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Famous Matt Goulding Quotes

“We navigate the produce stands, plucking palms full of cherries from every pile we pass, chewing them and spitting the seeds on the ground. We eat tiny tomatoes with taut skins that snap under gentle pressure, releasing the rabid energy of the Sardinian sun trapped inside. We crack asparagus like twigs and watch the stalks weep chlorophyll tears. We attack anything and everything that grows on trees- oranges, plums, apricots, peaches- leaving pits and peels, seeds and skins in our wake. Downstairs in the seafood section, the heart of the market, the pace quickens. Roberto turns the market into a roving raw seafood bar, passing me pieces of marine life at every stand: brawny, tight-lipped mussels; juicy clams on the half shell with a shocking burst of sweetness; tiny raw shrimp with beads of blue coral clinging to their bodies like gaudy jewelry. We place dominoes of ruby tuna flesh on our tongues like communion wafers, the final act in this sacred procession.”

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Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“Down every aisle a single thought follows me like a shadow: Brand Italy is strong. When it comes to cultural currency, there is no brand more valuable than this one. From lipstick-red sports cars to svelte runway figures to enigmatic opera singers, Italian culture means something to everyone in the world. But nowhere does the name Italy mean more than in and around the kitchen. Peruse a pantry in London, Osaka, or Kalamazoo, and you're likely to find it spilling over with the fruits of this country: dried pasta, San Marzano tomatoes, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, jars of pesto, Nutella. Tucked into the northwest corner of Italy, sharing a border with France and Switzerland, Piedmont may be as far from the country's political and geographical center as possible, but it is ground zero for Brand Italy. This is the land of Slow Food. Of white truffles. Barolo. Vermouth. Campari. Breadsticks. Nutella. Fittingly, it's also the home of Eataly, the supermarket juggernaut delivering a taste of the entire country to domestic and international shoppers alike. This is the Eataly mother ship, the first and most symbolically important store for a company with plans for covering the globe in peppery Umbrian oil, and shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano Vacche Rosse. We start with the essentials: bottle opener, mini wooden cutting board, hard-plastic wineglasses. From there, we move on to more exciting terrain: a wild-boar sausage from Tuscany. A semiaged goat's-milk cheese from Molise. A tray of lacy, pistachio-pocked mortadella. Some soft, spicy spreadable 'nduja from Calabria. A jar of gianduja, the hazelnut-chocolate spread that inspired Nutella- just in case we have any sudden blood sugar crashes on the trail.”

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Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“The Langhe is a paradise, a giardino: pears, apples, pomegranates, chestnuts. Everything you could want to eat falling from a tree. And above all, nocciole. You see those trees? Those are South American hazelnuts. Fatter. Rounder. There are also the smaller Turkish hazelnuts, but Ferrero Rocher uses the big ones to make Nutella. And wine- everywhere, wine. Barbera, Bonarda, Dolcetto, and the king, Nebbiolo, the king of all grapes.”

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Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“If Alessandro and Rosy are working from a disadvantage in terms of product recognition, they have put generations of accumulated experience into practice to fill the menu with dozens of little tastes of Como. They make fragrant, full-flavored stocks from the bones and bodies of perch and chub. They cure whitefish eggs in salt, creating a sort of freshwater bottarga, ready to be grated over pasta and rice. Shad is brined in vinegar and herbs, whitefish becomes a slow-cooked ragù or a filling for ravioli, and pigo and pike form the basis of Mella's polpettine di pesce, Pickled, dried, smoked, cured, pâtéd: a battery of techniques to ensure that nothing goes to waste. If you can make it with meat, there's a good chance Alessandro and Rosy have made it with lake fish. And then there's missoltino, the lake's most important by-product, a staple that stretches back to medieval times and has been named a presidio by Slow Food, a designation reserved for the country's most important ingredients and food traditions. The people still making missoltino can be counted on a single hand. Alessandro guts and scales hundreds of shad at a time, salts the bodies, and hangs them like laundry to dry under the sun for forty-eight hours or more. The dried fish are then layered with bay leaves, packed into metal canisters, and weighed down. Slowly the natural oils from the shad escape and bubble to the surface, forming a protective layer that preserves the missoltino indefinitely. It can be used as a condiment of sorts, a weapons-grade dose of lake umami to be detonated in salads and pastas. In its most classic preparation, served with toc, a thick, rich scoop of polenta slow cooked in a copper pot over a wood fire, it tastes of nothing you've eaten in Italy- or anywhere else.”

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“But you don't come to Palermo to stay in minimalist hotels and eat avocado toast; you come to Palermo to be in Palermo, to drink espressos as dark and thick as crude oil, to eat tangles of toothsome spaghetti bathed in buttery sea urchins, to wander the streets at night, feeling perfectly charmed on one block, slightly concerned on the next. To get lost. After a few days, you learn to turn down one street because it smells like jasmine and honeysuckle in the morning; you learn to avoid another street because in the heat of the afternoon the air is thick with the suggestion of swordfish three days past its prime.”

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Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“Italian cuisine is the most famous and beloved cuisine in the world for a reason. Accessible, comforting, seemingly simple but endlessly delicious, it never disappoints, just as it seems to never change. It would be easy to give you, dear reader, a book filled with the al dente images of the Italy of your imagination. To pretend as if everything in this country is encased in amber. But Italian cuisine is not frozen in time. It's exposed to the same winds that blow food traditions in new directions every day. And now, more than at any time in recent or distant memory, those forces are stirring up change across the country that will forever alter the way Italy eats. That change starts here, in Rome, the capital of Italy, the cradle of Western civilization, a city that has been reinventing itself for three millennia- since, as legend has it, Romulus murdered his brother Remus and built the foundations of Rome atop the Palatine Hill. Here you'll find a legion of chefs and artisans working to redefine the pillars of Italian cuisine: pasta, pizza, espresso, gelato, the food that makes us non-Italians dream so ravenously of this country, that makes us wish we were Italians, and that stirs in the people of Italy no small amount of pride and pleasure.”

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Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“The only point that everyone I spoke with in Rome agrees upon is that Armando al Pantheon is one of the city's last true trattorie. Given the location, Claudio and his family could have gone the way of the rest of the neighborhood a long time ago and mailed it in with a handful of fresh mozzarella and prosciutto. But he's chosen the opposite path, an unwavering dedication to the details- the extra steps that make the oxtail more succulent, the pasta more perfectly toothsome, the artichokes and favas and squash blossoms more poetic in their expression of the Roman seasons. "I experiment in my own small ways. I want to make something new, but I also want my guests to think of their mothers and grandmothers. I want them to taste their infancy, to taste their memories. Like that great scene in Ratatouille." I didn't grow up on amatriciana and offal, but when I eat them here, they taste like a memory I never knew I had. I keep coming back. For the cacio e pepe, which sings that salty-spicy duet with unrivaled clarity, thanks to the depth charge of toasted Malaysian peppercorns Claudio employs. For his coda alla vaccinara, as Roman as the Colosseum, a masterpiece of quinto quarto cookery: the oxtail cooked to the point of collapse, bathed in a tomato sauce with a gentle green undertow of celery, one of Rome's unsung heroes. For the vegetables: one day a crostini of stewed favas and pork cheek, the next a tumble of bitter puntarelle greens bound in a bracing anchovy vinaigrette. And always the artichokes. If Roman artichokes are drugs, Claudio's are pure poppy, a vegetable so deeply addictive that I find myself thinking about it at the most inappropriate times. Whether fried into a crisp, juicy flower or braised into tender, melting submission, it makes you wonder what the rest of the world is doing with their thistles.”

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Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“True to its name (gelato spelled backwards), Oletag is swimming against the tide of cost-cutting convenience that dominates Italy's ice cream industry. Sixty flavors at a given time, rotating daily- most rigorously tied to the season, many inspired by a pantry of savory ingredients: mustard, Gorgonzola with white chocolate and hazelnuts, pecorino with bitter orange. He seeks out local flavors, but never at the expense of a better product: pistachios from Turkey, hazelnuts from Piedmont, and (gasp!) French-born Valrhona chocolate. Extractions, infusions, experiments- whatever it takes to get more out of the handful of ingredients he puts into each creation. In the end, what matters is what ends up in the scoop, and the stuff at Oletag will make your toes curl- creams and chocolates so pure and intense they must be genetically manipulated, fruit-based creations so expressive of the season that they actually taste different from one day to the next. And a licorice gelato that will change you- if not for life, at least for a few weeks. Radicioni and Torcè are far from alone in their quest to lift the gelato genre. Fior di Luna has been doing it right- serious ingredients ethically sourced and minimally processed- since 1993. At Gelateria dei Gracchi, just across the Regina Margherita bridge, Alberto Monassei obsesses over every last detail, from the size of the whole hazelnuts in his decadent gianduia to the provenance of the pears that he combines with ribbons of caramel. And Maria Agnese Spagnuolo, one of Torcè's many disciples, continues to push the limits of gelato at her ever-expanding Fatamorgana empire, where a lineup of more than fifty choices- from basil-honey-walnut to dark chocolate-wasabi- attracts a steady crush of locals and savvy tourists.”

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Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“At first glance, the main display case at Dicecca today looks like a selection you'll find in any cheese shop in Puglia: tubs of milky water covering hunks of mozzarella in its many guises; strings of swollen scamorze dangling from the ceiling, bronzed by their stopover in the cold smoker; small plastic containers of creamy ricotta ready to be stuffed or eaten straight with a spoon. But look closer and you'll see some unfamiliar faces staring back at you through the glass: a large bucket brimming with ricotta spiked with ribbons of blue cheese and toasted almonds, served by the scoop; a wooden serving board paved with melting slabs of goat cheese weaponized with a cloak of bright red chili flakes; a hulking wheel of pecorino, stained shamrock green by a puree of basil and spinach. These are the signs of a caseificio in the grips of an evolution, one that started more than a decade ago when the brothers took the reins from their parents and began to expand the definition of a small, family-run cheese shop.”

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