Kitchener Chef Cooks Lopriore

The Austrian pianist and composer Artur Schnabel purportedly said of Mozart that he was “too easy for children and too difficult for pianists.”

In that paradox, Schnabel meant something to the effect that any child who has been taught to read music competently can hit the right notes to play Mozart well enough; however, when an expert pianist started looking closely at those seemingly simple notes and trying to really penetrate what Mozart was driving at, well, that is when things get a bit tougher altogether.

There is a similar paradox tucked into Paolo Lopriore’s week-long tenure at Stratford Chefs School (SCS): it is most difficult to cook a simple dish. Less difficult is to acknowledge that culinary students must learn how to cook simply.

As the school’s chef-in-residence recently, Loproire’s approach with SCS students set out for them precisely the paradox: treating a few simple ingredients with mastery and technical excellence to produce truly delicious food with depth and complex flavours.

A Lopriore menu from his SCS visit: stark in its simplicity; simple in its starkness.

Lopriore, on a return visit to SCS, oversees Il Canto in the Relais et Chateaux Certosa di Maggiano in Siena, Italy. He knows from simple: one of his best known dishes is a virtually undressed insalata of seaweed, aromatic herbs, some radish, and a few strips of nori. If he doesn’t cook within a sensibility of history and tradition, then perhaps no one does: the hotel operates out of a monastery dating to 1314.

Ensconced as it is in the Tuscan countryside, Il Canto has also ensconced several major awards for itself, such as checking in at #39 on the Pellegrino world’s best restaurants, though somehow that seems so far away on a cold Stratford night and with a menu designed by Lopriore to play with simplicity in a thoughtful way.

And, yes, this approach and understanding is what he wanted to make sure the SCS students learned. Cooking simply and beautifully is most difficult: with only a few ingredients on a plate, mistakes or omissions can’t be hidden, and the challenge is to hit all the Mozartian flavour notes and textures in the small space available.

For second-year student Vince Tummillo, 21, it meant leading a brigade of his fellow students as they prepared the Lopriore menu. The Kitchener native and Grand River Collegiate graduate oversaw most of the duties of the night under Lopriore’s guidance. He says that Lopriore looked carefully at each plate as it went to the dining room and his were the second set of eyes. He directed the pace of plating and directed the service staff–critical factors to a seamless connection between kitchen and front-of-house.

“We have a rotation three times a year in which you are the student-chef for dinner,” says Tummillo. “We’re responsible for purchasing the ingredients and making a detailed plan for each member of the kitchen. You need a clear vision of plating and exactly what you want to do.”

Paolo Lopriore plates with Tummillo, right.

Tummillo, who spent last summer cooking at Oliver & Bonacini Cafe Grill in Waterloo, admits to being somewhat skeptical about the menu when he received it–in Italian no less.

“I learned how to appreciate using few ingredients in creating something spectacular. That speaks to me in learning more about Italian cuisine and cooking style with him here and understanding how to make these dishes.”

Lopriore operates quickly during service and demands that same of his kitchen and service staff. Once the students recognized this, Tummillo says they adapted and things flowed well. “It was a great experience for everyone,” he says.

The Italian chef’s metier is cooking with bold vision, daring method and intense flavour contrasts, but that was not the route chosen tonight. Grounded in that most essential of Italian principles–simple cooking in a plain and rustic style–Lopriore put culinary pedagogy first and not kitchen acrobatics, he told me.

“I wanted a good menu of proper classic food for the students,” says Lopriore, my Italian and his English not really hitting it off all that well. “It is important for there to be respect for working with, for preparing ingredients.”

What? Who are you and what have you done with Paolo Lopriore? The real myth of the #39 Lopriore is bold and shocking flavours. He challenges diners–some say attacks–with the intensity of his culinary bravado.

Yet, during dinner an amuse of grace and elegance and comfort arrives in ovum form: a steamed egg custard is breathtaking and something, says Tummillo, that Lopriore dreamed up when he came into the kitchen at The Old Prune. There is even something profound in the slight cracks in the scissors-opened egg before me.

“The texture of the egg was unique,” Tummillo says. “It was something I hadn’t experienced before.”

The egg: it is life itself and is so important to cookery. Tummillo’s brigade separated the eggs, cut the amount in half, combined it with whipping cream, seasoned with salt and pepper, returned it to the shell and placed it lovingly in a steaming-vessel for a gentle heating.

At service, the egg was garnished with chive and tobiko. The flavour was clean and clear and the texture satin. Simple but dramatic with a result that allowed the custard to curl so easily and certainly on the spoon: perhaps that’s to be the understated drama of the evening with Lopriore in the kitchen?

Beauty in a shell: the simple, humble egg shows its full creamy potential under Lopriore's guidance.

Cipolle ripiene di magro (di magro denotes “meagre” or “lean,” as in stuffed but without meat) follows. Few cooks are going to take several steps to stuff a small and pedestrian onion in this classic of northern Italian cooking and serve it as first course, but this works well. “I was curious as to how this was going to come together,” Tummillo confesses.

A Spanish onion has infused nutmeg flavours and at once a slight tartness and sweetness that nips nicely into the creamy, fruity pumpkin stuffing (by virtue of some preserved fruit) to make it an ideal winter’s dish. The Lopriore touch are some Amaretti cookie crumbs scattered as garnish for anise flavour and textural interest. It’s surprising: cookies and onion.

Cipolle ripiene di magro: a "lean" pumpkin-stuffed onion.

The Stem Wine Group generously supplied some lovely Italian wines and an aperitivo from Luca, Italy; the latter was a mild but nicely hoppy Bruton di Bruton beer, a light wheaty and creamy translucent beer with a gentle effervescence and a note of fruit which made an excellent sip as a simple, rustic Italian beer. A 2010 Masciarelli Trebbiano d’Abruzzo had a light gold hue and a touch of fruit but it was the crisp acidity that did the job with the onion.

Tummillo’s and Lopriore’s next course, served with a ’09 Masciarelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo which is a softer red with lower acidity and some cherry notes, I describe as “under and over:” pasta e broccoli. “A very, very simple dish, that Paolo said was very familiar to him in Italy,” according to Tummillo.

“Under” in this humble dish did a few important things in presenting the ingredients simply and highlighting their specific qualities essentially naked. The penne was al dente; the broccoli, though just a tad too far cooked was obvious in its stance on where veg should be cooked. Too often vegetables are undercooked and therefore underwhelming. They aren’t supposed to raw unless they are being plunked down onto some sort of pot-luck veggie tray to snack on with dip. Cooks cook, and vegetables need to be cooked.

Two key tasting “over” notes here were an excellent green and grassy broccoli flavour and the subtle injection of briny capers and a hint of anchovy. Welling up easily, these flavours are no doubt that boldness that Lopriore is known for. And here it is controlled and restrained.

Lopriore and Tummillo keep it simple and delicious, both in flavour and technique, for the next course. A few meaty slices of lamb shoulder are served with nicely turned new potatoes (classic seven sides or so?) finished in the pan for a hint of caramelization and a note or two of crispness. These simple potatoes did precisely what Lopriore has said about his cooking: it seeks, he told me, to “reanimate the past through sensory experience.”

“The kitchen spent quite some time turning these potatoes,” Tummillo says, quickly adding, “and then they were confited in duck fat.”

Ah! These potatoes were precisely like my Sicilian Nonna’s–but without the duck fat! They were therefore simple, delicious and reanimated for me on a couple of planes.

Glorious and gloriously simple lamb sous vide with "Nonna's patates."

The lamb is succulent and moist with a nice juicy, earthy-rich line of deep-flavoured fat between two of the adjacent muscles and all of that is by virtue of its sous vide preparation–with no seasoning or marinading done.

If you must know of all things sous vide, the lamb was lightly seared in preparation for its lounging in the immersion circulator at 66-degrees for three hours. It was then shocked in an ice-bath and just before service slipped back in the pool for short swim at 45-degrees.

“From there we finished it with some butter in a pan, sliced it and ready to go. I felt that the flavours came through very nicely,” says Tummillo of Spalla d’Agnello al forno con patate ponte nuovo e carciofi.

You can tell just by looking at the even cooking and tenderness that this lamb was treated gently. A simple, clean sauce is drizzled about the plate and tinged with a hint of garlic. A few braised Jerusalem artichoke pieces achieve that a humble balance but with dynamic flavours.

Jerusalem artichokes oxidize quickly, but Lopriore wanted no touch of lemon juice, says Tummillo. “The way we dealt with it is that within two minutes of peeling them, they were in the pan. It was a mad dash of peeling and cooking right before service.”

Stem’s wine selection–2009 Heba Morellino di Scansano–uses its fruitiness and deep rich flavours well against the lamb and the sauce. The Morellino makes it a Sangiovese, the grape of the vaunted “Super-Tuscans” and Heba’s is light yet well balanced, I thought.

Tummillo’s and Lopriore’s final offering carried with it–finally–the Lopriore boldness, a punch that comes seemingly out of nowhere with a simple lemony dessert, perhaps the quintessential Italian dessert flavouring–or any final course for that matter for my money.

A punchy bifurcated lemon dessert: combine for the divine.

Torta al limone is essentially lemon tart two ways. It is divine–and shocking. The small tart is virtually paper-thin crust sandwiched and cooked between pastry molds to create 100 percent crispness. Inside is a properly consistent curd with a simple meringue on top bruleed by Lopriore himself.

Neighbour on the plate is a magnificent, 500-volt lemon sorbet/ice with an almost gelatin consistency with literally a full lemon of flavour. It is full and complete hard-core, hard-ass lemon flavour. Combine the two components and it is, simply, a kick-ass conclusion to a meal.

“This was unique. I’ve never had anything like the sorbet before. We blitzed an entire lemon in a blender and strained it for a sorbet without sugar. That contrast with the acidity speaks more to Paolo’s style than anything else on this menu. He likes bold and contrasting flavours,” notes Tummillo.

And then there are petits fours, which represent Lopriore noodling about the kitchen seeing what’s at hand. “These were one of my favourite things,” Tummillo says. “The flavours were spot-on and popped in the mouth.”

An orangey-zesty-almondy tuile forms a half-pipe of crisp, palate-cleansing flavour along with playful lollipops of chocolate and seabuckthorn berries with juicy tart flavour explosions and a subtle white chocolate and tarragon blend.

Basket of inventive petit fours.

Unique and inventive. And like all the dishes tonight: simple and delicious.