Welcome to a new series of posts featuring Chef Matteo Carboni, who we got to know here on Italian Food Lovers thanks to our ingredient of the month series.

Chef Matteo Carboni starts today another new series of video blog posts where he will guide us to the exploration of the Academia Barilla Culinary School, offering also culinary tips and other Chef insight straight from our cooking school in Parma, Italy.

So welcome Matteo Carboni and this first opening interview where he starts telling us how it feel being a Chef at a culinary school, as compared with his previous Chef experience at gourmet restaurants - watch the video below.

Chef Carboni will be back with us next week for another installment of this new “Exploring Academia Barilla Culinary School” series - stay tuned with us!

Though the famous popular Acquacotta soup has a very mysterious and unusual name, it is a well-known soup dish that originates from the Maremma area of Tuscany. The Italian name of this soup literally means “cooked water”.

Legend has it that the inventors of this dish, the herdsmen and coal men of Maremma, were accustomed to frequent journeys, and thus normally traveled with stale bread, dried meat, oil, garlic, onion, and a few herbs, in order to prepare acquacotta.

A more poetic version of its origin can be traced in the short movie “La Zuppa di Pietra“ (Stone Soup) by Christian Carmosino, winner of the First Prize at the latest Academia Barilla Short Films Festival.

In the short film director Carmosino tells a story staged in the 19th century in a village in rural Italy, where the metaphore of a stone soup stands for the pleasure of getting around the table for a rich meal all together by sharing ingredients, big smiles, and a big heart.

You can discover more about award winning director Christian Ambrosino by browsing his online channels on YouTube and MySpace, from where we got the embed code (with Christian’s authorization) to republish the beautiful “La Zuppa di Pietra“ short film here below in full. Enjoy it!

Contrary to its origins as a peasant dish, made simply of water and a few flavors, acquacotta is a very hardy soup. There is an assortment of recipes for acquacotta amongst the different areas of Tuscany, yet acquacotta is distinguishable from other Tuscan soups due to its use of eggs and stale bread at the end of (and not during) its preparation.

We found several book tracing the origins and tradition of acquacotta at the Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library in Parma, such as “Cucina e vini della Toscana” by Flavio Collutta (1974 Mursia Editore), “Il grande libro della cucina Toscana” by Paolo Petroni (1991 Ponte alle Grazie), and Sara Vignozzi and Gabriele Ganci’s cookbook “Tuscany – Flavour of Italy” (McRae Books, 1999), from which we picked the traditional recipe here below (image taken from the same book).

ACQUACOTTA
(serves 4)

Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: about 1 hour
Recipe grading: fairly easy

INGREDIENTS

- 5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 onions, thinly sliced
- 2 cups (10 oz - 300 g) fresh or frozen peas
- 1 and 1/4 cups (l7 oz - 200 g) freshly hulled broad beans
- 1 medium carrot, sliced
- 1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
- 1 crumbled dried chili pepper
- salt to taste
- 12 oz - 300 g trimmed young Swiss chard or spinach leaves, washed and shredded
- 10 oz - 300 g firm, ripe tomatoes, skinned and chopped
- 6 and 1/2 cups (2 and 1/2 pints - 1.5 liters) boiling water
- 4 large fresh eggs
- freshly ground black pepper
- 1/2 cup (2 oz - 60 g) freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino cheese
- 4 slices firm-textured white bread, 2 days old
- 1 clove garlic

Suggested wine: any dry white wine

PREPARATION

Pour the oil into a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add the onions, peas, fava beans, carrot, celery, chili pepper, and a dash of salt.

Sauté for about 10 minutes until tender and lightly browned. Add the chard or spinach and the tomatoes and simmer for 15 minutes.

Pour in the boiling water and leave to simmer gently for 40 minutes, adding more salt if necessary.

Using a fork or balloon whisk, beat the eggs with salt, pepper, and the grated Parmigiano or pecorino cheese.

Toast the bread and when golden brown, rub both sides of each slice with the garlic. Place a slice in each soup bowl or in individual straight-sided earthenware dishes, and pour a quarter of the beaten egg mixture over each serving.

Give the soup a final stir and then ladle into the bowls. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and add a pinch of pepper.

Serve immediately and enjoy acquacotta sharing it with others, as in Christian Carmosino’s award winning short movie!

CHEF TIPS

Our Chefs at the Academia Barilla Culinary School suggest to use Academia Barilla’s products such as Toscano IGP extra virgin olive oil, Peeled Cherry Tomatoes, and Academia Barilla’s traditional Parmigiano Reggiano or the Sardinian Pecorino Sardo Gran Cru, which you can all easily find at our gourmet online store. also, try Mantecarlo Bianco as dry white wine for better recipe results.

Buon appetito from Academia Barilla and Italian Food Lovers!

Enjoy some magic cinema moment with the video below, that puts together excerpts and trailers from the three short movies winners of the Premio Academia Barilla 2008 - the Academia Barilla Short Movie Award to Italian directors who bring food culture on a big screen, even if through a short movie.

This year’s winners of the Academia Barilla Short Movie Award were:

First Prize - La zuppa di pietra, directed by Christian Carmosino
Second Prize - Bellissimi, directed by Davide Vanni
Third Prize - Dulcis in fundo, directed by Davide Abate

Check out our previous post for more info and synopsis of the award winning movies - but also enjoy the video trailers below!

Congratulations to the winners from the Italian Food Lovers blogging team!

Millefoglie is the Italian version of the French pastry Mille-feuille, meaning “thousand leaves” which is a layered cake which can be filled in delicious several ways.

As described by the Wikipedia, other names for Millefoglie around the world are Mille-feuille (French), Napoleon (U.S.), vanilla slice, cream slice or custard slice (Commonwealth), all to describe a pastry made of several layers of puff pastry alternating with a sweet filling, typically pastry cream, whipped cream or jam. You can find the dessert name also written as “millefeuille” and “mille feuille“.

At the Academia Barilla Culinary School we thought this could be a perfect gourmet dessert to celebrate Mother’s Day, so we asked Chef Matteo Carboni to share with us the recipe, and also to prepare the dessert for us, so we could have some pictures, too (that, by the way, we uploaded also on Wikipedia).

We also took a small video of the preparation, available on YouTube and other video spaces, and of course embedded also here below in this post.

Ready for the recipe? Let’s go to the kitchen!

STRAWBERRY AND CHANTILLY MILLEFOGLIE
(serves 4)

INGREDIENTS

- puff pastry, 1 pound
- chantilly cream, 1 pound
- strawberries, 1/2 pound
- sugar (for decoration), to taste
- icing sugar (for decoration), to taste

INGREDIENTS FOR THE PASTRY CREAM

- fresh cream, 1.7 oz
- milk, 10 oz fl
- egg yolks, 2
- sugar, 1.7 oz
- white flour, 0.7 oz
- vanilla stick, 1/2

PREPARATION

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Unfold 1 puff pastry sheet and gently roll out into a piece of 12 inches with a rolling pin on a lightly floured surface.

Put it into a large baking sheet, previously buttered and prick all over with a fork. Trim edges of pastry with a knife.

Cut each sheet into rectangular of 3 x 1.5 inches. Sprinkle sugar on and then bake the sheet in the heated oven at 350° F until pastry is puffed and golden (approx 15 minutes).

Let it cool on racks. Aside, prepare the Chantilly Cream.

Boil the milk. Whisk egg yolks and sugar, add the flour and keep mixing.

Pour in part of the hot milk in order to obtain a smooth cream. Aromatize with vanilla stick and add the remaining milk very slowly.

Cook over moderate heat and keep mixing until thickened. Then let it cool quickly.

Whip the cream and add it to the Chantilly Cream.

In the serving plate , spread over one puff pastry cake base, part of the cooled pastry cream.

Cover it with a second puff pastry cake base.

Decorate the top and the plate with cubed strawberries, and icing sugar.

Check out our video below for more preparation details!

CHEF TIPS

Add few drops of Academia Barilla Traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena aged 25 years on the top for maximum gourmet results. You can easily find it at our online store.

Happy Mother’s Day from Academia Barilla and Italian Food Lovers!

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!