Masterclass: know your rice
Eaten by around half the world’s population every day, rice is a versatile staple that can be the base for a range of delicious dishes
Carlo Casoni has been a Corporate Chef at Mutti for 13 years, having previously worked for Ferrari F1 and in kitchens as far-flung as the Maldives and Melbourne.
When most people think about Italy, they think about pizza. After Chinese food, pizza is the most well-known takeaway. Italian food is much more varied than this. Our food tradition has more than 2,000 years of history. All the regions, towns and villages have their own ways of doing things. Every summer holiday, I travel around Italy for five or six days and I discover something new every time.
Meaning of Italian cuisine
Any cuisine from the Mediterranean diet is about making delicious, easy-to-prepare dishes quickly with few ingredients. It takes five minutes to cook a plate of pasta and tomato sauce. All you need is olive oil, onion, tomatoes, some seasoning and basil. For Italian chefs, the two most important factors when making a dish are that it’s made from quality vegetables, meat or fish and is very satisfying for the customer to eat.
Pasta make this yourself wherever possible. Have a go at different shapes and don’t overcomplicate the method or ingredients.
Extra virgin olive oil choose olive oil sourced from Italy. Extra virgin is the least processed and most flavourful oil, so use it for everything.
Vegetables for northern dishes like kale and potatoes are used to create hearty dishes. In the south, tomatoes, peppers and courgettes feature heavily.
Tomatoes the king and cornerstone ingredient of Italian cooking. Know your tomato varieties and how best to use them in different forms.
Bread you might think that the French are Europe’s bread masters, but Italy has a huge variety of its own, from focaccia to piadina.
Other than learning dishes directly from an Italian chef, the best way to create authentic dishes outside of the country is to import and use Italian products. For example, if you’re going to make a simple plate of tomato pasta and the pasta comes from France, the tomatoes from Greece and olive oil from Morocco, the result is not as good. Nowadays, it’s possible to source Italian products wherever you are in the world. The country is one of the best producers of canned vegetables. Whether you want mushrooms, peas or tomatoes, Italian growers and manufacturers go beyond EU standards. We use less water in the canning process, so you get a concentration of taste in each product.
1 Busiate: create ‘ribbon spirals’ by dividing the dough into small pieces. Roll into a thin sausage and wrap it around a wooden skewer to make a spiral. Slip this off the skewer and repeat.
2 Tortellini: use a round cutter to divide the thinly rolled dough, put a small amount of filling into the centre and fold the dough into a half moon (using a dab of water to seal). Draw the corners together and press to seal.
3 Tagliatelle: roll out a portion of the dough on a rolled surface until thin, then roll it up into a loose log and cut it into medium-width strips. Toss with semolina and use immediately.
4 Farfalle: to create these ‘bow-ties’ make the dough using the method above, then cut it into even rectangles. Pinch the long edge into the centre to form a little ‘tunnel’, then pinch the middle.
5 Giant penne: once thinly rolled, cut into evenly sized squares using a sharp knife or pizza cutter, then place a wooden spoon handle on one corner and roll diagonally. Press to seal the shape.
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