Tim Siadatan - Trullo

Contents

List of recipes

About the Book

London restaurant Trullo, and its baby sister, Padella, are taking the food world by storm with modern Italian recipes with a British twist. Whether its a simple bowl of pasta or a full roast, chef Tim Siadatan takes the best of Italian cooking and marries it with British produce to create inventive and original dishes.

Since he burst onto the scene as the youngest head chef at Jamie Olivers Fifteen, Tim has become synonymous with bold Italian cooking. He doesnt slavishly recreate traditional dishes so much as cook food that makes you jump up and down in excitement as you smell it coming out of the oven.

His influences range from his training at St John and Moro restaurants, where he learnt the value of simple, delicious fare, to his childhood as one of six children, when eating is what brought the whole family together.

Whether you want to make something special like rolled pork with nduja and prunes, or you simply want to nail the perfect delicious, silky and unctuous pasta sauce, it is all in Trullo.

About the Author

Since he graduated from the first intake at Jamie Olivers Fifteen, Tim Siadatan has become synonymous with bold Italian cooking. Aged twenty-three he became the youngest head chef at Fifteen (and chose to spend his one day off each week training at the iconic St John restaurant). He went on to work at Moro before opening Trullo in 2010, followed by Padella in 2016. His restaurants have garnered huge acclaim and he has notched up two Bib Gourmand awards, as well as the Evening Standard Worth Queuing For and Observer Food Monthly Best Cheap Eats for Padella.

For Jordan

Foreword

There is a famous image by Piero della Francesca, The Madonna of Mercy , which I rather identify with. It depicts a benevolent figure with outstretched arms, gathering a little crowd in the folds of her cloak. You may not be surprised that I do not frequently associate myself with religious paintings, but this one strikes a chord: being a chef is somewhat like being a mother hen, nurturing, gathering people under your wing and remaining calm when everyone else is running around like headless chickens! Then there are those moments when you can cluck with pride when your chicks have fled the nest and take over their own coop. This painting reminds me of that, and being Italian it is all the more appropriate for Tim, for whom I feel immense mother-hen-ish pride.

But I cannot claim all the credit! This book reads as a history of Tim: Jamie Oliver, Moro, St. JOHN, we are all parents to our love child Tim and his cheeky grin. His pedigree is evident, yet the result is all his own. It is delightful. There is one dish at Trullo that I return to as often as I can: the pici cacio e pepe. Its my favourite and the dish sums up Tims approach: a classic, but very much his. The slippery thick pasta, the oozy pepper sauce, the noodles giving you a cheesy whiplash on your glasses.

There is a wider history of Italian food in Britain into which Tim fits nicely. Lets step back in time. At around the moment that Franco Taruschio must have suffered some geographical confusion to have stepped off the train and found himself in Abergavenny, where he founded the seminal Walnut Tree, Elizabeth David was busy confusing the nation into thinking we should all be using Mediterranean ingredients. This is a controversial view, but I believe E. David to be responsible for a large number of disappointing tomato salads. Tomato salads are one thing in 1970s Naples but quite another in 1970s London, in November, with pale Sainsburys tomatoes facing you wetly on your plate.

But all was not so bleak. Let me whisk you away to Soho, at the time a mass of Italian shops. Lina Stores and I Camisa still remain and they were always the core (an aside: it was very important to shop at either I Camisa or Lina Stores. You could not shop at both. Showing my open-mindedness, I used to shop at Lina, but have since moved to Camisa). On Saturdays my parents would take me in to Soho and the day could go one of two ways: either we would go shopping at one of these stores, or one of the many other Italian product shops that used to exist at the time, then return home and have a wonderful lunch of Italian goodies. Or the second choice was lunch at the Terrazza restaurant next to the French House, one of a new generation of restaurants, all crisp pink linen and chic, modern people ordering bottles of Corvo Bianco like there was no tomorrow. This was the life!

The next big moment in Britains Italian lesson was Marcella Hazan. We had an Italian student lodging with us for a few months, the daughter of some architect friends of my father, and she brought my mother a copy of Marcellas Classic Italian Cookbook. I wonder if she had as much effect nationally is she did in my own household, where she single-handedly changed food as I knew it at home: how we thought about it, how we understood it. The Tomato Sauce III is still a firm family favourite all these years later Margot and I always think that our children are made up of 90% pasta.

I am deeply envious of anyone who does Italian, as I have always wanted to, and eating Tims food makes me dream of what might have been. There are some people Georgio Locatelli, and Tim is another who make pasta look simple. When I do it, it is never quite the same! Tim is a precise cook, but Italian food in the wrong hands suffers the danger of falling off the edge of rustic. You have to be very careful when you cook rustically, it can be mistaken for slapdash or a lack of care. These are not mistakes that Tim makes. He is subtle, precise, obsessive. My salad lesson seems to have made quite an impression upon him: a side salad is the touchstone of a kitchen. It is often forgotten then knocked together in a haphazard way, a lost object. A perfect salad, with perfectly dressed leaves, is a measure of how you cook everything else.

Let us return briefly to Elizabeth David and our sad tomatoes. We do not have to linger long on those tomatoes of old; fast forward some years and along came The River Caf, bringing with it flavour, an emphasis on provenance and the celebration of the art of simple. The joy in a rabbit leg! The beauty of cabbage! Before The River Caf it could have been a difficult thing to have an Italian restaurant in London, and care as deeply as Tim about the seasons. They are important to him, which is a good sign for an Italian chef, and this is very evident in his recipes. But it is a sensible understanding: he understands the limitations of being in London, not Naples. Enjoy the limitations, work with them! Enjoy what is available locally, supplemented with things that will travel well: cheeses, oils, tins, which give your dish the Italian boost rather than a sad Italian shadow.

I am reminded of a night out in Rome, with bright and glamorous young Italians. All they wanted to discuss, all night, was Puntarella (a Roman leaf). It struck me that it would be very odd to find such a thing in London: a group of young people discussing cabbage. Except perhaps in Tims company he would certainly be happy to discuss Roman leaves for hours.