L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 4 Superstar chef Massimo Bottura: knowing the past to shape the future of Italian cuisine A slice of cod placed on julienne-sliced vegetables, served in a squid ink broth and topped with a sprinkling of powdered seaweed and sea urchins. The dish that the Modenese chef Massimo Bottura created to pay homage to jazzman Thelonious M onk, reminds me of Malevič's Black Square painting and makes me think that, if art were to enter Bottura's - the number one chef in the world - kitchen, it would definitely be an explosion of geometric abstraction and mod- ern art, an aesthetic vanguard aiming at elaborating the past and open up to experimentation. The dish is the result of tech- niques and products that come from different parts of the world, even if, in the end, it's the color - that intense, deep black - to turn into the core of the tasting experience. "When cooking, we have to ask ourselves the right ques- tions," Bottura points out during our meeting at Eataly's cooking school in Los Angeles, where the chef led a master class for the latest edition of Identità Golose. "And it's the hardest thing to do, because it is very comforting to indulge in nostalgia, especially for those like me who come from a land where traditional flavors have been handed down through centuries". Massimo, what can prevent us from indulging in nostalgia when cooking? Art can help us a lot. Person- ally I feel a bit like the great artist Ai Weiwei, who represent- ed himself with three images: in the first one we see him holding a 2000 years old vas e in his hands, in the second we see him dropping it and in the last one himself and the vase in pieces. He explained: "I am not distanc- ing myself from my past, I am breaking with my past to build the future." That's exactly what I'm doing. I look at the past in a critical and non-nostalgic way, with the aim of taking the best from the past and bringing it into the future, whether it's an emo- tion, a piece of meat or anything else. And what questions have you asked yourself? For example, while conceiv- ing my bollito non bollito I asked myself: "Why do we have to boil meat in w ater?" The ans w er would be: because a thousand years of history have taught me so. But since I am a contempo- rary chef, I use technique to sub- limate raw materials, not my ego. Thanks to nowadays's tech- nology, I can communicate to palates all over the world that mixed boiled meats can also be served without boiling the meat, but by cooking it vacuum sealed, with temperatures below 70 ° C and for a very long time. In this way, I respect the ingredients, so the meat will be alive, full of proteins and organoleptic proper- ties, becoming the true protago- nis t of the bollito m is to, as opposed to its canonical version, where meat looses flavor and the real protagonists are its accom- panying sauces. Is there anything you save from our traditions, from the past? If you look at it in a nostalgic way, it's all beautiful. "It was so good back in the days" they say, "What extraordinary ingredients there were!" Instead, there was hunger. Nowadays we are lucky to be able to choose what cheese w e w ant right in front of a counter, and we can travel from north to south, from east to west throughout Italy and have a dif- ferent chees e every day that gives us emotions. What kind of approach it's better to have in the kitchen then? A t my res taurant, O s teria Francescana, I do this: if I see that a recipe doesn't evolve, I change it because I know that if I don't, then it will eventually Chef Bottura believes art can help chefs understand how to be inventive © Brambilla - Serrani SILVIA GIUDICI It's comforting to indulge in nostalgia, says Bottura, but we mustn't be afraid of experimenting © Brambilla - Serrani Continued to page 6 NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS

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