Italian Cooking With Chef Lidia Bastianich

“Italian food at its best is simple food. It’s about the ingredients.”

See some of Lidia’s recipes below

If you haven’t heard of Chef Lidia Bastianich, she’s basically the Julia Childs of Italian cooking.

In fact, Bastianich’s new book (her 10th!), titled “Lidia’s Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine,” pays homage to Childs’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

Bastianich says the two were friends and used the same publisher, who suggested the title.

“We had the same editor, the same publishing house and (they said), ‘You know what Lidia, I think we need an Italian kind of version of that message of ethnic cooking,” she told MetroFocus Host Rafael Pi Roman.

In it, you’ll find recipes and techniques that Bastianich says she’s been curating for years.

“What’s in here is kind of all those bits and piece of information that you kind of as you go on collect, you put it away; Things that make me who I am, that made me understand how to gook better. And I kind of pulled it all out of that file,” she said.

Bastianich says a good Italian meal begins (and ends) with the ingredients.

“Once you have them, pulling ’em together is really simple. And actually the fact is not to over elaborate, not to add so many things,” she said.

Bastianich says “Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine” spends nearly 100 pages explaining the art of selecting, preparing and storing products for Italian meals.

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Those tips will be helpful for the torta gianduia (chocolate hazelnut cake), gamberoni scottati con salsa di rucola (grilled shrimp with arugula sauce), orecchiette con vongole e zucchine (orecchiette with clams and zucchini) and the rest of the 400 recipes her new book offers.