Home » 2017 Blog post » Cefalu Cooking Demonstration
Cefalu Cooking Demonstration
Posted by Alexander Geyelin on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.
On Wednesday, we took a bus into the mountains by Cefalu to watch and participate in a professional cooking demonstration. The chef prepared four courses for us all, mostly using his home’s outdoor kitchen – first, two different types of arancini rice balls, with one filled with eggplant and cheese and the other Bolognese sauce. Next, he and his nephew made pasta with lentils, followed by some kind of skewered Sicilian sausage and finally a cannoli-like dessert.
The most impressive part, to me, was the way he did it all instinctually. To start, we all gathered in his kitchen and watched him prepare the individual components of the arancini balls. He simultaneously made the rice and the fillings, and he did so using just his own memory and feel. He never used a recipe, and his quantities were almost always measured just by eyeballing it and tasting along the way. At home, whenever someone in our house cooks, a specific recipe is usually followed religiously. Quantities are meticulously measured and great care is taken to ensure the proportions are right. Today, however, he just casually tossed ingredients in the pot and cooked completely based on his own culinary instincts and personal memories of doing it so many times before. At one point, we asked him how he does it so consistently every time without measuring anything. He replied “The first few times, it may not be so good. After twenty or thirty thousand, you start to figure it out a bit”.
The other thing that stood out about his cooking was the heavy emphasis on homegrown ingredients. Many of the vegetables and herbs he used were grown in his own backyard, and when he needed more of a certain ingredient he would just run outside and pick some more out of the ground. This is very different from most households back home, at least where I live, in northern New Jersey, as the vast majority of people buy all of their produce and groceries from large supermarkets or department stores. Overall, he went about his cooking in a far more casual and instinctual way, and he demonstrated the region’s general emphasis on locally grown and extremely fresh ingredients.
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