Italian Food Lovers

Welcome to the Academia Barilla Culinary School, and to a new installment in the series of Italian Food Lovers’ Ingredient of the Month. Today Chef Matteo Carboni introduces us to the main varieties of Italian Table Grapes with another Academia Barilla video.

As commented by Chef Matteo Carboni, Italy is a great producer of very good wines, but also a great producer of table grapes. In the video above, he tells us about the grape varieties of Sultana, White and Red, Pans, and Moscato.

Table grapes are a very good snack for the morning or the afternoon, but also for the end of a meal, to be enjoyed on their own, or accompanied with some mature cheeses such as Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino.

The grape varieties presented by Chef Carboni are very different from each other. Sultana has a thicker skin and a simpler taste, and it is the grape variety used to make golden raisins. Pans has a thinner skin and it is very rich in pulp and juice - the favorite variety of Chef Carboni to be tasted with Parmigiano-Reggiano. Moscato (Muscat) has smaller berries and it is very sweet; this is the grape used to make the famous Italian sparkling dessert wine Moscato.

Table grapes are good on their own, but also a very good ingredient to make gourmet recipes such as roasted veal or pork, in the preparation of rich salads with baby spinach and walnuts, and of course in the preparation of desserts.

Thank you Matteo for sharing your Chef knowledge with us, we look forward to having you again on Italian Food Lovers, next time with some gourmet recipes!

Of course we are very proud of this, so a blog post is due. Last week Mimi Murphy of Gourmet Magazine listed the Academia Barilla Culinary School in Parma, Italy among the “world’s best cooking schools”!

Gourmet Magazine, who categorizes cooking schools around the world according to characteristics such as “Adventure”, “Healthy” or “Relaxed” in its Gourmet’s Guide to the World’s Best Cooking Schools, actually ranks Academia Barilla among the top 5 cooking schools in the world in the category “Luxury“. Because, as reported by Gourmet magazine:

“What brings the act of cooking to life? For some, it means stepping into a world within a world. Each experience, whether sumptuous (a French château) or simple (a palm-fringed Indian island), should have a certain glamour about it, a certain sense of style.”

The article published by Gourmet Magazine about our Culinary School is very nice, with comments from author Mimi Murphy such as:

“I picked up some over-the-top flourishes, like a “recipe” for a parmesan wafer: spread grated cheese on wax paper, microwave for 20 to 30 seconds (let cool for a few more), then drape around the bottom of a glass to form a cup”. (from: What I learned)

Or also:

“How easy it was to customize a class—via email—based on what I actually liked”. (from: Biggest surprise)

Please visit the link that follows if you want to read the full article on Gourmet Magazine, which includes an exclusive recipe for a Cream of Artichoke Soup with Porcini (the recipe Mimi Murphy learned and cooked at the Academia Barilla Culinary School).

Thank you Mimi and Gourmet Magazine for the wonderful article!

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!

Today, March 21, is the first day of Spring; we leave behind us the cold days of winter (not so cold this year, after all) and look forward for more and more beautiful days of primavera, spring time.

So how about planning a trip to Parma, in the heart of Emilia-Romagna and the Italian Food Valley? Academia Barilla could be your perfect host for your Italian gourmet vacations.

Amazing Medieval town rich of culture and with plenty of historic highlights that meet culinary culture (check out our blog article from last year for a virtual visit to the city), Parma is also, as our readership knows, home to Academia Barilla, its Culinary School, and of course BIGAB, Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library.

Both Academia Barilla’s Culinary School and Gastronomic Library will release their official calendar of events and gourmet and cultural initiatives soon (you get a peek preview on BIGAB’s activities from a previous post), but make sure that you will have plenty of choices that you can customize.

Academia Barilla’s culinary learning vacations include everything from gourmet tours of the Italian Food Valley to hands-on Italian cooking classes at the Culinary School, cultural guided tours, exploration of traditional farms and local artisan producers of Italian regional specialties and more, including on the cultural side of experiencing Italy. Opera? We got that too. Contemporary art? Of course. Cinema? Yep.

Getting curious? We suggest you stay tuned with this blog for more details coming up soon, but also that you start inquiring at Academia Barilla about the gastronomic and cultural initiatives for 2008. You can call directly Academia Barilla in Parma, Italy at +39 0521 264-060 or toll-free number (numero verde) 800 376-116; if you are in the United States you can reach Academia Barilla the toll-free number 866 772-2233.

In the meanwhile, explore our Parma photo set on Flickr.com! (click on the image to go to the photo set).

See you in Parma in primavera!

Here are some pictures from the event hosted by Academia Barilla at the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library (BIGAB) last friday, when a delegation of Nutrition Science students from the University of Parma has been invited to discover the educational and research tools available at the Gastronomic Library, the unique gastronomic and culinary education center attached to the Academia Barilla Culinary school, in Parma, Italy.

In the photos below Dott. Giancarlo Gonizzi, BIGAB’s Curator, is pictured during the presentation of BIGAB’s capabilities and resources.

We just blogged about the calendar of activities that will see the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library at the center of a series of cultural events scheduled for this year in Parma, but we invite you to read our latest post for a complete overview of the upcoming events - and to stay tuned with us for more details, coming up soon!