cooking techniques

Italians know how to turn the everyday into something special, but maximizing taste and nutrition, even from fresh ingredients requires appropriate skills. Lack of culinary skill is a major setback to good eating, but Italian technique is fortunately quite simple to grasp and takes just a little time, practice, and patience to master.

All cooking comes from two parents: desiccation or dry heat – baking (al Forno) – and hydration or cooking wet – boiling (Bollire). But at the heart of both is the most important concept underlying Italian or any style of cooking for that matter: insaporire.

Insaporire, from the Latin meaning tasty, is more of an ultimate goal than a specific technique, a direction to coax flavor out of whatever you are preparing. Insaporire can be revealed in a proper dressing (lemon/oil/caper/anise) or a soffrito (frying bacon, garlic, minced herbs or vegetables in oil) to infuse a flavor base in a dish. Or, in singeing for char, or glazing fruit for caramelization, or recognizing a fruit’s peak ripeness, or plunging vegetables into cold water to arrest the cooking process and retain their texture. It’s using everything you know and have access to to make a dish taste as good as it gets.

The techniques discussed in The Diet Code are in the service of insaporire, and it’s one of the best parts of The Diet Code plan – you’ll enjoy eating balanced, nutritious meals that taste great and yield great results for your waistline.