Cuisine · Italy

Italian cooking

Pasta, risotto, pizza, slow-braised meats. The grammar of Italian cooking: few ingredients, cooked with more respect than any of them asked for.

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Carpaccio with arugula, beef and caper — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Appetizers and Sandwiches

Carpaccio

Carpaccio is an exquisite Italian dish consisting of thinly sliced raw meat seasoned with olive oil, lemon juice and other ingredients.

18 min335 kcal4 serves

🥑Keto⚡Quick🌾Gluten-free

Creamy Tuscan Chicken Pasta with chicken, penne and double cream — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Creamy Tuscan Chicken Pasta

Pan-seared chicken in a rich garlic cream sauce with sun-dried tomatoes, baby spinach, and Parmesan — all done in one skillet in 30 minutes. This dish is inspired by the flavors of Tuscany and loosely connected to Florentine sauce (cream, white wine, spinach), with sun-dried tomatoes added for the characteristic sweet-concentrated punch. It is not a traditional Italian dish but an Italian-American one — popularised in American restaurants and home kitchens. What makes it work is the layering: the chicken fond in the pan, the oil from the sun-dried tomatoes for the sauce base, the pasta water to bind everything. Done right, it is genuinely restaurant-quality.

30 min650 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

Crostata di Marmellata (Italian Jam Tart with Buttery Pasta Frolla Crust) with unsalted butter, eggs and apricot jam — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyAdvanced

Breakfast and Brunch

Crostata di Marmellata (Italian Jam Tart with Buttery Pasta Frolla Crust)

Crostata di marmellata is an Italian open jam tart: a shortcrust base called pasta frolla, filled with a thick layer of fruit jam and finished with a woven lattice on top. The dough is more crumbly and cookie-like than a French pâte sucrée, thanks to a higher ratio of butter and sugar worked in cold. Apricot is the most common filling, though cherry, fig, or wild berry jam work just as well. It's eaten at room temperature — for breakfast with coffee, as an afternoon snack, or as a simple dessert — and tastes better on the second day, once the crust has settled and the jam has soaked slightly into the base.

90 min350 kcal8 serves

🌿Vegetarian

Fettuccine Alfredo with fettuccine, butter and Parmigiano Reggiano — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Fettuccine Alfredo

Three ingredients: fettuccine, butter, Parmigiano Reggiano. No cream. The sauce is a pure emulsion of fat and starch — butter melted over hot pasta, Parmesan folded in with small amounts of hot pasta water until the whole thing turns silky and glossy. Fettuccine Alfredo was created in Rome in 1908 by restaurateur Alfredo di Lelio, who made it for his wife after childbirth. The dish is known in Italy as fettuccine al burro. American versions typically add cream, garlic, and flour — convenient but a different dish. The Roman original is lighter, cleaner, and more intensely cheesy. The technique is almost identical to Cacio e Pepe: the challenge is emulsification, not complexity.

20 min570 kcal2 serves

🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick

Focaccia with flour, olive oil and yeast — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyAdvanced

Flour and Confectionery Products

Focaccia

A high-hydration dough stretched into a generously oiled baking tray, dimpled deep with fingers so the pockets hold brine and olive oil, then baked at high heat until the bottom fries crisp and the top turns deep gold. Focaccia from Liguria — with sea salt and rosemary — is the version everyone copies and almost no one gets quite right at home. The brine is the technique most people miss.

300 min310 kcal8 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan

Fried Calamari with squid and flour — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Fish and Seafood Dishes

Fried Calamari

Calamari fritti (fried calamari, fried squid) is an Italian seafood starter: squid rings dusted in flour with a little fine semolina and deep-fried until pale gold. The squid cooks in under two minutes, so what matters is drying it well and keeping the oil at 180°C. Serve straight from the pan with lemon.

25 min286 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick💪High protein

Frittata di Spaghetti (Neapolitan Spaghetti Frittata with Leftover Pasta) with spaghetti, eggs and parmesan — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Breakfast and Brunch

Frittata di Spaghetti (Neapolitan Spaghetti Frittata with Leftover Pasta)

Frittata di spaghetti (also called frittata di maccheroni in Naples) is the iconic Italian dish for transforming leftover pasta into a new meal — a thick, golden disc of cold cooked spaghetti bound with eggs, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and melted scamorza, pan-fried until crispy on the outside and tender inside. Born in 19th-century Naples as a quintessential example of cucina povera (peasant cuisine), where nothing is ever wasted. The Italian saying 'La pasta non si butta mai' (pasta is never thrown away) finds its purest expression here. Today, frittata di spaghetti is a mandatory dish for Pasquetta (Easter Monday), the Italian day of countryside picnics, and a staple of beach baskets along the Campania, Calabria, and Sicily coasts — sliced into squares, wrapped in parchment, eaten with hands. The Magnifico Food blog calls it 'omnipresent in the backpacks of Italians on out-of-town trips.' The dish has even spawned a Neapolitan street food relative: frittatina di pasta, small breaded and deep-fried rounds sold at every Naples friggitoria. Key technique: cold pasta is mandatory (hot pasta destroys the egg-cheese binding), the pan must be moderately heated with olive oil, and the frittata is flipped using a plate for the second side — or finished in the oven at 190°C for the timid. Yields 4 servings in 25 minutes. Best at room temperature, served as a main dish with green salad, as antipasto cut into squares, or as picnic food with a glass of Falanghina or Greco di Tufo.

25 min400 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick

Insalata di Finocchi e Arance (Sicilian Fennel and Orange Salad) with fennel, oranges and black olives — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Salads

Insalata di Finocchi e Arance (Sicilian Fennel and Orange Salad)

Insalata di finocchi e arance is a classic Sicilian salad of thinly sliced fennel and oranges, dressed with olive oil, salt, and black pepper, with black olives. It is the contrast of sweet, juicy orange and crisp, anise-scented fennel — bright and refreshing. It comes from Sicily, where most of Italy's citrus is grown, and the orange salad is a legacy of the Arab rule of the island (9th-11th centuries): it was the Arabs who brought citrus into Sicilian cooking. It is a winter dish, since oranges (especially blood oranges, tarocchi) are in season in winter, served as an antipasto or contorno through the cold months. The salad is a fine example of Sicilian agrodolce, sweet and salty: the sweetness of the orange balanced by salty black olives and crisp fennel. Technical keys: peel the oranges to the flesh, cutting away the bitter white pith; slice the fennel very thinly; let the acidity come from the orange, not vinegar; black olives for the agrodolce contrast; blood oranges for the classic Sicilian version; and good fruity olive oil, since there are few ingredients. Save the orange juice that runs out — it is the base of the dressing. Serve at room temperature, the best winter citrus, sliced thin, with excellent oil.

15 min180 kcal4 serves

🌱Vegan⚡Quick🌾Gluten-free

Italian Bagna Cauda (Piedmontese Hot Anchovy and Garlic Dip) with garlic and anchovy fillets — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Sauces and Dips

Italian Bagna Cauda (Piedmontese Hot Anchovy and Garlic Dip)

Bagna cauda — Piedmontese dialect for 'hot bath' — is the ancient warm dip of olive oil, garlic, and anchovies that defines Northern Italian conviviality. Slowly melted into a single silky emulsion, kept warm at the centre of the table in a terracotta fujòt over a candle, surrounded by raw and cooked seasonal vegetables and crusty bread for dipping. Origins trace to medieval Piedmont and the Strada Salis (the salt road) that brought anchovies and salt from Provence and Nice into landlocked Piedmontese valleys, fueling a cuisine built on cured fish far from the sea. In 2005 the Asti Delegation of the Italian Academy of Cuisine officially registered the recipe with a notary in Costigliole d'Asti. Every November-December Asti celebrates Bagna Cauda Day. This domestic balanced version uses milk-poached garlic for elegance, salt-packed anchovies for depth, and a finishing knob of butter for silky texture. Active 25 minutes plus 15 minutes milk-poach. Yields about 300 ml, serves 6 as a centerpiece dip.

40 min350 kcal6 serves

🌾Gluten-free🥑Keto

Italian Cornetto (Sweet Laminated Breakfast Pastry) with unsalted butter, eggs and lemon zest — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Breakfast and Brunch

Italian Cornetto (Sweet Laminated Breakfast Pastry)

Cornetto (literally 'little horn') is the Italian breakfast pastry that people outside Italy take for a croissant: same crescent, different dough. It is enriched with eggs, carries roughly three times the sugar, and is scented with lemon or orange zest, so it bakes up softer and sweeter, closer to brioche than to the papery French version. It descends from the Austrian kipferl, which reached Italy through Venice in the late 17th century and picked up the eggs and citrus on the way. Straight out of the oven it is brushed with sugar syrup, the sciroppo lucido that gives the glossy top. In northern Italy the same pastry is called brioche; nobody there calls it a croissant. Count on two days: the dough is mixed in the evening and spends the night in the fridge, and in the morning the shaped cornetti still need three hours of proofing before the oven.

60 min320 kcal10 serves

🌿Vegetarian

Italian Salsa Rossa (Piedmontese Bagnet Ross Tomato Sauce) with tomatoes, onion and carrot — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyAdvanced

Sauces and Dips

Italian Salsa Rossa (Piedmontese Bagnet Ross Tomato Sauce)

Salsa rossa — known as bagnet ross in Piedmontese dialect — is a slow-cooked tomato sauce from Piedmont in northern Italy, traditionally spooned alongside bollito misto, the region's winter dish of mixed boiled meats. This version keeps to a plain vegetable base: ripe tomatoes, onion, carrot, celery, and garlic simmered until thick, then balanced with sugar and red wine vinegar. Many Piedmontese households build a richer version with roasted bell pepper and a pinch of cinnamon and clove, closer to what's sold as salsa rubra, but the tomato-and-soffritto core stays the same either way. Naturally vegan and gluten-free.

75 min120 kcal10 serves

🌾Gluten-free🌱Vegan

Italian Salsa Tonnata (Piedmontese Tuna Sauce, Pellegrino Artusi 1891) with canned tuna, anchovy fillets and capers — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Sauces and Dips

Italian Salsa Tonnata (Piedmontese Tuna Sauce, Pellegrino Artusi 1891)

Salsa tonnata is the Piedmontese emulsion sauce of canned tuna, anchovies, capers, hard-boiled egg yolks, olive oil, and lemon juice — a creamy savory cream that defines the iconic vitello tonnato (cold sliced veal under tuna sauce). Origins go to 18th-19th century Piedmont as a way to use leftover meat; the modern form was codified by Pellegrino Artusi in his 1891 cookbook 'La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene', where he added tuna and capers to an older anchovy-oil base. Before Artusi the dish was known as vitel tonné, sometimes mistakenly attributed to French origins via Savoy linguistic mix. By the 1980s vitello tonnato became a must-have on Italian restaurant menus. This classic Artusi version uses hard-boiled yolks rather than raw — safer and historically authentic. Beyond veal: tomato tonnato, egg tonnato, pasta salad, sandwiches, vegetable dressing. Active 20 minutes plus 1-2 hours rest. Yields about 350 ml, serves 8 as a sauce or dip.

20 min180 kcal8 serves

🌾Gluten-free🥑Keto⚡Quick

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