Q&A: Fabio Trabocchi

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

At Maestro, you cook traditional dishes and more contemporary ones, but your book is a tribute to the food you grew up with in the Le Marche region. At this point in your career, why did you want your first cookbook to reflect your origins?

I wanted to write about my childhood and what my relationship to my father was like. He was probably one of the last generations to grow up on a farm, and without knowing it, he was giving me a chef's education before I even knew what a chef was. For him it was perfectly natural to use only the best food, to teach me the difference between a perfectly ripe tomato and one that wasn't so good, to get the farmers to tell me how a chicken or duck had been raised, how much time the birds spent outside, how much they were fed before slaughter, if they had eaten acorns or figs, and how that would affect the final flavor.

You studied to be a chef in Italy and worked not only there but also in Moscow and London. And you've been at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner since 2001. Do you think of yourself as an Italian chef?

I look to all kinds of culinary influences: to the way I grew up, all my travels, my willingness to grow every day, my need to be creative. But I think of myself as an Italian chef who knows very traditional cuisine, but who uses that knowledge to make it evolve. And I present it in a contemporary way.

How much of your cooking at the restaurant is inspired by the foods of Le Marche?

We start from something I know very well, and we try to make it with its traditional taste. But we bring modern skill, flavors and technique to a recipe, transforming it into a completely new dish.

You mean like with the roast suckling pig. How do you take that from traditional to contemporary?

In the traditional recipe, you debone an entire pig -- an old one or a young one -- and take the entire flesh of the animal, mix it with wild fennel and fennel seed, and make something that looks like a big meatloaf. You open up the skin like a book, put the "meatloaf" inside the skin, roll it up and roast it in a wood oven until it's cooked through and the skin is crisp. Then it's served in slices. You can even buy the slices in the markets and put them inside panini.

In the Maestro version of the dish, we buy a suckling pig from a farmer, debone it, but keep the individual parts intact: the racks, the loin, the belly, the shoulder, the leg. Each part is put in a plastic bag with wild fennel and cooked in boiling water using the sous-vide style. We also pull the meat from the face and feet of the pig to make a terrine cooked the same way. Once the cooking is complete, we take individual chops or slices from the individual parts of the pig and patties of the terrine, sear them, and present them with a compote of wild fennel and dill, giving us a dish that can be served in a fine-dining establishment.

Wow. It sounds like the cooking of Le Marche can be complicated.

Most of the time it's extremely simple. A recipe can be based around two or three ingredients. But the special-events and holiday recipes can be very labor-intensive and complicated.

So what's the simplest recipe in the book?

One of the simplest is the Le Marche Risotto, with pecorino and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheeses. The twist is that you add cinnamon and grated lemon zest. You don't need a long list of ingredients, and it can be assembled for a quick lunch or family dinner.

Do you make it at home?

Yes, I do it for my kids. They love it.

And the most complicated?

It's the Le Marche version of lasagna, the vincisgrassi . Ours must have 12 layers of noodles. Even in Le Marche, it was reserved for special occasions. But it's not really complicated. It's just labor-intensive.

Why do you think the food of this region is so little known?

Our geography set us apart. Historically, even in Italy it's been unknown. When it was a sharecropper economy in Italy, everyone had his own farm, and there were strong internal borders. People didn't put themselves out there.

Do you try to give the cooks at Maestro the same kind of education that your father gave you?

Every month or two I try to take some of the cooks to local farms, the way I learned, but not as often as I'd like. But we talk daily about ingredients, and I encourage everyone to come in and see how things like traditional butchering are done, because I don't want those skills to disappear. They can bone a pig or lamb. Fish, too, and then I show them what we can do with the flesh, the skin, the bones, the trimmings.

Do you think your cooks will use this book?

This wasn't meant to be a chef's book. I wanted it to be approachable for someone who just loved food, and who cooks at home.