Riccardo Gaspari and Liebherr: Cooking like in Italy – with a fiery heart and well-cooled ingredients

The regional ingredients also play a very special role at the Liebherr booth – with special attention to how they are best stored and handled to maintain their outstanding quality. The long-lasting Liebherr appliances are excellent at meeting the high demands on taste: valuable food is stored in the right way – for brilliant freshness and greater sustainability, as less food gets wasted.

Liebherr took the opportunity to peek over Riccardo Gaspari’s shoulder while he worked and ask him about the crucial factors involved in creating an excellent menu made with regional ingredients.

Liebherr: Nice to meet you. What are you serving here in Milan today?

Riccardo Gaspari: I’m starting simple with whole-wheat bread and creamy butter. It’s important to give the bread dough a long time to prove. The cream – one of the most valuable parts of milk – also needs some time. It rises to the surface when the milk is at a stable temperature for 24 hours. It is then skimmed and turned into butter.

Liebherr: That sounds down-to-earth and simple. Is there anything we should look out for?

Riccardo Gaspari: It is important that the milk is kept at absolutely stable temperatures when it’s in the fridge, or else bacteria can form. To be precise, dairy products need to be stored at exactly eight degrees. Bread is essential for Italians so we also need cooling facilities for that. We bake it fresh every day – and if any is left over, it goes into the freezer. This way it stays fresh and stays top quality. You notice this immediately when you start to bake it. That means that nothing has to be thrown away, because the bread smells and tastes the same as it did the first day, even after quite some time.

We also store our butter in the freezer if we need to. Cows don’t stick to standardised processes, they follow their own rhythm. So there is sometimes lots of butter, sometimes less. If the dairy produces more butter, we immediately freeze it…

Liebherr: …and Liebherr’s special NoFrost function ensures that later defrosting isn’t a problem. Intelligent cooling helps to avoid food waste – and you can also save money. But sustenance extends beyond bread, correct?

Riccardo Gaspari: We like to serve marinated char, for example, with hand-made, lightly smoked mashed potatoes, with lovage oil and chives. We garnish this with chive blossom and elderflowers. With this comes a lemon broth, sake and champagne. Despite its subtle east Asian influence, this course also draws heavily from European cooking – for example, with the potatoes, chives and mountain celery. The elderberry accentuates the light sweetness of the char, while the chives emphasise the acidity of the broth.

Liebherr: How is char prepared?

Riccardo Gaspari: When it is delivered fresh, we clean and marinate it. Then it spends a night in the fridge. It is then fileted, cut and shock-frozen.

Marinating is especially important because it keeps the fish succulent and tender. However, a marinade can only take full effect at a uniformly low temperature. The fish must not spoil or dry out.

It must be kept cool for a certain period of time under HACCP regulations – which stands for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points. This is a critical point, because the fish needs to be not only impeccable, but also retain its distinctive taste.

Liebherr: The Liebherr fridge and freezer counters with their temperature range of minus two to plus eight degrees Celsius are ideal for reliable food safety, especially for fish or meat. Talking about HACCP: to assist with these requirements, the appliances are equipped with SmartModules or can be retrofitted with them. This allows the temperature to be monitored via WiFi and digital SmartMonitoring, and an HACCP report can be generated automatically at any time. But back to the food. What’s next?

Riccardo Gaspari: Next is cauliflower. The basis for this is the cream of Greek yogurt, a vegetable stock and a few splashes of whiskey. Marinated and grilled cauliflower florets are added, then comes a topping of cauliflower mousse with flambéed lemon powder. We use cauliflower because here it can develop its potential in the best possible way. It can effectively enhance almost any aroma.

We make Greek yogurt like this: we put our yogurt in the fridge and let it drain for two days. It loses its whey and gets thicker. However, we need very low temperatures for this. This gives the fridge an active role: the whey can only separate correctly at a constantly low temperature. The fridge actively “works” with you.

Liebherr: Thank you, this menu is a really special creation – simple and sophisticated at the same time. As we have now seen, this requires both passion for cooking and specialist expertise as well as the correct technical support, especially for cooling. However, it is not only important that the corresponding appliances are powerful, but also that they are efficient in using energy – such as the stainless steel cooling and freezing solutions that Liebherr will be launching next year. All components in these appliances are designed for maximum energy efficiency, brilliantly combining performance and sustainability.