Italian Food Lovers

We run out of recipes from the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Garden Chef Series and the Barilla Italian Cooking Weekend, at least for this year - next year we’ll make sure to have one of our bloggers from the Italian Food Lovers editorial team on site, so we can actually video the Chef demos and interview the Chefs (not while they demo, of course).

First of all, we would like to say thank you to Barilla USA’s Chef Lorenzo Boni, Trattoria N. 10’s Chef Doug D’Avico, Francesca Restaurants’ Executive Chef Laura Piper, Pinstripes’ Chef Mark Grimes and Mado’s Chef Rob Levitt for sharing their recipes with us. Thank you again, see you again on Italian Food Lovers!

Just to recap, this year we had the pleasure to publish on Italian Food Lovers recipes for 7 gourmet dishes. Did you try any of them at home? 

• Sautéed Wild Mushrooms Bruschetta
• Grilled Baby Octopus with Watercress Salad and Oranges
• Farfalle Piccolini Pasta Salad
• Linguine Fagottaro Pasta Salad
• Lobster Bread Salad
• Chicken Parmesan with Campanelle Pasta
• Grilled Peach and Prosciutto with Parmigiano-Reggiano and Bulsamic Must

Also, we have to say thank you to Stephanie Sette from the Academia Barilla USA Marketing Team (in the picture above) for getting all the content together for us (she does it all the time with the US events content, by the way) and of course also to Academia Barilla Italian Culinary Specialist Mario Rizzotti, who has been conducing several rounds of educational and tasting demos during the Barilla Italian Cooking Weekend.

In these pictures taken during the Barilla Italian Cooking Weekend Mario Rizzotti shares his Italian culinary knowledge with the show participants, teaching them how to professionally taste some of the best Italian gourmet products, such Italian extra virgin olive oils and traditional Italian cheese specialties such as Parmigiano-Reggiano and the several varieties of Pecorino, from Sardinian Pecorino Dolce to Pecorino Toscano DOP and Pecorino Sardo Gran Cru. Follow the link to see more pictures of Mario Rizzotti’s tasting demos at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

A final thank you goes of course also to all the guests and visitors and participated to the Chicago’s Chef show. If you liked the Italian cooking and Italian food culture you experienced at the Chicago Botanic Garden, you now you can find it also here on Italian Food Lovers all year round!

Also remember that you can experience the flavor and taste of Academia Barilla’s Italian gourmet food specialties all year round too, they are all available at the Academia Barilla online store, where you can also find Italian cookbooks, Chef tools, Italian gastronomy gift boxes and gift certificates!

Welcome to the second episode in our Exploring Academia Barilla Culinary School series. Today we will follow Chef Matteo Carboni, who disappeared behind the doors of Academia at the end of the opening episode, to explore the Training Kitchen of our culinary school.

Chef Carboni will tell us all about the features of one of the eight cooking stations, and will spend a word also on some of the tools every cooking station is equipped with: KitchenAid tools.

Those tools, that perform a number of operations thanks to interchangeable accessories, have been gifted to the Academia Barilla Culinary School directly from KitchenAid, a partner of Academia Barilla, and are really the bread and butter of working in a kitchen, according to Chef Carboni who also call them “Chef’s best friends“.

After discovering some of the technologies of the Training Kitchen (we will cover more and more details over the next posts), Chef Carboni asked us to follow him in another lab full of technology, but to show us some traditional, manual pasta making tools, which we already discovered not long ago, as Matteo used them to make Garganelli pasta for April’s ingredient of the month’s recipe.

In the video above, Chef Matteo Carboni will offer us also a close look at both the traditional classic pasta making hand tool (the metal tool in the video, “the one every Italian grandmother has“, as Matteo says), and to Chitarra, an Italian regional traditional pasta making tool needed to make Rigatoni alla Chitarrra that looks - and sounds - like a guitar!

We also republish the previous Garganelli pasta video here below so you can see the Pettine (comb) tool in action.

More insights, chef tips and video explorations around the Academia Barilla Culinary School will be published soon here on our Italian Food Lovers blog, so stay tuned. We have booked Chef Matteo Carboni for more interviews tomorrow - just give us a little time to edit the movies and we’ll share them with you!