My Story
My passion for food feels like an inevitability, something encoded in my DNA. It’s a thread I’ve followed throughout my life, often unconsciously walking the paths my parents tread before me.
My father fell into the food industry when he was 21 and immigrated to California from Naples, Italy. The first and most useful English phrase he learned was ‘really?’— a conversational placeholder that encourages someone else to continue talking. Despite this language barrier and probably due to the fact that he was a strapping young Italian man, he got work as a server in an Italian restaurant. There he met my mother, and a few years later he and his friends opened some of the first upscale Italian restaurants in Los Angeles. I was the little girl in the kitchen, folding tortellini and posing inside of a child-sized pumpkin for the seasonal pumpkin tortelloni press.
My father, Elio, in 1994 when he opened Il Moro Restaurant in Los Angeles, California.
My mother was born in San Pedro, California— A blonde American girl with a penchant for exploration, who learned to speak Italian and fell in love with my father. Taught to cook Neapolitan food by my Italian grandmother, aunts, and cousins, she brought the Southern Italian kitchen to our home in Laurel Canyon. She made family dinner every evening while my dad worked long nights at the restaurant. She taught me how much salt to put in the pasta water and how not to burn garlic. Everyone would always say that my mom made the best pasta, and she’d laugh, saying it was the handfuls of salt she’d added to the water that made the difference. They’d be horrified if they watched her!
My mother and father in Sant’Angelo, Ischia in 1983.
When I left home for college, I yearned to recreate the family meals of my childhood. I spent many nights cooking and eating with my friends, who would later become my chosen family. On one occasion, my roommate Wylie walked into our house with a two-pound bag of anchovies she had received through a monthly fish subscription. Unsure of how to prepare them, she suggested we put them on pizza. I had, however, spent many summers in Napoli, scarfing down more than my fair share of alici marinate and alici fritte. I had other plans for the small, shiny fish. That night we made anchovies 4 ways; cured, fried, grilled, and, of course, on pizza.
At the time, I was studying biology and was deeply curious about the human body. I was enamored with the complexity of the system and reveled in the magic of learning how humans work. Understanding biology felt like a superpower—to see what was unseen. When I graduated I was torn between what I was supposed to do with my degree (i.e. become a doctor) and what I loved, which was to cook. In a fit of uncertainty and worry about my future — classic 22 year old —I got a job as a medical assistant. I did not love being a medical assistant and quit after a year. Very much like my mother and father, I had grand plans to explore the world and planned a bike trip across Europe.
Before my trip, I got a summer job working at Oat Bakery in Santa Barbara. This is the moment when I realized that food is not just food, but a world to be discovered. The baker, Matt, who was running the sourdough program at Oat, and now owns Bread Bike in SLO, studied chemistry in college. He taught me about sourdough and had a deep scientific understanding of the process. Shortly after getting the job, I purchased Tartine Bread and then Noma’s Guide to Fermentation. I was hooked.
My first ever sourdough starters and some bread I made with them!
How had I not known this? How had I not realized that all this time, while I was studying cells in the brain, there was an equally interesting world in the food around me? There were microbes transforming milk into cheese, flour into bread, and grapes into wine. There were naturally occurring enzymes in grains that, if manipulated correctly, could break down starches into fermentable sugars and allow barley to become beer. I had known that food was a part of my life, but what I didn’t know was how much life I could find in food.
My first ever kimchi (left) and me with some bread I made at Grano Bakery (right) in Portland, Oregon in 2020
By the time the pandemic rolled around, I was deep in my fermentation craze. Just like everyone else I was baking and fermenting everything I could. However, my hunger for deeper scientific knowledge wasn’t satiated, so I applied for a food science program in Bolzano, Italy. I would later learn that my mother visited Bolzano when she studied abroad in Germany, at the age of 17. It was the first Italian city she ever went to. Somehow, fate brought me there 46 years later. During the program, I spent the summers in Naples and Florence with family and friends, eating everything I could and teaching a few people how to make bread along the way. I studied fermentation and chemistry and took three separate courses on cheese. It was amazing.
A postcard my mom sent from Bolzano, Italy to her family. Our apartment in Bolzano was just around the corner from where that photo was taken (left and right). Me after finishing my master’s degree in food science from UNIBZ (middle).
Now that I’m back in the states, I feel like there is more to be learned. I guess that’s the goal for this blog. I aim to continue my education by researching and writing about food, food science, sustainability, and more. I hope to learn, to share, to teach, to eat, and to have fun while I’m at it!
