Graduated but… where do I go from here?

Once I finished my studies as a biologist I decided to take a break from my field and find a job following another passion of mine. Bread and baking were my biggest interests back then. Luckily, I found a small bakery where they were looking for an apprentice and that’s how my journey as a baker started.

The job was tough, with crazy hours and soooo much to learn, but it was also extremely satisfying. Every day, at the end of the shift, I could touch the fruit of my labour and see it improving month after month. An experience that I rarely had with my previous jobs and studies.

During those years I learned a lot: the importance of good ingredients, and that those alone don’t make great products. Understanding them is as important as their quality to express their full potential. I also realized how much work, experience and craft there is behind every loaf of bread, every slice of pizza and every croissant.

The craziest moments during those years were at Christmas time, with an insane increase in production volume and the wildest custom requests from clients. Among the rest, we also made the Christmas Italian classics: Panettone and Pandoro. These were very stressful to prepare, but the result was worth every bit of work. The biggest ones were up to 5 Kg and they were delicious!!!

Recipes as scientific experiments

I moved to Belgium and with that I changed my career. Food, though, remained a fundamental aspect of my life.

Being a science geek, I inevitably fell in love with the scientific dimension of food. Let’s be clear, you don’t need to know science to prepare amazing food, but I find extremely fascinating how much small and spontaneous acts of cooking hide chemical and physical processes that transform raw ingredients into a great meal.

It must have happened to you that adding a pinch of salt to a bland dish will transform it completely: it'll be saltier, but it'll also taste sweeter and bloom with new aromatics. That’s because salt triggers an infinite number of receptors in your mouth, allowing you to perceive a more complex flavour profile in your food. Here explained: the ever-present pinch of salt in your desserts!

Another cool aspect of food science is that it helps you understand your ingredients to use them at their full potential. For instance, you are preparing a vanilla-flavoured cake, it needs to be baked in the oven. In such a case it would be a pity to use very expensive vanilla pods. All the aromatic components of those pods are fragile and will be gone during baking. What will be left is the same component you have in a good artificial vanilla aroma. Everything changes if the cake doesn't require baking, now those pods can release all their aromatics and you’ll get a result unachievable with other flavourings. Isn’t all of this super interesting?!

Now, every time I find new recipes that tickle my interest I treat them as a scientific experiment. I do extensive research and take notes. Then the preparation usually involves a scale, thermometers, timers etc… I know it seems very complicated, but I guarantee you, it is better than it sounds!

Sharing food, sharing knowledge

By the moustache, the pictures and the name you might have guessed: yes, I am Italian! If there is one true stereotype about us, it is that we love food and we love TO TALK about food all the time, even while eating!

That’s why I was very excited when together with the IHL, we came up with the idea of organizing cooking workshops. The goal was to make them fun, share knowledge about food and to cook together!

I admit, I was blown away by the response from the community. First of all, I’ll be forever grateful to the other volunteers who helped me: Maya, Jan, Reinier and many others! Then, of course, all the participants, who brought such enthusiasm and curiosity that really made it worth organizing. We explored recipes from different food cultures, we had fun preparing them together, and, most importantly, we shared that food!

Witnessing all of that, once again, reinforced my belief on how much food can bring people together and strengthen a community. I know I’ll never forget some of those moments (like seeing somebody whipping an entire Tiramisú to firmness with a vintage hand-spun egg beater, which was simply crazy), and I hope that is the same for the other participants.

Quick Fire Food Round

Dish that reminds me of home
Piadina (a flat bread typical from Romagna, where I’m from).

Go to meal for friends
Some baked goods: a nice loaf of sourdough bread or a fluffy homemade focaccia.

Biggest cooking disaster
Ouf… so many! The funniest is when I organized the first Chocolate Truffles workshop at the IHL! It was an insanely hot May and it ended up with 15 pairs of hands full of melted chocolate working around the IHL’s common room. It took me forever to clean all the chocolate handprints. I think you can still find a couple of chocolate smudges on some chairs.

Where do you like to get your ingredients to cook something from your home country?
Finding Italian products is never particularly complicated, you can have good brands of pasta sold at the supermarket and for more specific needs stores like Gigi have a great selection. A couple of local butcheries (like Roundou or Slagerij OX) sell fresh guanciale and nice charcuterie from Italy. In Elsen Kaasambacht, the cheese store, they have a great selection of cheeses from Italy and charcuterie. An honourable mention (even though it’s in Brussels) goes to the Maison de Poivre, a specialized spice store where I usually buy some specific variety of spices, like for instance the wild black pepper from Madagascar. If you never tried a Carbonara with it, you are missing out!!!

What is a new meal you discovered since moving to Belgium?
Cheese Fondue! I tried it in the Ardennes and the next thing I know I was buying a fondue set! One of the best things about Fall is that it is Fondue season agaaaain!

What traditions do you have around food?
Carbonara Pasta became the comfort food of our home. Together with my partner, we prepare it every time we need to celebrate something, even just that it’s Sunday!

In your language, how do you say ‘enjoy your meal’ or ‘that’s tasty’ or ‘I’m full’
Well, everyone knows “Buon appetito”, so let’s try something different: after a big feast and you reached your limit and cannot possibly eat more food you can say “Sono pieno come un uovo”, it literally translates to “I’m full like an egg”.