Dear Mr. Nico & Friends,
It is a pleasure and an honor to write a guest entry for one of my favorite food blogs. I’m currently doing a Master of Management in Food & Beverage at SDA Bocconi University in Milan. Part of the program involves incredible field trips around Italy discovering (and tasting) this country’s very rich culinary heritage.
On our latest trip we travelled to the charming little town of Colorno, just outside of Parma in Emilia-Romagna, the culinary heart and soul of Italy. My classmates and I spent 3 days at ALMA – La Scuola Internazionale di Cucina Italiana (Italy’s culinary institute started by one of the founders of modern Italian cuisine, Gualtiero Marchesi). Besides having a full-time program they offer customized courses as well. I can’t think of a better way, to spend a long weekend learning how to cook Italian cuisine.
The first class was entitled “Chef Work Basic Instruction”. We had a lecture on Marchesi’s approach to Italian cuisine. In the Marchesi code, food should be as simple and as understandable as possible, using the best and freshest ingredients and putting them on display! He’s also a great fan of Japanese cuisine, which he feels has a similar approach to the Italian style of putting the ingredients at the forefront. Besides French food, Japanese and Italian are my favorite so I was excited to spend 3 days learning to cook from one of Italy’s most famous chef.
After the lecture, we couldn’t wait to taste his food and went from theory to practice, watching 3 very talented chefs, make amazing dishes for us and teach us the “tricks” behind the trade. They started with the 1 main ingredient and 2-3 secondary ingredients, which should be complementary or contrasting, approach to a single dish. Our first dish was: “matcha green tea tagliolini salad with missoltini (dried Aula fish from lago di Guarda)”, complemented with a carrot and orange juice sauce. It was the perfect, refreshing light summer dish. The green tea in the tagliolini complemented the salty missoltini and the carrot and orange juice gave it a nice semi-sweet, smooth finish. This beautiful mix of color, taste and texture was a feast to the palate and to the eyes. What I really enjoyed was listening to the tips given by the chefs and being able to ask them all of the questions we wanted on the preparation. For a food lover like myself, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn (and hopefully be able to one day recreate) the art of Italian gastronomy. For example, in this particular dish I learned that to make pasta salad with tagliolini, you cook the pasta slightly more than al-dente and you then rinse it off with cold water to prevent it from cooking further and have the pasta maintain its firmness and not become completely sloppy.
They also taught us how to make risotto with goat cheese, oysters and chive and the basic 101s on making true, Italian risotto. From the aged carnaroli rice from Vercelli that you should use (yes, apparently rice is better aged as well, who knew) to the type of pan and wooden spatula, these were all precious tips and I am now hoping that I will finally be able to make a good risotto!
My favorite dish was the lamb chops steamed in lettuce leaves with sweet garlic puree. WOW is all I can say about one of the best things I’ve eaten in a long long time and which didn’t require any butter, cream, olive oil or sauce, just beautiful, fresh ingredients at their best. The lamb was steam cooked in a bamboo dim-sum basket placed over a steaming pot of water containing fresh herbes provencale, pepper and white wine, producing the most aromatic bouquet you can imagine. The garlic puree was made cooking garlic in milk, which was changed three times to take away the strong taste of garlic. In the end, this was one of the most perfect dishes you can imagine, the garlic puree perfectly complementing tender lamb chops that melted in your mouth.
In the evening, we had a “Pizza, Foccacia & Gelatto” themed evening. We were each assigned to a station where we would learn how to make one of them. I chose the pizza stand and dressed up as a “Pizzaiola” for the evening. Pizza-making my friends is TRICKY! Getting the dough just right, requires a technique and handling which you acquire only through rigourous practice and years of training. I didn’t realize that once you start working the dough you have to be extremely quick or it loses elasticity and you have to start all over again. Newfound respect for pizzaiolos! Once we finished, a lovely table was set up for us outside in the courtyard of the beautiful ALMA building (an ancient palazzo), with an ice-cream vendor stand containing the ice-cream my classmates had just made with classic italian music and opera playing in the background.
On the final day we were put to a live practical test on everything we had learned the past couple of days by preparing a Marchesi’s 7 course 3 Michelin star menu. We were put in a restaurant kitchen and assigned to our stations. Furthermore, they had camera crews following filming and interviewing us and the Chefs putting us under pressure. I felt like I was in a Top Chef episode. Like Mr. Nico, I am a sweet tooth and as we hadn’t done desserts yet I chose the dessert station. We made a deconstructed strawberry done 3 ways dessert: homemade strawberry marshmallow with strawberry coulis and a strawberry salad, YUM! Making the marshamallow was the trickiest part though, especially the presentation. What I found really interesting was that they put a little bit of black pepper and lemon balm herb in the strawberry salad to bring out the flavors so that’s why simple fruit salads always taste better at gourmet restaurants, who knew. At the end we all sat down and ate the lunch we had prepared but each one of us was in charge of serving and presenting the dish we had made.
Each dish was beautifuly paired with a wine chosen by the school’s sommelier (they also have a sommelerie school) and we were given our diploma’s at the end of lunch, can’t think of a better way to end these three days in Italian gastronomical heaven.
Laetitia
ALMA
Piazza Garibaldi, 26
43052 Colorno (Parma)
+39 0521.52.52.11
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