In London, I am spoilt by so many different ingredients and cultural influences, which have pushed the way I think about food way beyond the northern Italian flavour palate that I grew up with. But on holiday everything is stripped back to a few knives and some pots and pans and whatever I find when I go out each morning – maybe with some money in my hand to meet the fishermen coming off the boats, or at the market to buy fresh local vegetables or rich, creamy burrata. So Puglia, too, has inspired some of the recipes in this book. The ingredients may be more limited, but their quality is exceptional, and that is when I feel at my most creative. I look at what I have and decide then and there how to prepare it for family and friends to share. Just as my grandmother did all those years ago in Corgeno.
Seasonal salads and vegetables
I find myself focusing more and more on vegetables, not only for flavour but for the beauty their different textures can bring to a salad or a dish, sometimes just by the way you cut them. I am excited by the idea of vegetable butchery.
Pan-fried cauliflower salad with anchovies and chilli
When I was cooking at the Savoy I thought of myself as the King of the Cauliflower, because one of my jobs was to make the cauliflower soup, and I made a cauliflower cheese that was a work of art, really light and perfectly glazed. But the truth is I never liked cauliflower much. In the cooking of countries like India it is treated to interesting spices, but in European cuisine it often seemed like the boring enemy of gastronomy. In Italy they used to say that cauliflower was for priests, because it kept the sex drive down. But my opinion changed forever a few years ago when I tasted a cauliflower pizza made for me by a husband and wife team, Graham and Kate, when I was a judge at the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards.
This sweet couple, who now have a restaurant in Bristol, drove around in a bright yellow Defender van with a wood-fired oven called Bertha in the back, and they would come to your party and make maybe 70 or 80 pizzas in a night. Back then it was quite a revolutionary thing to do. I asked them to make me a pizza margherita and another one of their choice. The margherita arrived and it was unbelievably light, Neapolitan style, and I was already thinking, ‘These guys are good,’ when they brought out their anchovy and cauliflower pizza. Graham had sliced raw cauliflower very thinly and used it instead of cheese. I cannot even describe the way in which it was almost melting and yet it kept its structure and flavour, and its tanginess worked so well with the flavour of the anchovy and a little touch of chilli and lemon zest. It was so delicious and like nothing I had tasted on a pizza before.
When someone presents to you, in such a different way, a vegetable that you have put into a certain compartment of your mind for years and years, it is a total shock. I went back to the kitchen at Locanda and I immediately said to the boys, ‘Do we have some cauliflower?’ Of course we didn’t, because I didn’t like it. So I had to go and buy some. We played around with a lot of ideas, and this way of pan-frying the cauliflower and incorporating it into a salad with anchovies, in a little echo of the pizza flavours, was the one we loved the most. It is exactly the kind of quick and simple salad I like to make if Plaxy and I are at home on our own, or as a starter if friends come around.
When a cauliflower is quite big and loose it is easy to break it into small florets of the same size which will cook evenly, as I suggest here, but if it is smaller and very hard and compact, it can be easier to cut a cross in the base and cook it all in one piece, until just tender. As it cools down, the heat will penetrate evenly all the way through to the centre. Then you can cut it into slices. It’s your call, depending on the size and density of the cauliflower.
Or, if you prefer to roast the cauliflower in the oven, you can spread the florets over a baking tray and roast them at 180°C/gas 4 for 20 minutes, sprinkled with a little olive oil. When they have turned golden, remove the tray from the oven and allow them to cool down.
Serves 6
salted anchovies 6
cauliflower 2 heads, separated into florets
olive oil
hard-boiled eggs 3, chopped
black olives 15, stones removed
capers in vinegar 1 tablespoon, drained and rinsed
chopped mild red chilli 1 teaspoon
chopped fresh parsley 1 tablespoon
Giorgio’s dressing 200ml (see here)
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Pan-fried cauliflower salad with anchovies and chilli
1 Rinse the salt from the anchovies and dry them. Run your thumb gently along the backbone of each anchovy – this will allow you to easily pull it out and separate the fish into fillets.
2 Blanch the cauliflower in boiling salted water for 2 minutes. The florets should still be crunchy. Drain them.
3 Heat a little olive oil in a pan, put in the cauliflower and sauté until golden all over. Lift out into a large serving bowl.
4 Add the anchovy fillets, eggs, olives, capers, chilli and parsley. Drizzle in the dressing, mix everything together very gently so that you don’t break up the egg yolks any further, and season to taste.
Plaxy’s salad
When I first came to London my palate wasn’t very spice-oriented. In my region of Lombardy we would occasionally put a little mild chilli into a pasta sauce, but that was it. It was Plaxy who educated me to eat more spicy food, which seemed very daring at the time. But the more you eat, the more you increase your capacity to still taste the flavours of the food and not be distracted by the heat, and so I came to love spice as much as she does.
This has become known as Plaxy’s salad because I first made it for her after we had been in Thailand, and she was hankering after the fresh, clean flavours of the food there. I had some carrots and apples, so I put together this very simple combination which has become a favourite at home, and the boys in the kitchen often make big bowlfuls of it when the staff sit down for their meal before the evening service.
It is the combination of fresh carrot, chilli, mint and sweetness that really drives the flavour, so the rest can be quite loose and you can use different fruits if you prefer: perhaps pears or mango. You can leave out the almonds if you like, maybe put in some tomatoes, parsley or coriander, which adds its own radish-ey aroma. Often we grill some chicken breasts and put them on top of the salad and that is lunch, and it is a great salad to put out as part of a barbecue. Of course you can increase or decrease the quantity of chilli, and if you prefer a more citrus dressing, add a little more lemon juice, or if you like a milder flavour, add more olive oil.
Buy fresh, bunched, organic carrots if you can, as you want to get as close as possible to that intense flavour and aroma that a good carrot has when it is just pulled from the ground and that you never forget. When I was small, my grandad had to stop me pulling up all the carrots in the garden, washing them and eating them straight away, like Bugs Bunny. I loved them so much.
Be gentle when you grate the carrots so that you don’t bruise them, otherwise they will lose some of their moisture.
Serves 6
almonds 250g
carrots 12
green