My journey as a cook started relatively late in my life. I have always like food, but as you read in About Me, I started cooking as an adult.
What I am inspired by right now
- Sourdough bread baking (I make mainly gluten-free, but study wheat bread as well).
- Fermentation (mainly Koji/Miso-related, and L.A.B).
- Healthy food.
- Japanese-inspired techniques and Japanese ingredients.
What inspired me through my journey
I started by watching videos on Youtube, especially Gordon Ramsey’s videos. The chef has an energy, a passion, which is just contagious. He speaks about the food he is cooking in a way that just makes you want to turn on the stock, chop something, and throw it in! He was my real first inspiration, which drew me to cooking.
Then, once I started, I fell in love with it. I bought a lot of books on techniques, binged-watched a lot of videos, and when I got more skilled also took some online classes. Thomas Keller, through his online classes, was one more source of inspiration. The way he treats the ingredients, his food philosophy, and his rigorous French-inspired technique. French technique was probably my first love, because as a newbie in cooking I wanted to learn how use my knife, how to make a good Boeuf Bourguignon, how to make a sauce. My approach is always been of wanting to understand why things are done in a certain way, so that I can tweak recipes, make them my own. I believe that is also why I was more drawn to learning techniques than learning recipes. And by seeking that I stumbled into somebody who radically changed the way I cook: Samin Nostrat.
“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat is a book that changed the cooking game for me. I highly recommend it to any amateur cook that wants to learn why you do what you do in recipes, and by learning things this way you can free yourself of recipes themselves. You can become a cook that when sees ingredients already knows the challenges they pose by thinking what the ingredient is made of and how to elevate it. You can react when something unexpected happens while cooking. You can adjust your process because you will understand what is going on. You will know WHY a recipes has a certain step, and whether it is important or not. Besides, her book is beautifully illustrated and very funny. She has a great personality!
There is also Brad Leone from Bon Appetit, who through his “It’s Alive” Youtube show got me to know fermentation, inspiring me into learn more, experiment, try. Joshua Weissman is one more cook who I watch all the time and have a lot of respect for. Alex (French guy cooking) makes the list as well.
Fermentation-wise, how not to be inspired by “The Noma Guide to Fermentation” by René Redzepi and David Zilber. The book is so interesting that I would advise it even to people who have no interest in fermenting themselves but are interested in food. Reading this book is really what made me pull the trigger on starting some fermentation projects, among which fermenting 8kg of miso in my London flat for 1 year.
As I grew as a cook, I naturally moved away from French cooking and got closer to my roots (Italian- and Sicilian-inspired cooking) and Japanese cooking (for which I have the utmost respect due to its seeking of balance, which is very often achieved with wonderful, delicious, often simple, and extremely balanced dishes).
I also like Indian cooking, which I am getting started with, maybe we will explore that together! In general, I really like mixing ingredients, techniques, from different cultures. Often you will find in my recipes that I maybe employ a Japanese way of doing things on Italian-looking recipes, or viceversa. This happens because I always like to think about the role of a technique or an ingredient in a dish, as Samin taught me.
For Sicilian cooking, I recommend “Made in Sicily” by chef Giorgio Locatelli, who, ironically, grew up in norther Italy and put foot in Sicily only as an adult, but fell so much in love with it that went there summer after summer, exploring the food, the culture, the history. All this information and love are poured into his book, which is a wonderful read.
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