The Italian experiment with food

It’s all about the ingredient — how you cut it, cook it and pair it, says Italian chef Igor Macchia, who owns a restaurant in Italy’s Piedmont region. He tells DNA how to innovate without moving away from the traditional.

One of the best ways to innovate with a cuisine and yet stay traditional is to bring back an ingredient that has, over time, vanished from the kitchen cabinet.

That’s a tip from chef Igor Macchia, who runs a Michelin starred restaurant in Torino, Italy. For instance, he found a renewed use for hazelnut oil. “Until about 70 years ago, hazelnut oil was very popular in Italian cuisine because of its abundance. But then its uses were discovered in chocolate, and the nut became expensive. People started making hazelnut chocolate instead of oil, because extracting oil was a more expensive process,” says Macchia, who is in Mumbai to showcase the culinary fare of the Piedmont region of northern Italy at Vetro, The Oberoi Hotel’s Italian restaurant.

He found out about a manufacturer who still extracts hazelnut oil and now uses the ingredient to twist a recipe. “Even a little hazelnut oil in a salad will change the entire taste of the meal.”

These small discoveries make the culinary experience more enjoyable, he adds. To watch diners relish a meal that’s so simple and yet so different is what encourages Macchia to innovate with his recipes.

Staying traditional
While experimenting, he found a new way to serve up lamb. He marinates it overnight in coffee, an ingredient the Italians use in unexpected ways. After a bare amount of grilling, he serves coffee-laced lamb with a basic salad. “Lamb, which is so flavourful in itself, needs an overnight marinade with correctly brewed coffee for the meat to soak in the flavour of the beverage,” he says. The result is succulent with only a hint of coffee. It is traditional, in that it uses locally grown coffee in the marinade, and unconventional — the combination of the two is unique.

And yet, to define ‘traditional’ in Italy is not simple. Within Italy too, there are so many regional influences to the cuisine. In southern Italy, for instance, there is an abundance of olive oil near the coast. Naturally, it forms an important ingredient in the cuisine. However, as you travel north and it becomes colder, olive oil is replaced by butter. “Much like our neighbours, the French,” says Macchia.

Italian food is much like most Mediterranean cuisines. It’s the preparation that sets the cuisines apart. For example, says Macchia, rice, slow cooked with a continuous infusion of water, will taste different from rice boiled in a fixed proportion of water, like the Spanish do.

One thing is common throughout Italy though. Families sit down to a long 5-course meal. “The portions are small, so we can taste much more that way. And, in my family, for instance, the television is always switched off at meal time,” says Macchia.

And then, there’s pasta. Though the types of pasta used in northern and southern Italy are fresh and dry, respectively, the ingredient stays the same: the starchy, durum wheat pasta. “While Italian food is not about pizza and pasta only, we Italians do love our pasta,” he says.

So much, that Macchia uses a caramelised stick of spaghetti to decorate even his desserts sometimes. The same ingredient — in this case, the spaghetti — tastes different when cooked differently.

Pairing flavours
To be able to experiment with a recipe, you have to know and understand what the traditional recipe is, he says. “I can’t start driving a Ferrari the minute I get my licence. I have to start in a smaller car, right? Similarly, with food: you have to know your roots before you change or add an ingredient,” Macchia says.

Once you learn what each ingredient brings to a recipe, you can try innovating. Macchia found that the slightly sweet risotto goes well with bitter coffee. “The layer of coffee at the base of a risotto dish enhances the taste of the risotto. When you have something crunchy, or an infusion of another flavour, the dish isn’t boring anymore,” he says.

Risotto always sticks to the base of the pan it is cooked in. “This crunchy bit is scraped off by the kids in the family. I find that a base of coffee in my risotto reminds me of my childhood, when I scraped off the pan my mother cooked in,” he says.

To understand the quality of each ingredient, Macchia relies on the memory of the taste. He uses this memory to try new things. “It’s just the way you know that two colours won’t match, similarly, you just know that two ingredients don’t go well together.”

He adds that chopping, slicing or peeling an ingredient too brings a different taste to the dish. He finds that peeling an asparagus and chilling it in ice water goes very well with warm mashed potatoes. This, with a dressing of slightly acidic carrot sauce, makes for a different kind of salad.

Sometimes, his experiments turn out differently. “You think one thing and the result is completely different from what you expect, but in the process, you learn a new dish,” he says. “I’ve learned that diners don’t always want foie gras or black truffle to get a good dining experience. Even a simple dish prepared differently will give them that feeling.”

Sometimes, at his restaurant La Credenza in Turin, it’s just about the Michelin star. Diners found an immediate difference in the taste of the food after the restaurant was awarded the star, he says. “It was the same food that tasted different before and after the star.”

As for his own favourite food, Macchia says he’s a “curious chef”. “I always try out local cuisines. This is one of the reasons I haven’t had Italian food in Mumbai yet. I’d much rather taste the local fare,” he says. But sometimes, even tasting expeditions can go horribly wrong. In Taiwan, he heard about a stinky tofu. “I come from Italy, where we love our gorgonzola cheese (the bad smelling blue variety), but this tofu stank from two miles away. Even I couldn’t have it!”