In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent, I’m asking you to skip Florence on your next trip to Tuscany. I’m sharing my two cents on tourism and overcrowded destinations, but I would love to know your thoughts on this, as well. We talk about travelling during the low season and your option to slow down and enjoy the provincial life of a small town.  We introduce our immersive three-day seasonal cooking masterclass: https://en.julskitchen.com/tuscan-cooking-classes#threeday Our Colle...

In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent, after a year of absence, I tell you a little bit more about the things that have happened: - This podcast is not dead, it is just on a break. - Our newsletter on Substack, Letters from Tuscany, is where most of our writing and recipes will live from now on. - For the past two years, we’ve been working on a new cookbook, Cucina Povera, The Italian Way of Transforming Humble Ingredients into Unforgettable Meals. It will be released in April...

The best way to understand the Tuscan pastry art is to have a walk in Siena with an open mind, following the trail of spices, paying attention to the colours and to the ingredients of the baked goods arranged in the shop windows of bakeries, cafés, and pastry shops. The Tuscan pastry art isn’t show stopping, elegant, refined or elaborate, as you would say of the French patisserie or oven of the Southern Italian pastry art of Sicily and Naples. In this episode, we will delve into the Tuscan...

In today’s episode we’re travelling southward, towards the heel of the boot of the Italian peninsula, Salento. Today’s guest is Nina Gigante, a wellness, food, and travel journalist, and a qualified holistic nutritionist. While we were in Salento to visit Tommaso’s family, I was continuously texting Nina to have advice on where to go, shop, and, guess what, eat. Thanks to her tips we discovered my favourite brioche in Salento. In the following conversation, you’ll hear us talking about what...

In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent, we travel to the mountains to visit my friend Vea Carpi. She is a cook, a farmer, a sourdough baker, and passionate about wool. She has a maso up in the Trentino mountains and an agritourism with her family. We are both from Tuscany, but we met there, in her farmstead, where we were greeted as part of her family. We attended one of her sourdough baking courses and learnt about her life in the mountains. In the following conversation, you’ll...

In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent, as promised, we have a guest that will guide us through one of the most beautiful Italian regions. This region recently filled your imagination with postcard-like maritime views, bowls of trofie al pesto and Vespa rides thanks to the latest Disney Pixar movie, Luca. Today we’ll go to Liguria. Today’s guest is Enrica Monzani, known online as A small kitchen in Genoa, food writer, soon cookbook author, and cooking class instructor in her...

This is the first episode of our second season, a special summer edition, a short collection of 4 episodes. In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent I switched role and asked our friend Valentina Dainelli, known on line as ToomuchTuscany, to be the host of this conversation: I felt it would have been much more interesting for you than listening to a soliloquy. The occasion is my 40th birthday, and we had a little online celebration. We talked about recipes and cakes, about Livia,...

In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent we celebrate the spring season, its produce, with asparagus, fresh peas, fava beans and monk’s bears. We celebrate fresh herbs, one of my favourite ingredients in the kitchen, and the magic of foraged wild flowers, like robinia flowers and elderflowers. This is also the last episode of the first series of Cooking with an Italian Accent. We’ll take a break to work on our cookbook, and we’ll be back during the summer with a special edition, a...

In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent I’m going back over our past 12 years of blogging, and I’ll share with you the reasons why we still believe in blogs, and why we love it so much. I’m also sharing my tips to maintain a long-term relationship with your blog: - Write about something relevant for you. - Be authentic. - Show up consistently. - It is ok to take some time off. - Be patient. At the end of this episode, I’m also introducing our new project, a weekly subscription-based...

In this episode of Cooking with an Italian Accent I’m sharing why I love risotto, and why I find it is a therapeutic recipe. When making risotto, let your senses guide you. Risotto is also a perfect example of the physical theory of everyday cooking, The Time-Work Continuum, shared by Mark Bittman in 2014. I’m also sharing the recipe for a seafood risotto, just to show you how all the elements are in a perfect symphony. The seafood risotto comes close to a seaside trip in terms of...

From the last episode of this podcast, a few things have changed. Summer has gone, leaving space to a bright, mild Tuscan autumn, and now it is winter, well, it’s Christmas in a few hours. On August, the 28th, we welcomed Livia, our baby girl, into this world. It has been long, exhausting, and emotional beyond words. The old life, the 2019 life, seems so far away for more than one reason. I barely remember how it was before, as so many things happened that turned our life upside down. Food,...

Before a well-deserved pause to welcome our baby girl into the world, and to get used to a completely new life, I’m so happy to share the latest episode of Cooking with an Italian accent, a conversation I had a few weeks ago with Irina Gergescu about her cookbook, Carpathia. I like how she intertwines recipes, traditions and superstitions, like when she mentions garlic, or when she says that eating horseradish before Easter will bring you health all year round, or when she explains that...

In today’s episode we’ll be talking in details about the pound cake, known as quattro quarti in Italian. This is probably the cake I make more often, especially in its version made with extra virgin olive oil, the most appreciated during our cooking classes, but also the one I rely on when I don’t have a clear idea on what to bake. The original pound cake contained one pound each of eggs, sugar, flour and butter. Hence its English name, pound cake, and its French or Italian name, quattro...

We reached the 40th episode of our podcast "Cooking with an Italian Accent"! So it's time to celebrate and to recap what we’ve done so far in these 15 months spent together, what you liked the most, why we love this podcast so much and how it perfectly integrates in all that we do. We’ll talk also about who we are, what we like and what is going to happen soon in our lives! Join us for a little celebration! Read more: https://en.julskitchen.com/podcast/episode-40-get-to-know-us-better

Today we are talking about cookbooks. When I was organizing my cookbooks on the bookshelves, I rediscovered some favourites from the past that needed some more love, and realised there are cookbooks that I barely opened after the initial I-desperately-need-this-book enthusiasm. So, I thought I would share some of my favourite cookbooks here on the podcast, as you might find them interesting, too. Today we’re talking about cookbooks on Italian cuisine, but do not expect the last cookbooks...

Juls’ Kitchen is a family business. Tommaso and I work together to teach classes, develop recipes for clients, taking photos, producing the podcast, and writing the blog and the newsletter, along with cookbooks and articles. It has its highs and lows, but this is our job, and career. We do not have a backup plan, and, to be honest, after the hard work it took to get where we are, I do not want to change my job, as this is what brings me joy, what I am good at. That’s why we had to rethink our...

This is a special episode with a dear friend, Regula Ysewijn. We met in London in 2011, at the Food Blogger Connect, and since then we’ve become best friends, supporting each other through life and work endeavours. Today we’re here to celebrate her new cookbook, Oats in the North, Wheat from the South. This book is Regula’s love letter to British baking, and to Britain, its bakeries and shops, its traditions and ingredients. We’re talking about what it takes to write a cookbook with a solid...

One of the few positive aspects of this eternal lockdown is that I had the chance to learn new recipes and techniques. Usually, I am too busy trying to respect deadlines, juggling cooking classes and assignments, so I just play it safe. Week after week, I cook those old reliable recipes that are part of my cooking repertoire. Comfort comes from repeating a ritual, a set of flavours. But where is the excitement of learning a new dish? Of discovering a new technique? This feeling of excitement...

I didn’t think my way of cooking would change much during the lockdown. I thought I was already quite organised, with a well-stocked pantry, responsible in using my ingredients and leftovers and creative when it comes to improvising. Yet, in more than a month of lockdown, I noticed some changes that made me reflect on my approach to cooking. First of all, now I am cooking mainly for the two of us: this is the first time since we’re together, it feels very intimate. In this episode, we will...

There are two different aspects of comfort food: on one side, there’s the food that gives you comfort and pleasure when you eat it, like pappa al pomodoro, on the other side, the many foods that give you solace, a respite from the news, from heavy thoughts, from comparison, when you cook them: just think about bread. In this episode, we will explore different comfort foods, related to childhood memories or to personal achievements, from pappa al pomodoro to chicken meatballs, from rice...

After 11 years of blogging, a love born by stirring a ciambellone on a kitchen stool with mum, 5 cookbooks, a podcast, countless projects never launched or lost along the way, and numerous dreams kept among the pages of a notebook, I keep asking myself what is food for me. I haven’t grown tired of writing recipes. For a while, I wondered if it was enough, if I wasn’t dumbing down a topic bigger than me. Then I realised that food is enough for itself and, at the same time, it crosses...

Today buying good quality chestnut flour can be difficult, and it is certainly more expensive than it used to be. A good local organic stone ground wheat flour costs about 2€ a kilo. If you want to buy an organic, stone ground chestnut flour made with local chestnuts, that flour can cost from 10€ up to 15€ a kilo! It used to be the flour of poor people, of those who could not afford, or get hold of, wheat flour, and now it is considered a delicacy, as it is a gluten free flour, very...

Today I am here to celebrate the citrus season, with their brightness, the joy they add to cold winter days, the liveliness they lend to rich dishes, or the depth of flavour they give to the simplest salads. In this episode, I’m sharing how I use them, when I’m not munching on clementines directly from a paper bag coming home from the market, juicing oranges and bergamots in the morning, or zesting a lemon in a cake batter. You’ll find recipes for fresh dressings for pasta, like lemon...

I learnt to cook from my grandmother, watching her patiently stirring a pot of ragù, or foraging herbs in the fields to make a salad, or an omelette. I learnt to cook because I was hungry for delicious, diverse food: my mum had a basic approach to cooking, which did not include “strange” ingredients such as butternut squash or thyme. She taught me all the recipes that nurture a family, though. I learnt to cook through practice, cooking from cookbooks, from recipes picked up at the market,...