Historically in the past it was considered one of the rare diseases affecting about 0,02% of the population. Then it exploded in the media, especially in the United States. Wheat has ended under accusation even though a 2013 study, based on data from the 1th and 206.561st centuries, ruled out that there has been an increase in the protein content of US wheat (proportionally correlated to the gluten content) due to the artificial selection of the cultivated qualities. More credible is the fact that the diagnostic capabilities to identify its presence have increased. Then there were spectacular conversions of famous personalities such as Victoria Beckham, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Novak Djokovic one of the greatest tennis players in history number 6 in the ATP rankings, who declared their intolerance to gluten, victims of Celiac disease. And celiac disease has in a certain sense become the current disease of recent years. Not that the numbers are irrelevant, in Italy there are 320 people with officially diagnosed celiac disease. But it must also be said that there are instead XNUMX million who, according to a Nielsen research, consume gluten-free foods, thinking that this could have slimming or in any case beneficial and purifying effects. And this is how a XNUMX million euro market has developed behind real or presumed celiac disease.
For many, the restaurant has become so if not a mirage, a place to be visited with great circumspection, with a thousand recommendations and with many fears of contamination and healthy anxieties.
But for anyone passing through Signa, a precious city of art and cultural traditions, rich in historical evidence, mentioned by Puccini in his "Gianni Schicchi", 20 kilometers from Florence, and is celiac, real or presumed, the restaurant La Quercia of Villa Castelletti, becomes a safe port of call, where everything, from bread to canapés, from first and second courses to desserts is strictly Gluten Free, a place to enter without worries and mistrust and enjoy a refined and tasty lunch in absolute freedom of choice.
All thanks to a young thirty-two-year-old chef from Prato, Elisa Masoni, the first Gluten-free Chef in Italy who, however, is not celiac, but who has taken on an all-out challenge: to demonstrate that you can eat creative, tasty, rich and respectful of nature without depriving itself of anything except gluten. To tell the truth, the idea started from the ownership of the beautiful complex of Villa Castelletti, a set of seventeenth-century farmhouses transformed into a 3-star boutique hotel with a style that combines a charming hotel with a Tuscan agritourism, taken over in the 80s. 12 by the Allegri family by the Croft counts who after the war had used the villa as an orphanage. A charming location, with a small lake, a XNUMX-hectare park with an English garden bigger than Florence, but also of memory: still today, in fact, the children of those periods meet every year for a dinner in to remember the moments spent in that orphanage.
In 2015, the Allegris had the intuition, sniffing the wind, to give life to a gluten-free project. Which materializes in the meeting with the young Chef from Prato, who comes from the consolidated school of Claudio Vincenzo of the La Limonaia restaurant in Villa Rospigliosi in Prato who cultivates a single philosophy in the kitchen, focus on selected ingredients from the territory, respect their characteristics, elaborate them in the wake of the recipes of the local tradition, in the seasonality of the products, in the careful selection of their most genuine Tuscan nature, from the meats from Mugello to the Vaiano and Senese poultry, to the fresh fish from Versilia and Porto S. Stefano to the vegetables all at Km0, to the artisanal production of fresh and filled pasta.
If these are the foundations on which Masoni grew up, then the figure of Ana Roš took over, the great Slovenian Chef of the Hiša Franko restaurant, elected best cook in the world in 2017, protagonist of an episode of the documentary Chef's Table on Netflix, 38th place in the ranking of The Worlds 50 Best Restaurants 2019, to permeate its culinary culture. How Ana Ros reached the top of international catering "Studying the basic techniques on the few books found in her country's library and asking for advice - as we read in a portrait of her in Elle - from restaurateur friends, experimenting, daring, failing, and trying again until finding the perfect alchemy of tastes and textures that make a dish great”, Elisa Masoni at the Quercia di Villa Castelletti set out to create a local cuisine, respectful of the raw material but open to contaminations and unusual combinations. A cuisine that ranges with ease from vegetables to game, proposing head and heart dishes, at the same time thought out and instinctive.
“My cuisine – he says – represents me with products from my areas, including those from the Casentino area, with simple, genuine ingredients. I try to bring my experiences back into the dishes, to recreate combinations of flavors that are sometimes unusual and remain impressed, the most important thing is the flavor and balance of the dish”.
The balance, the harmony of flavors remain the foundations of his culinary practice, a legacy of the DNA of the family on the maternal side, all passionate about art, from his mother "who for family reasons was unable to continue his studies in his youth" to his aunt sculptress and restorer "quite established at the time" which led her to start the art school, concluding it with a diploma in sculpture.
But her cuisine is also the legacy of her beautiful youth made up of moments of pure enjoyment of life, of her long summers in the Casentino, "in a small town, Casalino, together with my maternal grandparents with whom I got closer and closer to cooking with the search for wild herbs, fishing in fresh water next to my brother a skilled fisherman, preserves involving all the relatives, ricotta and nettle tortelli, soprassata and so on. I waited all year for those moments lived in those extraordinary mountains”.
After finishing art school, Elisa Masoni thinks of enrolling in the University of furniture but…, indeed, a but suddenly arises: “I knew it wasn't really what I wanted to do, I understood that the thing that made me happy was cooking and making people happy people through food, even with just a bite, bring back memories as for me ricotta and nettle tortelli were, which take me back to carefree childhood moments”.
And for Elisa Masoni, making people happy also means taking care of those who are increasingly showing gluten intolerances. The project fascinates her, making a healthy cuisine without renouncing the flavour, the taste, the pleasantness of the food. A new territory to conquer, a new gastronomic dimension in which to wander.
And if someone thinks that celiac disease should be mortification at the table, they are very wrong. Just take a look at his menu, where we find, for example, a wonderful smoked salmon trout with goat celery sponge and its eggs; a duck crem caramel with its Puntarelle juice and fried capers, a Mugello donut filled with potatoes with fried sage pecorino cream and barco onion and its reduction. But signature dishes are also the fried donut stuffed with velvety cheese or the red turnip Wellington, where the tuber is served in a puff pastry crust and accompanied by mustard, turnip tops and mushrooms or the game loin (deer, fallow deer or venison) with chestnuts, celeriac and pomegranate.
Of course it was a demanding challenge at the beginning with a big question mark on how this culinary proposal would be accepted by celiac and normal customers. But Ana Ros' creativity, inventiveness and great lesson in modernity won out in the end. On the other hand, Masoni is not the type to hold back in the face of challenges. She says of herself: "I'm very stubborn when I have a goal I don't stop until I get there". She is fussy in studying her cooking, in private life she is the complete opposite, a very friendly person: "I try to put people at ease, and also at work I try to create a positive atmosphere".
Elisa Masoni's greatest satisfaction to date is to note that people "do not realize that everything is gluten free, they remain very enthusiastic, furthermore people intolerant to gluten find the tranquility of being able to dine out without being on the alert" but above all that of " to see the happiness of those who ate with gluten until the day before and today can no longer, in rediscovering the pleasure of eating tasty dishes".
The Castelletti Oak
via di Castelletti 7, Signa (Florence)
tel. 055.0763602 - 8735073
restaurant@villacastelletti.it
Open from Tuesday to Saturday from 19,30 to 22; Sunday also for lunch
