Italian Food Lovers

Last December a group of American students from NY Universities (Monroe College and Paul Smith College, NY) spent some time in Parma to study Italian Cuisine at the Academia Barilla Culinary Center .

The group of students were headed by Giacomo Berselli, President of the Marco Polo Foundation, the organization who sponsored the students’ trip to Italy. After spending 7 weeks in Otranto (Puglia) and 3 weeks in Ferrara (Emilia-Romagna), the students attended cooking classes at the Academia Barilla Culinary School in Parma for additional 2 weeks.

During their Parma residency the US students of the Marco Polo project studied the typical products of the Parma region, and attended classes of olive oil tasting, Parmigiano Reggiano and Prosciutto di Parma tasting, as well as Balsamic Vinegar of Modena and wine tasting. After theory and tasting classes in the morning the young Chefs spent some time researching Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library, with the support of the Library Curator Giancarlo Gonizzi and his team.
The afternoon were generally spent in the kitchen, trying dishes and recipes containing the ingredients the students have been working on all day, under the guidance of Academia Barilla Executive Chef Nicola Bindini and his Chef team.

To complete the students’ full immersion into the art of Italian gastronomy, Academia Barilla organized also culinary and gastronomy tours for the students, allowing them to discover the secrets of producers and farmers of authentic regional products, and to meet the countryside traditions and history of the Emilia-Romagna region, that certainly is a key ingredient of our traditional recipes.

At the end of the 2 weeks of classes the Academia Barilla Culinary School released to each student a certificate of completion of studies that, join with the other certificates awarded by the students at the other learning locations across Italy, would have grant them the formal recognition of the exams and classes by their respective original colleges (Monroe College and Paul Smith College, both in the NY State).

Here below a couple of testimonial notes from the Marco Polo students, as written on the Academia guest book, pictured here above with more Marco Polo testimonials:

“Thank you Barilla for such an informative 2 weeks. I enjoyed myself thoroughly would tell my family friends about this wonderful place. Thank you so much.”

“Ciao, this school has taught me that food to the Italian is religion and the kitchen is their church. Thank you Academia Barilla.”

To know more about the student program we interviewed Marco Polo Foundation President Giacomo Berselli who firmly says that “Academia Barilla is state-of-the-art of the Italian Cuisine“!

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Stay automatically tuned and always updated with the latest news from Academia Barilla and Italian Food Lovers with the Italian Food Lovers RSS Feed.If you are already using an RSS Feed reader software this post will make sense to you, but if you are not familiar with RSS technology, let us immediately advice you that RSS feeds don’t have much to do with food, so don’t rush to the kitchen!

An RSS feed is a simple file that tells the RSS reader software of your choice to constantly monitor our blog (when you are online with your computer). Your software will send you and alert everytime we publish a new post on Italian Food Lovers. It generally looks like receiving an email, with the blog title as subject of your RSS alert, and the first lines of the post copy as summary. You don’t have to come check our blog every day to see if we posted something new, your RSS reader will tell you when there are new gourmet news for you!

If you are still looking for the right RSS reader software we can suggest a simple search on Google for “RSS reader software”, that takes you to this result page where pretty much all the best solutions are represented.

We like Feedburner, we think is a good platform that covers pretty much most of your favorite RSS fedd choices, and is definitely a good standard also from the user standpoint. You should have a look at their website.

If you are ready to subscribe to the Italian Food Lovers RSS feed now, just click on the RSS icon below and choose your RSS platform of choice.

Subscribe to Italian Food Lover blog with your favorite RSS reader

It all should work automatically, otherwise just feed manually our RSS URL into your favorite RSS feed reader - http://feeds.feedburner.com/ItalianFoodLovers - this should definitely work!

If you don’t see your favorite RSS reader in the Feedburner distribution network please let us know, and we’ll burn a new custom feed for you instantly!!!

More about RSS soon -

Happy new 2007 from Italian Food Lovers and the Academia Barilla blogging team!!!

Hi there, first of all, let me apologize in behalf of all the Italian Food Lovers blogging team for the quality of the images we published up to today, which is not so good, we know it… :(Unfortunately we are experiencing a little bug with the image uploader of our blog platform (and another couple of techie things), and we’ll have to wait for our tech team to be back from their vacation break to fix it all.

We promise you that we’ll publish amazing and gourmet magazine-quality images of food creations, culinary classes, Italian gastronomy and everything Italian Food Lovers soon.

In the meanwhile, we’ll provide you with a lot of learning and gourmet reading pleasure, thanks to the passion Leigh and Massimo are putting into the Italian Food Lovers blog. We really love blogging! :)

We are also getting a number of videos ready for you - so stay tuned for some video entertainment on Italian Food Lovers. If you are hungry for videos now, please enjoy the first three videos on the Academia Barilla website.

We are also uploading homecooked videos on YouTube.com, so you can enjoy at least another 11 of them - if you speak Italian… we’ll record some new videos in English soon, don’t worry.

Please be patient, as you normally are when it comes to cooking time. I also promise I will provide soon a full text translation of our existing videos - an exclusive gift for the Italian Food Lovers blog readers!

We are also setting up all the right RSS feeds, so that you can use your favorite RSS feed reader to stay in touch with us. More on RSS very soon. In the meanwhile, please use our standard feed www.italian-food-lovers.com/feed/.

Last anticipation: we are taking in consideration the feedback from some of you early blog readers, and we’ll be undergo some little design interventions at the beginning of the new year (next week!), to make sure to offer you a better usability and entertaining experience on Italian Food Lovers!

Keep sending us your comments - it’s easy, just use the link below.

Happy New Year to all Italian Food Lovers in the blogosphere!

See you soon in 2007.

Are you heading out for a restaurant today or during the next Holydays?Looking for a very good Italian restaurant in the United States and don’t know where to book your dinner? Let Academia Barilla and Zagat Guides help you in your restaurant choice.

Academia Barilla is proud to offer a definitive guide to America’s top Italian restaurants, a precious pocket guide for all Italian food Lovers, published by Zagat in partnership with Academia Barilla.

By partnering with the Zagat guide organization, we’ve helped survey some of America’s most choosy eaters in order to better understand what dishes, wines, products, and restaurants America’s Italian Food Lovers choose as their favorites.

Why are we proud to join with the Zagat name to produce this guide? Simply put - quality Italian food, no matter where it is served, is in need of strong recognition.

Whether it be an incredible gelato experience on Columbus Street in San Francisco or that little pasta joint on the corner of Sullivan Street in Manhattan, our readers and our friends all have experiences they want to share about their favorite Italian places, and their most memorable meals.

The Zagat Survey guidebook lists and reviews the top 1,500 Italian restaurants in the United States, so whether you are traveling or just want to make a reservation for a good Italian restaurant in your area, we are sure you’ll find the right gourmet restaurant for you!

Of course, it won’t come as a surprise to realize that many of these restaurants use Academia Barilla products. If you tasted this excellent Chianti Wine Jelly and Pancetta on this Beef Tenderloin or the sweet, nutty flavor of freshly cut Parmigiano-Reggiano and decadent Pecorino Toscano on the after-dinner cheese plate, as suggested by Epicuriosus.com, then you’ve tasted Academia Barilla.

Click here to buy a copy of the Zagat guide at the Academia Barilla online bookstore, and leave us a comment with your favorite Italian restaurant, and maybe even a dish or two, in the comments below.

Also, as the “serving suggestion” from the picture let you guess, the Academia Barilla Zagat Survey guide to the top Italian restaurants in the US is also a perfect Christmas gift idea for all your Italian food lovers friends!
Buon appetito, and Merry Christmas!!!

Buongiorno Italian Food Lovers!Let me quickly introduce myself, my name is Carla, and I’m in staff at the Academia Barilla Press Office.

Let’s immediately say that I’m Italian and, even if my English is pretty fine and fluent, I‘m sure you’ll smile at my Italian accent listening to me speaking English – sorry in advance for typos and weird ways of saying things every now and then!

I hope that, despite of the accent, you will appreciate all the updates, the stories and the interviews that I will post on this blog for all the Italian Food Lovers. I will treat you well on this blog with plenty of useful information.

For the gourmet fans: I will share on this blog top Chefs’ tips straight out from the Chef classes at the Academia Barilla Culinary School. I will also dig for you in the hidden treasures from our Gastronomic Library with culinary and cooking books that date back to 16th century. You’ll be amazed by our discoveries. And I will keep you updated on our calendar of classes, courses, tours and activities at the Italian Culinary Institute in Parma, Italy.

I will also take you with us on our culinary learning vacations across Italy to discover the secrets and centuries-old techniques of farmers and artisan producers of traditional balsamic vinegar, Parmigiano Reggiano, Prosciutto di Parma, extra-virgin olive oil and other traditional regional Italian products.

For the gourmet pleasure of our professional and home Chef readers I will make sure to post interviews with Italian and International top Chefs that give classes in our Culinary School, Italian cuisine Chefs’ tips, and I will keep you updated on the availability of Italian regional DOP gourmet specialties.

And for you all food industry and media fellows, I will report from all food shows and conventions worldwide where Academia Barilla will represent Italy as Ambassador of Italian gourmet cuisine.

See you on the Italian Food Lover blog, and Merry Gourmet Christmas to everybody!!!