What’s old is new again in the hands of some of Italy’s avant-garde chefs. In this workshop, you’ll witness some of the creativity permeating Italian restaurants today—but only after a trip through some more traditional kitchens.

Meet Your Guest Chefs

Eight distinguished chefs and a food writer will lead you in this exploration of Italy’s table, past and present, with a focus on the foods of the South. Meet them now:

Paul Bartolotta is co-owner of The Bartolotta Restaurant Group in Milwaukee, which includes Ristorante Bartolotta, Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro, Mr. B’s, and The Bartolotta Catering Company. He received the James Beard Award for Best Midwest Chef in 1994 and spent many years in Italy and France, training with Valentino Marcattili, Roger Vergé and Paul Bocuse. He formerly worked as executive chef of San Domenico in New York City and Spiaggia in Chicago.

Lidia Matticchio Bastianich is co-owner of Felidia and Becco restaurants in New York; Lidia’s in Kansas City and Pittsburgh; and Esperienze Italiane, a food, wine and cultural tour company. Bastianich hosts “Lidia’s Italian American Kitchen” and “Lidia’s Italian Table” on public television, and has written three cookbooks: Lidia’s Italian American Kitchen, Lidia’s Italian Table and La Cucina di Lidia.

Massimo Bottura is chef-owner of Osteria la Francescana, recently rated the finest restaurant in Modena, the culinary capital of the Emilia-Romagna region. Bottura trained extensively with Alain Ducasse at his restaurant Louis XV in Monte Carlo before opening La Francescana.

Antonio de Rosa is executive chef of the restaurant in the Hotel Mercure Villa Romanazzi-Carducci in the Pugliese capital of Bari. De Rosa teaches at the Bari Hotel and Catering School and is a member of the Italian National Culinary Team, which competes annually in the Culinary Olympics. De Rosa has played a prominent role for years in the international promotion of Pugliese cuisine.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins is a food writer and author of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, Flavors of Puglia, Flavors of Tuscany and Essential Mediterranean. Jenkins was a former staff writer for The New York Times and continues to freelance for the Times. She also writes frequently for Food & Wine and other national publications. Jenkins leads the CIA’s culinary tour program to Sicily.

Domenico Maggi is executive chef at the restaurant in the Golf Hotel in Riva dei Tessali on the Ionian coast of Puglia. Maggi teaches at the Bari Hotel and Catering School, is captain of the Italian National Culinary Team and has received numerous awards in international culinary competitions. Like his colleague Antonio de Rosa, he is a respected proponent of Pugliese cuisine.

Anna Rita Simoncini and Mauro Stopponi own I Sette Consoli restaurant in the Umbrian town of Orvieto. Simoncini is in the kitchen while Stopponi, her husband, runs the dining room of this elegant restaurant known for its attention to traditional products, its comprehensive wine list and wonderful desserts.

Craig Stoll (’85) is chef and co-owner of Delfina in San Francisco’s Mission District. A CIA graduate, Stoll has worked at Tutto Bene, Timo’s and Palio d’Asti in San Francisco. He was named Rising Star Chef by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999 and San Francisco Magazine in 2000. In 2001, Food and Wine magazine named him one of its Best New Chefs.

Lidia’s Vegetable Table

“In the traditional Italian menu, vegetables play a tremendous role,” says Lidia Bastianich. “If you’re going to serve Italian cuisine, not to be familiar with vegetables is doing a disservice to Italian culture, your restaurant and your clients.”

Bastianich believes that the Italian vegetable repertoire is a vast resource for American chefs, who have not explored it enough. She would like to see chefs working in Italian restaurants in America using more vegetables throughout the menu, and she has no shortage of ideas based on Italian tradition. Here are a few:

eggplant cooked in vinegar and water, then marinated with olive oil, garlic and mint
zucchini dipped in flour and egg, fried and rolled with capers (“a wonderful antipasto”)
radicchio braised with anchovy and garlic
roasted butternut squash wedges with toasted almonds and balsamic drizzle
cauliflower “steaks” pan-fried with garlic, then topped with anchovies and breadcrumbs
a salad of shaved celery, porcini and Parmesan
a salad of oranges, fennel, olive oil and vinegar, to serve with crab or sardines
zucchini boiled whole, dressed and served with boiled eggs and red onion
fava bean puree with braised chicory and toasted croutons, a Pugliese specialty

Watch Cody Hogan, chef at Lidia’s Kansas City , make a salad of spaghetti squash, toasted almonds and Gorgonzola.

At Lidia’s in Kansas City, Hogan persuaded local farmers to grow some of the Italian vegetables he couldn’t get. He invited farmers and local chefs to a meeting at his restaurant and passed out seed catalogs. Potential suppliers met potential buyers, and deals were struck. “You can make a difference doing that,” says Hogan.

Up-and-coming nettles: Craig Stoll’s wild nettle tagliatelle

What are the up-and-coming vegetables in America’s Italian kitchens? Let Lidia Bastianich introduce you to some we are sure to see more of.

Pasta Traditions from Southern Italy

Historically, the southernmost regions of mainland Italy—Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria —have been the country’s poorest. Cooks there have learned to make a lot from little and are used to creating meals from a handful of pasta and the produce of their garden. In contrast to pasta dishes in the north, which are often richly sauced with meat, butter, cheese and cream, the pasta dishes of southern Italy show more clearly the struggle to make something from nothing.

In the more affluent north, fresh pasta dough contains eggs—and the more, the better. In contrast, Pugliese cooks make many of their traditional forms, such as the ear-shaped orecchiette, with just semolina and water. In the poorest households, in times past, the orecchiette might be made with farina di grano brucciato (burnt wheat flour), produced from the fallen grains scavenged post-harvest after the wheat field was burned.

Today, says Domenico Maggi, a chef and teacher in Puglia, these old recipes are being revived. People may be prosperous enough now to afford white flour, but they recognize the uniqueness and extraordinary flavor of the old dishes.

“Many of my colleagues go to Ferran Adrià or other big chefs to get new ideas,” says Maggi. “When I’m at home in Puglia, I go chase the nonnas (grandmothers) to get the recipes from them.” Semola battuta is one such recipe, which Maggi recently learned from an old woman in his village. The dough is unusual for Puglia in that it contains eggs and cheese. Typically, the pasta is cooked in turkey broth on the day after Christmas.

Watch chef Domenico Maggi make the Pugliese pasta dish semola battuta. [Part 1][Part 2]

Semolina comes from durum wheat, a high-protein wheat of a different species than the wheat used for all-purpose flour. If you remove the bran and germ from a kernel of durum wheat and grind it, you get semolina, which can be fine or coarse. If you grind the semolina extra fine, you get durum flour. In Puglia, many pasta doughs call for fine semolina (semola in Italian).

“Most recipe books in English will tell you that you can’t make handmade pasta from semolina,” says Nancy Jenkins. “That’s not true. Pugliese housewives make such pasta every day, or every Sunday, and nobody complains that it is too hard to work.” However, a semolina-and-water dough should always be allowed to rest for 15 minutes before rolling.

Orecchiette con cime di rapa: ear-shaped pasta with broccoli rabe and garlic

Cavatelli con fagioli: bean-shaped pasta with cooked cannellini or cranberry beans

Ceci e tria: chickpeas with homemade semolina pasta; some of the noodles are cooked with the chickpeas, the rest are fried and sprinkled on top

Maccheroni ai ferri: short pasta shaped around a knitting needle, served with tomato sauce or ragù

Saltare in padella: Literally, to sauté in a skillet. A technique for incorporating pasta and sauce. The pasta is removed from the boiling water a minute or two early and transferred to the hot sauce to finish cooking. Note Domenico’s use of this technique in his pasta demo.

Stuffed Large Squid

From a cook’s perspective, the southern region of Puglia is one of Italy’s most enticing. Produce thrives in its fertile soil and sunny climate, and the coastline teems with fish and shellfish, such as mussels, squid, octopus, sardines and red mullet.

Puglia is Italy’s most important olive oil-producing region, providing two-thirds of the country’s oil—much of it excellent. And some of its wines, such as the white Locorotondo and the red Salice Salentino, deserve attention abroad. Is it any wonder that Puglia calls itself “the California of Italy”?

Puglia’s cherry tomatoes are famed throughout the country. In late summer, home gardeners will pull up their plants and hang the vines, still heavy with tomatoes, in a cool, airy place to dry. The climate is so benign that people can conserve them through the winter that way. They dry gradually, becoming sweeter and more intense—far better than any canned tomato. “In winter, you go to your outdoor pantry, pull some tomatoes off the vine and squeeze them into your pan,” says Nancy Jenkins. “All the flesh comes out and the skin stays behind. It’s a fabulous thing.”

The Pugliese diet exemplifies the healthful Mediterranean diet, based on beans, grains, vegetables, a little seafood and olive oil. The fava bean, fresh and dried, is at its heart. Fave e cicorie, one of Puglia’s emblematic dishes, consists of dried fava bean puree enriched with olive oil and accompanied by cooked greens, such as dandelion or turnip greens. What could be more healthful? Dried fava puree also sauces fresh pasta, as in Lasagne with Mushrooms and Fava Beans. (Lasagne isn’t the name of a layered pasta dish in Puglia, but the name for a long fresh noodle.) In spring, fresh favas are stewed with artichokes during the brief period when they’re both available.

Pugliese cooking is women’s cooking, says Jenkins, created in the home. “It is a cuisine without rules,” says the author, “because it is based solely on what’s in the larder.”

Calzone of Spiced Ricotta with Lamb Ragù

“When we talk about a ragù in Apulian cooking, we mean a sauce cooked very slowly and based on tomato sauce,” says Antonio de Rosa. A ragù builds its flavor from the bottom up, beginning with sauteed aromatic vegetables and herbs, followed by well-browned meat, then a splash of wine simmered until it’s absorbed, then tomato puree. During the long, slow cooking, the sauce absorbs flavor and body from the meat, and all the elements knit together.

The meat can be poultry, pork, lamb, veal, beef or a mixture. In some southern Italian families, the cooked meat is shredded and returned to the pasta sauce. In others, the meat remains whole and is served as a separate course. In that case, the meat-flavored sauce—minus the meat—is ladled over pasta and served first.

Yet another variation can be seen in Puglia’s Maccheroni ai Ferri with Stuffed Chicken Ragù. For this dish, a whole chicken is stuffed with breadcrumbs, chicken liver and seasonings, then braised whole in tomato sauce. The rich, flavorful sauce dresses the pasta, but the chicken is sliced and served on top, not separately. A feast, to be sure.

Because of the time involved, a ragù is Sunday food in Italy . “It is the smell of the old town of Bari on Sunday morning,” says Domenico Maggi. “Ragù is the smell in the air.”

A ragù always tastes better when made with bone-in meat, such as shoulder, neck or shank. The bones contribute body to the sauce.

Sometimes a ragù is served over stuffed pasta, such as ravioli or tortelli. Such time-consuming dishes are often relegated to holidays, when there are enough people at the table to reward the effort. Puglia’s Calzoni of Spiced Ricotta with Lamb Ragù is such a dish, made typically for Christmas or Easter and a specialty of the town of Altamura. Not the pizza-like turnover that Americans know by that name, these calzoni are ravioli filled with lightly sweetened ricotta.

Watch chef Antonio de Rosa make Pugliese calzone with a long-simmered lamb ragù. [Part 1][Part 2]

Cannelloncino of Mortadella

Italian food is changing in Italy, evolving to reflect international ideas and contemporary tastes. Although we think of Italian food as firmly rooted in tradition, some of the country’s most-watched chefs are doing what creative people do and taking their menus in surprising new directions.

In the eyes of Paul Bartolotta, an American chef who cooked for many years in Italy, such change is healthy and inevitable. In the 1980s, many high-end Italian restaurants drew their inspiration from France, says Bartolotta. Their food was refined and elegant, but it had lost some of its Italian soul. Diners who wanted regional food stuck to trattorias, where the cooking was rustic, simple and dependable.

Just as Italian chefs looked outside for inspiration, so did Italian winemakers in the 1980s. Many began modernizing their wineries, purchasing small French oak barrels for aging, and replacing traditional grape varieties with new plantings of Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon.

A good thing? In part, says Bartolotta. The acclaimed Super Tuscan wines are a result of this international outlook. When Tuscan winemakers began adding Cabernet Sauvignon to their Sangiovese, they created a new category of wine with real merit.

“It’s important that we allow this evolution,” says Bartolotta, speaking of both wine and food. “Italy can’t be making osso buco forever.”

Bartolotta believes that many Italian chefs today are struggling with how to move the Italian kitchen forward. The best ones are no longer looking to France but to their own regional traditions. Using familiar ingredients or dishes as a starting point, they then transform them with new techniques, such as foams and gels.

Massimo Bottura, whose restaurant La Francescana in Modena has a Michelin star, is among those chefs trying to find new ways to interpret old dishes. Rewarding his efforts, Gambero Rosso, the prestigious Italian guide, named him its chef of the year in 2002.

In the following video demonstration, you can watch Bottura in action as he takes a well-known dish from his region (cannelloni) and well-known regional ingredients (prosciutto and mortadella) and creates something that Bartolotta calls “shockingly new.”

Just to clarify: the “pasta” in the video is a gelatin made from prosciutto broth and agar-agar.

Watch Massimo Bottura make some highly unconventional “pasta.” [Part 1][Part 2]