How Chef Nancy Silverton Transformed Her Love of Italian Food Into a Restaurant Empire — YesChef

[Music] years ago i went to italy for the summer [Music] i fell in love with italy then did a lot of cooking but mostly fell in love with how delicious everything was [Music] i really appreciate dishes that are very very simple [Music] i don't know i'll never feel like a chef you know i feel like a mentor and i feel like a restaurant owner [Music] nobody says yes chef to me [Music] [Music] don't know [Music] hodini doriso oh one fantastic oh my favorite thank you i'm gonna get it christmas eyes are my favorite and they had one left and you got it and i thought would you like some that's okay enjoy it you sure you don't want a little [Music] cafe cappuccino the best in all of umbria [Laughter] [Music] [Music] is [Music] is [Music] oh would you like to buy a bed and breakfast because i know a perfect one right here oh yeah it's beautiful yes i have people that would like to cook at it [Music] [Music] 33 years ago i rented a house for a month in tuscany outside of lucca [Music] i fell in love with italy then and i luckily um was in the position that i could buy a small house in umbria and i have been going every summer and every winter since it's my ideal vacation because it's a vacation that i get to cook at where i have my knives i have my platters just the comfort of being in a home rather than a hotel for me a real vacation is being away from the pressure of running a restaurant but still being able to cook on my terms look at my yield of my are you kidding do not eat one of those just one i don't i have to try it [Music] yeah there you go you can finish it finish the coffee all right karina let's see you're going to take care of the plates and whole setting and what i have to decide if i'm going to use my pretty little plates or just the standard white big one so they can look like she's a pretty prettier one because it's such a small group then they can go back and get more if they want okay no class this is not a plastic party okay so now as far as food okay so potatoes tomato cauliflower cabbage onion chechi escarole that's girl i have onions and i have some mixed salami that i'm going to slice on the slicer so oh whose dog is [Laughter] before [Music] nancy is truly a pioneer in the food industry especially in los angeles since the beginning of my career writing about food nancy's always been an important figure it was just exciting to watch where her palette would go what her interests were nancy's like a nucleus she draws people into her orbit she's difficult nancy's meticulous obsessed which is fueled by a raging curiosity above all of those things i think she is so good at getting out of each person that works for her what her vision is [Music] with nancy you know that there's something she's searching for in her brain that is unique my late husband jonathan gold called it urban rustic it's not just about the meat and the vegetables but all the little things that go with it she is still so interested and excited about what she does on a daily basis it's so inspiring she found this a way of combining italian food and california food and melded it into something that actually turned out to be game changing [Music] it's kind of fascinating to me that that she became so besotted with italy because when i first met nancy she was besotted with bread john davis hey boss how are you do you have an apron for me yeah what about your glass of wine oh i'll take that as well okay my free glass of wine that i get for showing up and visiting you i met nancy in 1991 when i did an internship at campanile restaurant which is one of her first restaurants and then eventually got hired on as a pastry assistant and then eventually became a pastry chef nancy is our founder we like to collaborate we like to work together always help some cooking with it there you have it well perhaps with baking bread i will become very well dressed to i like to bake you can tell that um i don't bake anymore okay caramelized onion and olive breadsticks okay your salt's over here here's your here's your yeast i'm using dry all right and then here's your olive oil all right la brea bakery when i created it i didn't know where it was going to lead it wasn't like there was a model or i said what i want to do is i want to build a bakery and then i want to turn it into an empire and then i want to write a cookbook and then i want you know nothing was premeditated it was as simple as i was going to open a restaurant there wasn't a lot of good bread available in los angeles why don't i try to figure out how to bake a loaf and that was really the story of la brea bakery nothing more than that the starter we use is what nancy created 30 years ago and we've been continually using it so here's the starter we keep that's been around for 30 years the starter is now in all of our bakeries we have one on the east coast in new jersey we have a large one here in los angeles in van nuys this also made it all the way over to ireland where we have a bakery over there and then we also house it in a sourdough library in belgium when i first started working with nancy i was straight at a culinary school she uh definitely demands perfection i was not a yeller i'm not a yeller i know that so no you're not a yeller you're not a yeller you'd be lying i i do remember getting yelled at but that's not even you my late husband jonathan gold was the restaurant critic for the los angeles times and what he loved about following nancy is following her obsessions we're adding flavor to it that it can't help but taste good and smell good when it comes out of the oven she you know will latch on to something like she did with bread and it was just exciting to watch where her palette would go what her interests were i know that there's been several aspects of my cooking career that have given me notoriety for lack of a better word starting with when i did the desserts at spago you know then moving on to campanile and la brea bakery i became known for my bread when nancy and mark peel decided to open campanile in los angeles it was considered a major food event and then i watched her fall in love and i watched that love start to seep into the plates mozzarella is what changed everything for nancy [Music] [Music] [Music] the buffalo that we use at um our restaurants in los angeles comes from italy comes from exactly the same area but i have to say it tastes nothing like the buffalo that you eat in italy because buffalo has a short shelf life but it's not supposed to be refrigerated it firms up and it turns into something else uh it's the best that we can do but there's nothing like eating it here as soon as you bite into it it's like a sponge and all of the milk kind of oozes out and that experience you don't get in the united states [Music] dreams [Music] how many girls how many boys yeah we have 400 girls here adult girls and there's one boy per 25 females uh we are in full mating season now because the mating season goes from march to september and so they should be at work hard work right hard work hard work but someone's got to do it you can tell the boys by the size the size of the horns and the size of the animal look at that oh yeah i want to go under that yeah that that machine is never is never still basically because they love being scratched and they take turns and they actually fight for for the scratcher but i love that they know to go there yeah yeah yeah i think we're gonna have to get more because actually we've seen that animal well-being uh brings to like more production and better production is the original mozzarella buffalo yes yes yes actually in italy we have a distinction we call mozzarella the one from buffalo fiordi latte is the one from cows so you don't even so you don't even say mozzarella de buffalo you just say mozzarella and you know right away that that means it's from buffalo and when it is from canada yeah she's very curious yep where do they like to be touched and generally the nose the nose they really like this hello nose so each of these buffalo they get milked twice a day yeah each one each one they know when the time is and so you'll see they'll be waiting outside of the gate wow cause they're like heavy yeah actually we are in the moment where the buffalo milk is the highest price ever yeah there's a huge shortage of milk buffalo milk because there's high demand and not a big population of buffaloes i'm very glad that you know we are in tuscany because the brand is very is very strong in any any food product wine oil you name it and we are actually the only producer from tuscany that can say that the milk is 100 from tuscany [Music] oh wow nice [Music] this is like my house [Music] it's very small very small uh piccolo [Music] piccoli wanted [Music] [Music] it's just so good still tastes good but uh it doesn't taste thin it doesn't taste finished manually this right now is just sort of stringy and separate and doesn't really it doesn't really feel alive at this point am i do i don't want to ruin their cheese am i doing it right and i'm not getting any direction yeah we do it together let's see now that's better together i've done it in small batches with a with a wooden spoon not like this though now it's mozzarella right pasta [Music] wow awesome look at that quanto pillow [Music] just the way he fondles it you know what he's thinking about i'll tell you right now wow [Music]

Channel: Eater

Views: 522,385

Keywords: chef, nancy silverton, pizzeria mozza, la brea bakery, pizza, mozza, osteria mozza, chef nancy silverton, pizzeria, cooking show, los angeles, pizza dough, bread, food, chefs, cuisine, best chefs, italy food, food videos, italian cooking, italian food, best food la, best italian food la, best italian food, italian, italy, italian food los angeles, los angeles food, michelin star, michelin star chef, michelin star restaurants, osteria mozza los angeles, restaurant osteria mozza

Id: IT4fMh4Sa_o

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 09 2022