Italian Food Lovers

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!

Welcome to our Ingredient of the month series. Today Chef Matteo Carboni from the Academia Barilla Culinary School wiil introduce to us the ingredient of the month for the month of May, fava beans (also called broad beans or tic beans around the Commonwealth, scientific name is vicia fava, according to Wikipedia).

Matteo will cook a great dish of pasta using the Garganelli pasta he showed us last week how to make using traditional pasta tools. For the sauce Chef Carboni suggests to use fava beans, ripe tomatoes, rosemary and garlic. The first step would be peeling the fava beans, which is very easy if we blench the beans in boiling water for about 20 minutes. Same operation to peel the tomatoes - check the video for Chef tips on how to cut the tomatoes into small cubes getting rid of the seeds.

While Chef Carboni cooks the fresh Garganelli pasta (approx cooking time 4-5 minutes) he prepares the sauce heating up some extra virgin olive oil to sauté the fava beans, to which he adds rosemary, garlic, pinch of salt and the diced tomatoes.

When the pasta is cooked Chef Carboni adds it to the sauce, and sautee for another half minute, finishing the dish while still in the pan with parsley, freshly grated black pepper and Pecorino Grand Cru. Add a bit of extra virgine olive oil (Matteo here uses Academia Barilla’s Monti Iblei Extra Virgin Olive Oil DOP) and black pepper before serving.

Final Chef tip from Matteo: you can add a pinch of grated black truffle to make the dish more unique in flavor and presentation.Buon Appetito 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!

Welcome back to another instalment of the Academia Barilla Culinary School videos. Today Chef Matteo Carboni will show us how to prepare fresh pasta by using simple ingredients, and traditional hand techniques.

Chef Carboni is getting ready to prepare two different types of traditional Italian fresh pasta, Maccheroni alla Chitarra and Garganelli, but we’ll get there with the second part of this video next week. Today we will learn how to make a perfect dough, so let’s follow Chef Carboni’s culinary tips and Chef advices from the video below.

Chef Carboni starts with the ingredients: white flour and eggs, we are going to need about 100 grams of flour (3 oz. approx) for each egg. It all starts with the set up of a wheel of flour where to add the eggs that will be beated inside the the flour wheel.

Add a pinch of salt and one or two tablespoons of Italian extra-virgin olive oil, and keep beating and mixing, adding more flour until the mass of dough start to take volume. At this point it starts the manual operation of hand beating, see the video for detailed tips from Chef Carboni on how to manage this simple but pretty critical preparation step.

When the dough is ready, following Chef Carboni advice, it is wise to immediately wrap the dough in transparent film to prevent it from air exposure. The dough should rest for about 20 minutes in wrap, but you will have to wait until next week to learn how to prepare Maccheroni alla Chitarra and Garganelli!