency to Chef Douglas D’Avico from Chicago, Illinois.

Chef Douglas D’Avico, also known as Doug, decided to become a professional Chef as he loves being around food and the environment of the kitchen. Today Chef D’Avico is the top Chef at the Trattoria N0. 10 in Chicago, where the restaurant specialty is contemporary Italian cuisine.

Before taking the lead in the kitchen at Trattoria No. 10 in Chicago and been awarded with 3 Stars by the Chicago Tribune in 1991, he worked at a horse racing park, a river boat casino and for hotels in Miami, Florida and Honolulu, Hawaii, as he told us in a recent interview.

Among the other questions, we asked him what was the secret ingredient in being a top Chef, and he answered “good fresh ingredients“.

Chef D’Avico’s favorite food is seafood and pasta, and he has a definition of Italian cuisine as “clean, fresh and simple“. Also, Chef D’avico definition of Italian gourmet is “taking fresh produce, artisan ingredients, and cooking with care and respect“.

Chef Douglas D’avico is an adopter and supporter of Academia Barilla products, for his culinary creations. He states that Academia Barilla products are “very good quality with clean flavors“, and you can always find them in his menus.

You can trust Chef D’Avico’s judgment or give it a try for yourself at the Academia Barilla online store, where plenty of Italian gourmet specialties are available and just a click away, and where you can also find the authentic Italian gourmet ingredients used in gourmet recipes by Chef D’Avico and other top Chefs around the world who take Italian cuisine seriously and to the next level.

If you want to get in touch with Chef D’Avico you can meet him at Trattoria N.10, 10 N. Dearborn, Chicago IL 60602 (Google map below). Please visit the restaurant website at www.trattoriaten.com for complete contact info but also detailed menus, restaurant reviews, reservations for private parties and restaurant gift cards. Also, feel free to call directly Trattoria No. 10 at +1 (312) 984-1718.

Since Chef D’Avico’s “plat fort” is seafood, he will be back with us tomorrow to share his first recipe, a yummy Octopus Carpaccio with Blood Oranges. We can’t wait, can you?

We have been blogging about celebrity Chefs for some time now, and we are finally proud to announce the launch of the Italian Food Lovers Chef Networks!

Thanks to the never-stopping activity of Academia Barilla’s Italian Culinary Specialist Team in the United States, and to their relations with several top and celebrity Italian Chefs, we put together a network of guest Chefs who will be contibuting to our Italian Food Lovers blog sharing their Italian food love, passion, experience and, of course, gourmet recipes and special Chef’s cooking tips!

Each month we will introduce a new Italian Food Lovers Guest Chef, who will then start contributing on regular monthly basis. We have a nice line-up of celebrity gourmet Chef who will share their culinary secrets with us.

No anticipations, just get ready to meet our first Chef Network Guest next Monday, Chef Douglas D’Avico from Trattoria n. 10 Restaurant in Chicago. Welcome to the Italian Food Lovers Chef Network series!

Last week Chef Matteo Carboni from the Academia Barilla Culinary School shared with us a few video tricks on how to prepare fresh pasta by using simple ingredients, and traditional techniques and pasta tools.

Following the Chef demo from our previous video, Chef Matteo Carboni introduces us to the pasta tools he will use to make Garganelli and Maccheroni alla Chitarra, two traditional Italian regional specialty types of pasta.

The main pasta tools will be a wooden pinroll, and also a manual pasta machine.

But the interesting traditional tools Chef carboni is going to use in the video demo are the Chitarra (in Italian, guitar - its strings can actually be played!) and the Pettine (in Italian, comb). Those pasta tools have been used in Italian regional cuisine for centuries and are still a good Chef’s help today.

Chef Carboni starts slicing the dough before passing it through the pasta machine, making sure to put the rest of the dough back in plastic wrap while working on each piece. The pasta machine will help create large and thin slices of dough, in a process of countinous flour dusting and machine rolling.

When the slice of dough is ready to be processed, Chef Carboni starts cutting it in pieces to prepare the Garganelli, that gets indivudually rolled on the Pettine with the help of a little stick and great manual skills to get their traditional shape.

To make traditional Maccheroni alla Chitarra (that Chef Carboni says are more like fettuccine, rather than maccheroni) Matteo will use, of course the Chitarra, and an energic action with the wooden pinroll, that immediately reveals the pasta.

As Chef Carboni suggests, you can use it for cooking straight away, or you can powder them with some flour, make single servings and freeze them until needed.

Buon appetito from the Academia Barilla Culinary School!

Do you remember the book Parma, a Capital of Italian Gastronomy, by celebrity Chef and cookbook writer Giuliano Bugialli?

We quote the cookbook very often on our blog not only because Chef Bugialli is a good friend of Academia Barilla, but also because the cookbook itself is published from Academia Barilla Editions, and is available at the Academia Barilla online store.

Chef Bugialli’s cookbook won last year the Gourmand World Cookbook Award 2007 in the Best Italian Corporate Book category, and this year has been shortlisted for Best in the World in the Gourmand Awards, same category Best Corporate Book, this time global.

The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards is an initiative launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time in 1995. After more than 10 years the Awards, annual celebration of “those who cooks with words”, has become one of the most important events in the industry, gathering a crowd of professionals from all over the world in cookbook business, including several universities and cookbook libraries.

Since 1999 there has been an awards category for books on Italian cooking. This year in London there were 845 cookbooks from 107 countries competing in 40 categories for Best in the World.

The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards are big especially in Europe, but are very relevant also around the world. In 2006 the awards visited Kuala Lumpur and the year after moved to Beijing. Last April 13 the 2008 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards were held in London, UK.

Chef Bugialli’s Parma cookbook is a great book to discover both the gourmet and the cultural souls of Parma, the Capital of the Italian Food Valley. Rich in content as well as recipes, the cookbook is also illustrated by great photos (including all the images in this blog post) by photographer Andy Ryan.

Unfortunately, Giuliano Bugialli’s cookbook didn’t make it for the final award gala at London’s Olympia Theatre, the competition was tough with other very good 12 books from other counties in the same category.

Nevertheless, Academia Barilla has been awarded for the work carried on by BIGAB, Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library in Parma. As Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Vice President Bo Masser said:

“The creation of the Gastronomic Library of Academia Barilla and the mission of Academia Barilla are very impressive“.

The Jury honored Academia Barilla with a “Special Award” and the following mention:

“The work of Academia Barilla in Parma is very important. It deserves this award with International recognition for its leadership for understanding and taking action for world culinary culture“.

Wow, that’s a huge honor!

Please join the Italian Food Lovers blogging team in a standing ovation for the fellows at the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library: good job, BIGAB! Compliments!

And compliments to Chef Giuliano Bugialli too for the Italian Gourmand Cookbook Award won last year!