The Italian mob
With his big, doughy hands and cheeks like the smooth-skinned grapes growing outside, Franco Rossi seemed like the very embodiment of Italian food culture. Healthy and passionate, the 70-year-old chef had, he said, been working alone all day, at his own pace, to get our feast ready, in this the kitchen of La Stoppa wine estate just outside the Italian town of Piacenza.
What he produced was typical of a proper Italian feed. A plate of regional cured meats - thin slices of coppa, culatello and pancetta - to start, and a beautiful pasta course of ricotta-stuffed torti to follow, collected earlier in the day - no shame about buying-in round here - from the village pasteria. Then a divine local dish of pisarei e faso, or Piacenzan regional pasta and beans (see page 41 for recipe). And for the main course, the bluest of beef, showing barely any signs of heat, served with rosti potatoes. All this was rounded off with a big slice of apple pie to make us feel at home, and some of the best home-made vanilla ice-cream ever tasted.
It was a romantic scene and, for the 17 chefs who had just eaten the meal, a million miles away from the experiences of their own working lives. For the assembled group were all head chefs from Conran restaurants, who once a year are invited to leave behind the pressures of their own kitchens and head off on a trip to meet some of the company's suppliers. This year it was to be in and around Milan. The idea: to learn a little more about the food they use, where it comes from, and how it can be used.
Rossi provided a lesson in simplicity, making the task of preparing five courses for more than 30 people, even at his ripe age, look easy. First, he took his time, and second, he, along with much of the best cooking in Italy, allowed the country's wonderful produce to look after itself. Those five courses didn't constitute culinary gymnastics, but in Italy, it seems, technical know-how is only half the point. As Jeremy Lee, head chef at Conran's Blue Print Caf‚, commented: "It's not about the detail with this cooking, but the spirit. You don't want to fiddle around with it too much."
Gastronomy
In Italy, much of the flavour is born before the kitchen. At Peck, Milan's world famous temple to gastronomy and our first stop after landing at Linate airport, we witnessed a cornucopia of top-notch produce: cheeses on one counter, cured meats like cinghiale (wild boar) cured still within its hide on another, and guanciale, bacon from the pig's cheek.
It's expensive (instead of stacks of the £5 bargain wine you find on offer in Britain, here we saw a £30,000 pile of P‚trus) but the quality seemed to merit it. "Just look at the marbling on that," commented Andr‚ Garrett about the arista di maiale (pork loins). "You just wouldn't get that on pork in England." Other cuts that left the chefs salivating were the 4in-thick rib-eye steaks and belly of beef, another example of produce that English audiences rarely get to experience.
And it wasn't just at the Harrods-food-hall end of the spectrum. The following morning, despite arriving late at Milan's wholesale produce market - our driver was later christened Barthez after the former Manchester United goalkeeper, not only because of the physical resemblance, but also because he was prone to gaffes - the sheer weight of produce still on offer confirmed why Italy has such a well-developed culinary culture.
Tomatoes were everywhere: huge ones, wrinkled ones, green ones, plum and cherry, and all on the vine. Wild broccoli, romanesco, brassica, spiky artichokes, very moist new-season garlic and Sicilian oranges sweetening the air were all there in mountains.
"We can get all this in England," said Quaglino's Julian O'Neil, "but it's just the quality that's so much better, and so much fresher. You can see why Italian cooking is about keeping it simple."
The chefs soon warmed to the sights, with Danny Murphy, managing director of Covent Garden-based supplier Chefs' Connection, taking some stick - "Look Danny, that's what we chefs call real punnets" - from John Sarginson of Butlers Wharf Chop House over some particularly oversized boxes of Spanish strawberries. The vendor of the strawberries liked the attention, too, handing out tasters, this being Italy, to the only two women on the trip, Eva Inzani from coffee company L'Unico Musetti and Suzanne O'Connor from Zinc Edinburgh.
But there was a serious point to be made, too. Murphy, who imports plenty of his own stock from this very market, pointed out the peppers that were both green and yellow, another lesson on how the approach to food there is so different: "The taste on these would be beautiful - just smell them," said Murphy. "But I couldn't sell them because of the colour - people would think there was something wrong with them."
That attitude in the UK stems from modern convenience living - some might blame supermarkets - spawning a public at ease only with what looks the same and is on the shelves all year round. There may be a sea change beginning, with more consumers appreciating seasonality and the origin of food, but neat, uniform and vacuum-packed is still what the majority buy into. In the Italy we saw, nothing was as sterile. Italy is, of course, the home of the Slow Food movement, which promotes traditional, non-technologically driven food production. In a recent European study, Italians also came out as some of the most suspicious food consumers in Europe, with only 10% trusting modern processed meats.
The irony of that is that Italy has some of the best cured meats, processed yes, but according to age-old traditions such as at the Salumificio Val D'Ongina. This salami factory boasts three DOP (those protected by a designated origin) cured meats, but there's no need for a freezer here, or the issuing of hairnets and plastic boots. We were all proudly ushered into where the carcasses were strung up, and later brushed past thousands of pancettas, salamis and other hams. All were hanging in the maturing cellar after being hand-rubbed with salt and spices before being stitched up and hung for up to a year.
The point is that paranoia over food safety isn't allowed to strangle the produce itself. People celebrate the old methods and trust those traditions. As our guide pointed out, the process used here to achieve the exceptional results dates back to the 15th century, when people would salt and smoke their meat to make it last for longer. The maturing process is a careful balance between good and bad organisms, ageing and protecting the meat in turn. The careful balance of salt is introduced to rein in the action of bacteria, but in no way to stop it.
According to Eva Inzani, who often visits members of her Italian family here, locally there are still plenty of families who cure meats in their own cellars. Regulations prohibit them from selling it, of course, but when they get together to compare and compete over results, one imagines the only food scare would be if it didn't taste right.
After all that, it was a fitting climax for the tour to finish with yet another heady feast, this time courtesy of supplier La Credenza.
Two novelties particularly charmed the chefs: first the burrata from Puglia, which is the cream of whey from cows' milk, tied up in a plastic pouch that when cut open spills out on to the plate, ready just to be seasoned and then served as a starter with bread.
The other, the gnoccho frito, was just a small, pillowcase-shaped dough parcel made with milk, which was deep-fried and eaten with culatello. It should be no surprise that of everything on display, these were, of course, two of the simplest.
The Nominations are… Mention the words nominated supplier to restaurant chefs and they usually scoff about compromise, quality and, hell, personal bloody freedoms. You'd think basic human rights had been violated.
The Conran Group operates with a system of nominated suppliers, however, and the head chefs gathered on this trip didn't seem too fussed. Arthur Cloppers, purchasing director for the group, explained why. "We have over 80 suppliers the chefs can buy from, and the majority of them are nominated by the chefs themselves," he said. "Obviously we have to check the quality and make sure they reach the production and supply standards we set, but if they're right we're happy to add to that list all the time."
The advantages are clear, as was debated at this year's Chef Conference, when those who supported systems of nominated supplier pointed out that it gives the company or group more buying power and can help to build up more consistent relationships with those they're buying from.
Problems can arise when chefs aren't given options. But in Conran's case, if a chef isn't happy with quality or supply from one, another supplier is ready to step in. The company has 18 supplying meat, 19 fresh produce and 19 fish. A minority are key suppliers, while the majority might supply only one speciality product, but there's always an alternative.
What was obvious on this trip was that, as well as having an opportunity to meet some of their suppliers, the chefs also had a chance to share conversations and advice about who was supplied the best of what and who could do better: an informal forum.
It wasn't all old men hand-stitching pancettas according to age-old custom. A trip to the family-run L'Unico Musetti coffee factory showed more hi-tech Italian production in action, as piles of green coffee beans in 600kg bags were sent down the line to be computer-controlled roasted at 220¡C - albeit according to a taste monitored every day by matriarch Lucia Musetti.
The visit did throw up a few pointers as to how the Italians like their coffee - 7g of ground coffee, for instance, to make just one fluid ounce of espresso, rather than the 1.5fl oz expected by more quantity-obsessed Brits. And here are some hints if you want to make a more authentic cappuccino.
- Don't worry about using semi-skimmed milk. Even adding water won't affect the creaminess.
- Try sprinkling the chocolate straight on the coffee so it ends up between the layer of coffee and milk.
- Don't overheat the milk. Leave the steam spout at the bottom of the jug to warm the milk through and don't try to create an Elvis-style milk quiff on top. Italians look for cream, not froth.
- Italians have their own versions of a clover leaf in Guinness (above). Try gently sloshing the milk as it pours and "drawing" with the stream, except move the cup rather than the jug.
