Italian Food Lovers

Parma, the capital of Italy’s Food Valley and home to Academia Barilla has been celebrating these days not only the love for Italian food but also the love for opera, with a full month of celebrations and events dedicated to the Italian opera Maestro Giuseppe Verdi with the Opera Verdi Festival 2008.

As our readership probably remember, last year we dedicated several blog posts to the Opera Verdi Festival 2007, blogging about the Maestro as well as about the Opera Festival and the gourmet opera tours organized by Academia Barilla to allow the Italian food and opera lovers to enjoy the event at its best.

This year the Opera Verdi Festival 2008 presented an even more structured program, with plenty of opera shows at several historic theaters and locations; a full digital booklet with program and info in English is downloadable at this link from the Teatro Regio website.

Academia Barilla offered luxury gourmet and opera travel packages to enjoy the experience of discovering Verdi’s opera, the city of Parma and the Italian Food Valley in full style.

In addition to the gourmet cultural tours organized in conjunction with the Festival Verdi, Academia Barilla provides more gourmet and cultural tours to Parma and Italy’s Food Valley, that we love to call Italian Culinary Learning Vacations, as they allow tour guests to learn a lot about Italian culinary culture while enjoying a luxury vacation.

For more info, details and booking for Academia Barilla’s cultural, culinary and gastronomic tours, please get in touch with Academia Barilla in Parma at +39 0521 264060 (toll-free number from Italy 800 376-116), or in the United States at the US toll-free number 1-866-772-2233.

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!

Second episode of our “virtual gastronomic tour” that follows the agenda of the Academia Barilla Gastronomic VIP Tour to Emilia-Romagna organized and guided by Academia Barilla Culinary School Alumni Frank DiMaria.

After exploring Parma’s locations and initiatives included in the gastronomic tour with a previous post, today we will discover all the learning, teamworking and fun moments the tour guest will enjoy at the Academia Barilla Culinary Center.

Located right in front of the 5-star hotel where the tour guest will stay in Parma, the Academia Barilla Culinary Center will be like a second home in Parma for the VIP tour participants.

On Monday, September 22, day two of the VIP gastronomic tour, the first learning and fun moment at Academia Barilla is guaranteed. After breakfast, tour guests will be welcomed to Academia Barilla with a guided tour of the Culinary Center and the first hands-on cooking session in the morning, that ends with a group lunch based on the gourmet dishes cooked together.

Two days later, after discovering Parma, the Italian Food Valley with all its century-old food culture secrets (artisan food production, Medieval castles, the culinary culture and food specialties of Modena and Bologna) and right after a morning walking trip to the local outdoor market, a second hands-on cooking class at the Academia will focus on a menu that includes all the traditional gastronomy products discovered during the entire VIP gastronomic tour.

The group lunch in Academia Barilla that follows will be prepared by the tour participants, more food fun after the food learning!

Academia Barilla will be stage for a “farewell event” with group dinner also on the evening of day five of the 6-day VIP gastronomic tour, with a gourmet dinner menu prepared by the Chefs of the Academia Barilla Culinary Center the tour guest have known in the previous days.

We cannot really synthesize in a blog post the experience of learning how to cook, how to taste traditional food products and enjoying top gourmet food at Academia Barilla, you really have to experience it directly.

In case you missed an article we published a couple of weeks ago, did you know that Gourmet magazine just listed the Academia Barilla Culinary Center in Parma among the world’s best cooking school, ranking our Culinary Center among the top 5 schools in the world for the category “Luxury cooking schools“?

Also, there may be the chance you will be interviewed for our blog about your experience at Academia Barilla and with the VIP gastronomy tour, as we will be there too! You could end up also being a testimonial for our Italian Food Lovers blog! See you soon in Parma at the Academia Barilla Culinary Center!

Remember that the tour program may be subject to variations - check out the program and tour details published here and just stay tuned with Frank DiMaria for latest news and updates on this Academia Barilla VIP gastronomy tour. For more info and booking call Frank at +1 847 965-0672 or +1 847 417-7587, or email him at frankdimaria@comcast.net.

Next blog post for this series: artisan food producers, a Medieval castle and the Ferrari Museum!