Have you ever wondered how certain foods have been elevated from everyday dishes to menu items at the best Italian restaurants Orlando? It’s not unusual to find what was once considered to be basic home fare being transformed into more elegant and richly flavored menu offerings.
If you close your eyes and think for a moment about your favorite comfort food, odds are, you’ll conjure up a soup, a stew or another dish your mom would throw together with only a few, very simple ingredients. Its aroma always made you smile as it wafted through the house and you couldn’t wait to get to the table for that delicious meal! Chances are, it was her own version of something her mother had made with perhaps the same or even more frugal ingredients. Now, think about how you would recreate that same dish. With a readily available arsenal of spices, herbs, and other ingredients at your disposal, it would be easy to enhance that old family recipe and lift it into the next dimension with your touch and a new depth of flavor.
In some Italian families, these original meals consisted of very little meat. Instead, they mostly contained repurposed, stale bread. Panzanella salad, made from stale bread, was tossed with tomatoes, onions, and herbs, and then drizzled with olive oil. Once a regular meal for the common public, this dish is now found on many upscale Italian restaurant menus. This meal has been upgraded to contain fresh herbs, exquisitely pressed olive oil, and whatever else the chef has decided to use to augment the flavor.
Simple bread soups appear throughout the regions of Italy–all of them born of the necessity to make food provisions last for as long as possible. Made with ingredients such as white beans, kale, barley, fresh herbs, and sometimes a few vegetables, the addition of stale bread to the cooking process thickened these soups and gave them more rib-sticking quality. Some soup recipes call for milk and eggs to be added, others add cheese rinds for flavor, but all are made from simple ingredients that are meant to conserve the portion, rather than waste it.
Porridge, polenta, and risotto-like dishes were the mainstay of many impoverished Italian families in the early to mid 1900s. During this time, meat and poultry were too valuable for farmers to put on their own tables. These dishes were relatively bland, being flavored with a bit of fresh herbs and not much more. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to find polenta or risotto on a restaurant menu, having been reinvented and enhanced with cheeses, herbs, spices, and wine, among other ingredients.
Join us at Christini’s Ristorante Italiano to enjoy authentic Northern Italian cuisine with just the perfect amount of panache, set in a relaxing ambience with an attentive staff. From a simple but delicious Spaghetti al Pomodoro to our rich Scaloppine al Marsala, we guarantee a food experience you will be talking about for years to come at one of the best Italian restaurants Orlando! Browse through our website and check out which celebrities have visited our restaurant on our celebrities page.