La Dolce Vita, the annual Italian festival in London’s Business Design Centre, is returning for its sixth year next month with a variety of Italian chefs and producers expected to attend.
Sponsored by Birra Moretti, the four-day festival will also feature a number of Italian restaurants, including an outpost of Theo Randall at the InterContinental Park Lane, pizza from the Made in Italy Group, and pasta from Giovanni Rana.
Visitors will also get the chance to sample and buy wines from across Italy at the Wine Academy, try foods from the many Italian producers exhibiting at the festival, and watch traditional Italian cookery demonstrations from top chefs at the Teatro del Gusto.
Two of the chefs featuring at the Teatro this year will be Birra Moretti brand ambassadors Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi, the chef/proprietors of Caffe Caldesi in Marylebone and La Cucina Caldesi, who will be demonstrating how to use beer in Italian cookery.
Cooking with beer
After working with Antonio Facciola, head chef of Ristorante La Brisa in Milan, the Caldesis have developed several traditional Italian recipes that feature beer as an ingredient, including white risotto made with beer instead of wine.
Katie Caldesi said: “It’s important for us to show that you can cook with beer like our ancestors did in recipes like beef and ale pie and beef stew cooked with beer. It’s going to work really well; it used to work years ago it’s going to work now. We need to reintroduce cooking with beer to the UK.”
La Dolce Vita runs from 11-14 March 2010 at the Business Design Centre in London.
Giancarlo and Katie Caldesi tell BigHospitality about why beer works as an ingredient in traditional Italian rcecipes: