Welcome to Italian Food Safari’s first episode – a celebration of Italian food in Australia featuring lots of good food simply cooked and many smiling faces. Like the opening story of the series – “Woodfired Bread – Ricupero Family”.  Those four words have me back in the forested surrounds of Jarrahdale in Western Australia, about an hour and half from Perth. Cosimo Ricupero came to Australia from Calabria and has worked hard to carve a life for his large family. He cleared land and started growing vegetables – lots of them – capsicum, tomatoes, eggplant – all the southern Mediterranean vegetables he knew.

His children and grandchildren now add up to five families and they come together every couple of weeks to bake traditional wood-fired bread in the large wood-burning oven that Cosimo made many years ago. This is the golden-crusted pane di casa type bread that is treasured in the Italian realm – we ate it hot from the oven with vegetables roasted on the coals, their blackened skins peeled and the vegetables mixed with olive oil and some crushed garlic.  It was well worth the morning’s work chopping wood, stoking the fire, removing the coals, mopping the bricks, making the dough, kneading it, letting it prove and shoveling it into the oven.

Cosimo, the patriarch, if you can call such a young jeans-clad man a patriarch, told me he loves to grow or make much of what his family eats – he believes the key to being healthy is not to have processed food and not too much meat. Wine is fine, especially if you’ve made it yourself or helped one of your friends.

Good pure food is a subject that’s also resonates with olive oil blender Joe Grilli, who combines the best of the olive oil produced in McLaren Vale for his acclaimed Joseph label. Sitting down to a lunch in the courtyard of his estate (this is one of the many tables in the series that I’m sure viewers would love to have a seat at!), he expanded on the idea of eating being one of the most intimate things one does and therefore something that needs thought and care. Olive oil, he says, is the only oil produced that doesn’t need further refining once its pressed – its ready to go as a pure and natural food/ingredient.

Respecting food takes on a whole new perspective when you see how some of it is produced – take vongole – the sweet little molluscs that are found in the sand of tidal zones in some parts of Australia. We went to work early one morning with the smiling Tony Petruzelli, a rather foreboding cloudy day with forecasts of storms. Not the sort of day you want to be outside..and certainly not chest-deep in water digging around for clams. But the result, like most things is so worth it!

You’ll see three beautiful recipes in this episode – for perfect bruschetta with Guy Grossi; spaghetti alle vongole with Eugenio Maiale and Cannoli with Achilles Mellini. What a way to start! Hope you enjoy the feast each week.

Salute!

Maeve