[music]
-Years ago, I went to Italy for the summer.
I fell in love with Italy then, did a lot of cooking but mostly fell
in love with how delicious everything was.
I really appreciate dishes that are very, very simple.
I don’t know. I’ll never feel like a chef.
I feel like a mentor. I feel like a restaurant owner.
Nobody says "Yes, chef" to me.
[music]
-Good morning.
Good morning.
-Good morning.
[background conversation]
-Do you need a refill? One, fantastic. Oh my favorite.
Thank you. They’re my favorite. They had one left.
-You got it?
-I got it. Would you like some?
-That’s okay. Enjoy it. [laughter]
-Are you sure you don’t want a little?
Cafe, cappuccino the best.
-Thank you. Thank you very much.
-In all of Umbria.
-Thank you.
Umbria is big.
[background noise]
[music]
[background conversation]
-Hi, Nancy. Welcome. -Thank you.
-Hi.
-Hi, Aldo.
-Welcome back to Panicale.
-Thank you.
Aldo, please, a glass of Montefalco.
-Perfect. -Thank you.
Do you need more ice?
-I’ll have a ghiaccio. It’s okay. I’ll take your ghiaccio.
-Thank you, Aldo. Would you like to buy a bed
and breakfast because I know a perfect one?
-Oh my god. Have we got a great one right here.
-Maybe.
-It’s beautiful.
-The one with the cover?
-Yes. [laughter]
-I have people that would like to cook at it.
[music]
-33 years ago, I rented a house in Tuscany outside of Lucca.
I fell in love with Italy then and I luckily I was
in the position that I could buy a small house in Umbria.
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--
-You’re kidding.
-Do not eat one of those.
-Just one.
-I don’t have-
-I have to try it.
--that many. [laughs]
-Yes. Here you go, are you going to finish it?
-Finished the coffee. All right, Corina,
you’re going to take care of the plates and the whole setting.
I’m going to have to decide if I’m going to use my pretty
little plates or just the standard white big ones, so they can load up.
-Let’s use your prettier one because it’s such a small
group then they can go back and get more if they want, all right?
-Okay.
-No plastic?
-No plastic.
-No, this is not a plastic party.
Okay, so now as far as food. Potatoes, tomatoes-
-Tomatoes.
--cauliflower, cabbage, onion, ceci, escarole.
-Escarole.
-I have onions and I have some mixed salami.
-Salami, okay. Slice.
-I’m going to slice on the slicer. Who’s dog is that? [laughs]
-Is the gate open? Where did it come in from?
From there? That is hysterical. [laughs]
-Cauliflower-
-The cameo.
--with the-- [laughter]
-I’ve never seen that dog before. [laughter]
-Nancy is truly a pioneer in the food industry, especially in Los Angeles.
-Since the beginning of my career writing about food,
Nancy has always been an important figure.
It was just exciting to watch where her palate would go,
what her interests were.
Nancy is like a nucleus, she draws people into her orbit.
-She’s difficult. Nancy is 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 of 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 way of combining Italian food and California food
and melded it into something that
actually turned out to be game-changing.
-It’s fascinating to me that she became so
besotted with Italy because when I first met Nancy,
she was besotted with bread.
-Hello, John Davis.
-Hey, boss. How are you?
-Do you have an apron for me, something?
-Yes, I do.
-Okay.
-What about your glass of wine?
-I’ll take that as well.
My free glass of wine that I get for showing up and visiting you.
[chuckles]
-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 and we like
to collaborate and we like to work together.
-Always helps with cooking.
-There you have it.
-Well, perhaps with baking bread.
-Enjoy it.
-I will.
-You come very well dressed to bake.
-You can tell that I don’t bake anymore.
Caramelized onion and olive breadsticks.
-Your salt is over here and here’s your yeast.
I’m using dry and then here’s your olive oil.
-Great. 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?
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.
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.
It’s also made it all the way over to Ireland,
where we have a bakery over there.
Then we also house it in a sourdough library in Belgium.
When I first started working with Nancy,
I was straight out of culinary school.
She definitely demands perfection.
-I was not a yeller. I’m not a yeller. I know that.
-No, you’re not a yeller.
-You’d be lying.
-[chuckles]
I do remember getting yelled at by her though.
Must not have been you.
-Not by me.
-[chuckles]
[music]
-My late husband, Jonathan was the restaurant
critic for the Los Angeles Times and what
he loved about following Nancy was following her obsessions.
-We’re adding flavor to it that it can’t help it taste
good and smell good when it comes out of the oven.
-She will latch onto something like she did with bread
and it was just exciting to watch where her palate 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,
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.
-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]
-Good morning. Some bufala, bocconcini.
Maybe one affumicata.
-One affumicata.
-Yes.
-You're going to have a good lunch today.
-The bufala that we use at our restaurants in Los Angeles
comes from Italy, comes from exactly the same area.
I have to say it tastes nothing like
the bufala that you eat in Italy because bufala has a short shelf life
but it’s not supposed to be refrigerated.
It firms up and it turns into something else.
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 oozes out,
and that experience you don’t get in the United States.
[music]
-Dirty boots.
[music]
-With the bufala, how many girls how many boys?
-We have 400 girls here, adult girls and there’s one boy per 25 females.
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, yes.
-Hard work, but someone’s got to do it.
[music]
-You can tell the boys by the size.
The size of the horns and the size of the animal.
-Look at that. Oh, I want to go under that.
-That that machine is never still basically because they love being
scratched and they take turns and they actually fight for the scratcher.
-I love that they know to go there.
-Yes, I think we’re going to have to get more because actually,
we’ve seen that animal well being brings
more production and better production.
-Is the original mozzarella bufala?
-Yes. Actually in Italy,
we have a distinction we call mozzarella the one from bufala,
fior di latte is the one from cows.
-You don’t even say mozzarella di bufala you just say
mozzarella and you know right away that that means it’s from
bufala and when it is from a cow, fior di latte.
-Fior di latte it’s from a cow.
He’s very curious.
-Where do they like to be touched?
-Generally the nose.
-The nose?
-They really like it.
-Hello, nose.
Each of these bufala they get milked twice a day?
-Yes.
-Each one.
-Each one. They know when the time is,
so you’ll see they’ll be waiting outside of the gate.
-Wow, because they’re like heavy.
-Actually we are in the moment where
the bufala milk is the highest price ever.
There’s a huge shortage of buffalo milk because there’s
high demand and not a big population of buffalos.
I’m very glad that we are in Tuscany because
the brand is very strong in any food product.
Wine, oil, you name it.
We are actually the only producer from Tuscany
that can say that the milk 100% from Tuscany.
-Right.
[music]
-Let’s separate it. Wow. Nice.
-The stairs.
-Attention. This is like my house.
[music]
-It’s very small.
Very small cheese factory.
-Small.
Yes, we work with small quantities, just our milk.
All our products are made with 100% buffalo
starting from mozzarella cheese.
We’re the only dairy producer in Maremma
that produces 100% buffalo products.
We have some curd we obtained from milk.
Then some whey is added. It’s like sourdough bread.
We add rennet to whey and then there’s
a procedure of breaking, and drying.
This is the result. I’ll let you taste it.
Now it’s tasteless because obviously adding hot water, fat dissolves.
-It’s still good.
It still taste good but it doesn’t taste finished.
It doesn’t taste finished.
-This one here goes into the machine that carves the paste.
It’s put in here, and we start with maturation.
-This right now is just stringy and separate
and it doesn’t really feel alive at this point.
-Now he’s adding hot boiling water, so it can be stretched.
Be careful, it’s very hot. It becomes white as a pearl.
-I don’t want to ruin their cheese. Am I doing it right?
I’m not getting any direction.
-You need to stir in the other direction.
-We’ll do it together. That’s better, together.
I’ve done it in small batches with a wooden spoon.
Not like this stuff.
-You change direction so that the paste is
well laid out and absorbs all the water.
-Now, it’s mozzarella, right?
-Yes. Now, this is mozzarella.
-Pasta mozzarella.
-The paste goes into that machine which gives
us the size we want based on the roll we put in.
[music]
-What is he-- Oh, wow.
Look at that. How many kilos?
-Two kilos.
I made 17 of them this morning.
-Just the way he fondles it you know what he’s thinking about.
I’ll tell you.
-We’re in Tuscany and it’s zizzona Maremmana.
-Wow. [laughter]
-Yes. [chuckles]