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!

Our readership knows that Academia Barilla established, back in 2005, a unique Gastronomic Library in Parma, Italy, that we often reference for cookbooks, recipes, and other Italian culinary culture highlights.

The Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library, annexed to the Academia Barilla Culinary School, is unique in its kind, and definitely is the most complete collection in the world of knowledge, history and resources for everything gastronomy.

The Library, also nicknamed BIGAB (acronym of the Italian BIblioteca Gastronomica Academia Barilla), counts today more than 8,000 titles and some of them are unique items, such as handwritten cookbooks or historic menus, or some books that date back to the 15th century.

All the books are indexed and included in the Italian Public Library system, and are retrievable online. But to be able to examine BIGAB’s item one has to pay a visit to the Library in Parma, which is always a very pleasant thing to do, specially after the recent remodeling and rearrangement of the Library space, which is now more comfy then ever.

Many visitors every year book their visits or just drop in during Library hours, and some of them come from abroad to perform some very specific culinary research, specially when involving historic aspects of the food culture, or very specific “long tail” niches of culinary culture.

In order to properly index the huge amount of books, menus, objects and other gastronomic treasures, BIGAB’s Curator Dott. Giancarlo Gonizzi and his team created a very unique indexing method, which is based on the general Library index code that ranges 1-9 for topics from the more general (0) to the more specific (9).

As explained by Dott. Gonizzi, the BIGAB team developed a parallel indexing mode where library items are also indexed with a separate code still ranging 0-9, but on a scale of exclusively culinary and gastronomic topics.

Just to recap the excellent explanation from Dott. Gonizzi of how the indexing system works, under the 0 code are indexed more general culinary items`such as standard cookbooks, while code 1 will index all historic recipes and cuisine books, 2 is the code to retrieve all the culinary books about ingredients only, while 3 is all about Italian regional cuisine.

Code 4 is for the international cuisine, and 5 is the code to index all books dedicated to professional Chef techniques, from food conservation to cooking and preparation. Code 6 defines all books and library items dedicated to thematic cuisines such as, for example, cooking for communities, cooking for singles, the VIP cookbooks, or the cuisine of love, the session we have been browsing a lot for our Valentine’s Day recipes, or our series of aphrodisiac recipes for last year’s Valentine Day.

The code list goes of course to 9, and will talk more in the future about it - just for you to know, the indexing method is absolutely amazing; on a search for a book on “Asburgic Cuisine in Trentino” requested by a visitor, it took less then 1 minute to spot the exact location of the rare cookbook and handle the copy to the visitor for her consultation (I personally witnessed this at my latest visit to BIGAB).

Dott. Giancarlo Gonizzi is pictured here above during a video interview at the Gastronomic Library, that we’ll publish here soon. For those who are curious, the sculpture next to him is the Guggenheim Award, offered to Academia Barilla at the end of last year by the Italian Foreign Trade Board (ICE - Istituto per il Commercio Estero) for being the Italian industrial company who invested more in culture not only in terms of sponsorships, but mostly on developing cultural activities in support of the business activity (BIGAB, of course), and for promoting Italian culture abroad.

BIGAB is not just a Library - on my latest visit last week for an interview to Dott. Gonizzi (that we’ll publish here soon), I discovered the full schedule of cultural and educational events BIGAB is involved with. Last week, the day after my visit, a meeting with approx. 80 Nutrition Science students from the University of Parma was scheduled at Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library. The focus of the meeting was introducing BIGAB’s Library system, and all the tools the students will be able to access for their research, thanks to a convention between Academia Barilla and the University of Parma.

A few cultural events are in BIGAB’s program for the first half of this year, such as Gusti d’Autore (Tastes of Author), an event scheduled on April 7-9, 2008, that includes literature and poetry readings about cooking, as well as food-related cinema screenings, all in conjunction with other special cultural events organized by the City of Parma. We’ll talk soon in details about Gusti d’Autore.

On May 6, 2008, BIGAB will be again under the cultural spotlights for the Premio Academia Barilla (Academia Barilla Award), a prize awarded by Academia Barilla to the best short movies about food and cooking. The event is organized by Academia Barilla in parallel with the leading Italian food expo CIBUS - you can be sure we will be blogging a lot more in details about it.

Other plans? We can give here a little anticipation about a Museum of Tomato, and a Museum of pasta just outside Parma… but we prefer to give you full updates about it as soon as we get more details. As always, stay tuned with Italian Food Lovers.