Fast Recipes Feature: Italyum!

Looking authentic Italian recipes?  Italian native, enthusiastic home chef Federico Pezzaioli, is on a mission to teach the world what authentic Italian cuisine is all about.  Federico shares his memories growing up in Italy and discusses his Italian recipe collection: Italyum.com.

1. Could you tell us a little about yourself and your culinary background?

I have been exposed to the cooking practice since I was a boy. In Italy it is a very common thing, because in the past the kitchen was the place where you spent most of your time with the family.  While my grandmother or mum were cooking, I was playing around them. It was there, during the play time in the kitchen, that food, ingredients, flavors, aromas and chats about what to do and how to do it, get in your DNA. It is like being infused by all of these things. When you grow up, you go out with friends and in Italy, conviviality, friendship and socializing are all things that spin around food.

When I was 25 I have probably visited all the regions of Italy and tasted the character of each regional cooking. In my 20's I was in the army and that was a good chance to travel around the country. At that time all my money was spent on food, eating in the best trattorias or family run restaurants around the country. After the army, I worked as a salesman for a big Italian company and again, this was a great opportunity to travel the country from its top to toe. I had lunch and dinner in the most imaginative places and at the end of the lunch/dinner I always spent some time chatting with the cooks about food, recipes and trying to get some of their secrets. If you do this for 20 years, you become a non-professional connoisseur and start to have a good idea about Italian food. I have also been lucky to have an uncle, Zio Vittorio, from Puglia region of Italy, who is a great cook and  taught me a lot about cooking, especially vegetables and fish.

I began writing recipes when I moved to the UK, in 2001, and it has been a long journey. Initially, it was just about showing people how to cook some of the most iconic Italian dishes, then I started to read lot of books about Italian cooking, recipes, cooking techniques etc. and after a while I felt that the next step was to improve the cooking technique. Currently, I am attending (part time) a professional cookery course at the Glasgow Metropolitan College, to learn more about food and cooking techniques and once that is done, I will go back to my roots, showing people how to cook traditional Italian dishes.           
 
2. What inspired you to create Italyum.com?

I like to think of Italyum as the last castle, defending the Italian cooking tradition from the "DEVIATION OF TASTE". Coming to the UK (but it is the same everywhere outside Italy), I have seen many things that are wrong about Italian food and I am very sad when I see people eating in a so called "Italian restaurant" or buying "Italian food" at the supermarket, and most of the time they don't get the real thing, with the real flavors.

People are mislead by the marketing tricks; put an Italian flag onto the packet, called it "Italiano", write "buonissino" on it and there you go, you have the perfect Italian meal!

A perfect Italian classic meat sauce like the ragu' alla Bolognese must not contain any herbs, while here in the UK most of the ragu' sauces sold in the supermarkets or used to make pre-packed-so-called-Italian-food use a ragu' sauce flavored with herbs and sometimes spices (it is Italian food we are speaking about, not Indian food which I love and respect).

This twisting traditional recipes is appalling. It is teaching people to accustom themselves to a deviated taste, which has nothing to do with Italy and its culinary tradition.

The same applies for the pesto sauce; here in the UK you can buy horrible pesto sauce that tastes of lemon. Pesto sauce must not contain lemon and it should be prepared fresh, everyday, with sweet Genovese basil, so it is made readily available at the supermarket counter.


And what about garlic bread? It is mostly a baguette (French bread) with garlic flavored butter (French technique) sold with an Italian flag… How many times have I had to tell people that in Italy we don't have garlic bread; we have bruschettas, we use olive oil and not butter on our bruschettas and that the whole thing about Italian garlic bread and Italian garlic oil is a big con!

So the big question is, how would people of Yorkshire feel if I start writing about Yorkshire pudding filled with banana pesto?  I bet that most of them would feel like me when I see Italian recipes completely distorted.

Then, we have the "famous & rich" celebrity food writers and one of them, very famous in the UK, presents a pizza dough containing "beaten egg". Well, the food writer got a bit confused because it is pizza dough we are speaking about and pizza dough is made without egg! 

Italyum is the last defending castle against those who want to destroy the tradition; tradition that has been built in 2000 years, since the Romans or even before. I am passionate about this and I will fight the aberrations affecting Italian food outside of Italy until my last day; this is my personal commitment. 

3. What can readers find on Italyum.com?

Good, traditional and accurate Italian recipes. The step by step photo format has been chosen so people have to follow a precise track and get to the end without the risk of manipulation. If you follow the track, without twisting anything, you will get the real thing.  

4. If you could summarize Italian cuisine into one quote, what would it be?

“Maximum results with the minimum amount of ingredients.”

For recipes and more on Italian food, visit Italyum.com