Trentodoc Festival

COOKING TALES Sensory cuisine (with tasting) In the photo: Alessandro GILMOZZI (from behind), Pietro LEEMAN (from behind) Trentodoc Festival Loggia Romanino Trento, 8 October 2022 [
Matteo RENSI Archivio Ufficio Stampa Provincia autonoma di Trento]

Vegetable cuisine or sensory cuisine. So we start from the sensations. “If we take a herb like negritella, which is not eaten, each of us can match its smell to something different – explains Eleonora Cunaccia, owner of Primitivizia, connoisseur and teacher of the collection of mountain herbs -. For me, for example, it tastes like 80% chocolate, for others it tastes like vanilla chocolate, and so on. We are therefore talking about a cuisine that stimulates the instincts and at the same time linked to an overall vision of nature: there are, we realize, the traits that all the valleys have in common, instincts, in fact, shared “seeds” ” .

Herbs, therefore, at the base of this cuisine, but also honey. “Honey is a plant product – underlines Elena Paternoster, owner of Mieli Thun together with her sister Francesca, a beekeeping and honey storage company -, as shown by the fact that different types of bees would always produce the same pollen with the same pollen. honey, while different pollens give life to different honeys. It is then – he adds – a pure and noble, ancient ingredient, which we should abundantly reintroduce into the kitchen, even in innovative forms. I am thinking, for example, of the creaming of a risotto with heather honey: the effect is that of a mushroom scent ».

Sensations that are closely linked to spirituality, for Pietro Leemann, starred chef of Joia: «Food is a tool to break down barriers, to go beyond what we are. Vegetable food then amplifies this process. It is a question of entering into the essence of nature, of finding, by eating, something forgotten that lay within us ». After all, according to him, “in nature there is every element necessary to eat. The wild is able to give us everything ». Hence the inspiration for his dish presented at the Trentodoc Festival, in combination with mountain bubbles, a “Porto del sole” composed of salted aubergines, dipped in corn starch, fried and then lacquered in teriyaki sauce, on a base of composed of plums and ginger and buckwheat biscuits. «A dish that demonstrates – he explains – how vegetable cuisine also knows how to bring different cultures together».

And not least, as the recipe by Alessandro Gilmozzi, chef of El Molin demonstrates, telling the story: «” Peat hypothesis “, my dish, is inspired by peat, which until the early 1900s was fed to children for its concentration of “good” bacteria and which I was able to taste during a trip to Switzerland – he says -. An ancestral, instinctive flavor, again of total reconnection even unconscious to nature, which I propose again with a 70% focaccia made of potatoes, dipped in wild sage and black cabbage and combined with white lichen, porcini powder, candied birch powder, wild mint and thyme flowers ».

Trentodoc Festival – Vegetable cuisine to rediscover a link with nature and the mountains