Coming from important experiences in Italy and abroad, sacred monsters such as the great Alain Ducasse with excursions into the starred experimentalism of Pier Bussedtti, passing through the starry Bellevue in Cogne, the Cambio in Turin, the Trussardi alla Scala, the Gemma di Rosa restaurant in the La Mandria Natural Park, the Petite Madeleine of the Turin Palace Hotel, when in 2019 he landed at the helm of the Opera Ingegno & Creatività restaurant a few steps from Turin central station, in a short time he managed to make the Cometto family restaurant a point of reference of high quality cuisine in the shadow of the Mole. Barely thirty-five, chef Stefano Sforza already boasts a collection of absolutely respected achievements: Emerging Chef of the Year at the 2020 Food and Travel Italia Awards for his cuisine that is "clear-cut, precise in flavor and well-defined in tastes. Without too many frills, straightforward and clean, a cuisine made of territoriality, innovation and concreteness”; award from TheFork and Identità Golose People Choice's Award on the occasion of TheFork Restaurants Awards 2021, Il Golosario Restaurants 2022 award, a Hat, in Le Guide De L'Espresso, and Two Forks from Gambero Rosso, with a score of 81/100 and from 2022 marked in the selection of the Michelin Guide which is expressed in these terms: "elegant and refined place where the promising young Stefano Sforza prepares a very personalized creative and at times ingenious cuisine with apparently risky combinations but which thanks to his technique manage to maintain an admirable balance all the acidic notes of the dishes, for example, are conferred by fruit, excellent fermentations and marinades”. In short, a viaticum for future goals.
In the kitchen, Stefano Sforza offers a cuisine with clear flavors and well-defined tastes, without too many frills, where it is important to "remove" rather than "put" - as the maestro Gualtiero Marchesi taught, he recalls - because inserting an extra ingredient to give an unsolicited complexity is everyone's skill, while leaving only well-studied flavors on the plate is an attitude of few. Sforza's cuisine is made up of territoriality, innovation and concreteness, with a menu that changes according to the seasonality of the products. the common thread is territoriality. Starting with the vegetables, always purchased from trusted farmers in Pino Torinese or produced directly in the garden of the Cometto family farm in Chieri. In addition to the à la carte proposal, two menus, one of which is vegetarian, designed not only strictly for vegetarians, but for those who want to go beyond the concept of vegetables and appreciate their possible developments and then there is the "Opera" menu, the chef's manifesto that combines traditional flavors with spicier and citrus ones, giving a slight Asian accent. The menus follow the seasons and change every 3-4 months. And this already denotes an attention to respect for the raw material.
With an extra particularity that increases its merits. Since 2020, the restaurant has embraced a rigorous path of sustainability so that its menu does not include pretentious fish varieties in danger of extinction – replaced by lesser-known, but no less satisfying species – as happened for foie gras. Another responsible decision was to reduce the refined sugar in sweet dishes and replace it with raw sugars or, even more frequently, by exploiting the natural nutritional properties of fruit, all with a mission: to educate, stimulate, make people discover the complexity of flavors that are hidden behind to recipes. By discovering new ingredients or unknown properties of more common raw materials, as in the case of the vegetarian menu.
In the vegetarian menu, the chef enhances one seasonal ingredient at a time, in a tasting journey that goes from appetizers to desserts. In the specific case of the Cauliflower Giardiniera recipe, the protagonist is not a single ingredient but a family of ingredients, that of the Brassicaceae, which includes cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower, which is its main ingredient. the chef – which I created inspired by the traditional Piedmontese recipe, which I revisited with the sole use of cauliflower”. “Normally, only white cauliflower is used in the pickled vegetables, while in my version, I have also included the yellow, green and purple varieties, combining them with a different sous vide each time”. Yellow is thus combined with turmeric and purple with beetroot. The dish is also characterized by a marked acetic acidity from the use of white wine vinegar and white wine and by the presence, at the base of the dish, of a cream obtained from white and green cauliflower scraps. A real concentrate of health
Coming from important experiences in Italy and abroad, sacred monsters such as the great Alain Ducasse with excursions into the starred experimentalism of Pier Bussedtti, passing through the starry Bellevue in Cogne, the Cambio in Turin, the Trussardi alla Scala, the Gemma di Rosa restaurant in the La Mandria Natural Park, the Petite Madeleine of the Turin Palace Hotel, when in 2019 he landed at the helm of the Opera Ingegno & Creatività restaurant a few steps from Turin central station, in a short time he managed to make the Cometto family restaurant a point of reference of high quality cuisine in the shadow of the Mole. Barely thirty-five, chef Stefano Sforza already boasts a collection of absolutely respected achievements: Emerging Chef of the Year at the 2020 Food and Travel Italia Awards for his cuisine that is "clear-cut, precise in flavor and well-defined in tastes. Without too many frills, straightforward and clean, a cuisine made of territoriality, innovation and concreteness”; award from TheFork and Identità Golose People Choice's Award on the occasion of TheFork Restaurants Awards 2021, Il Golosario Restaurants 2022 award, a Hat, in Le Guide De L'Espresso, and Two Forks from Gambero Rosso, with a score of 81/100 and from 2022 marked in the selection of the Michelin Guide which is expressed in these terms: "elegant and refined place where the promising young Stefano Sforza prepares a very personalized creative and at times ingenious cuisine with apparently risky combinations but which thanks to his technique manage to maintain an admirable balance all the acidic notes of the dishes, for example, are conferred by fruit, excellent fermentations and marinades”. In short, a viaticum for future goals.
In the kitchen, Stefano Sforza offers a cuisine with clear flavors and well-defined tastes, without too many frills, where it is important to "remove" rather than "put" - as the maestro Gualtiero Marchesi taught, he recalls - because inserting an extra ingredient to give an unsolicited complexity is everyone's skill, while leaving only well-studied flavors on the plate is an attitude of few. Sforza's cuisine is made up of territoriality, innovation and concreteness, with a menu that changes according to the seasonality of the products. the common thread is territoriality. Starting with the vegetables, always purchased from trusted farmers in Pino Torinese or produced directly in the garden of the Cometto family farm in Chieri. In addition to the à la carte proposal, two menus, one of which is vegetarian, designed not only strictly for vegetarians, but for those who want to go beyond the concept of vegetables and appreciate their possible developments and then there is the "Opera" menu, the chef's manifesto that combines traditional flavors with spicier and citrus ones, giving a slight Asian accent. The menus follow the seasons and change every 3-4 months. And this already denotes an attention to respect for the raw material.
With an extra particularity that increases its merits. Since 2020, the restaurant has embraced a rigorous path of sustainability so that its menu does not include pretentious fish varieties in danger of extinction – replaced by lesser-known, but no less satisfying species – as happened for foie gras. Another responsible decision was to reduce the refined sugar in sweet dishes and replace it with raw sugars or, even more frequently, by exploiting the natural nutritional properties of fruit, all with a mission: to educate, stimulate, make people discover the complexity of flavors that are hidden behind to recipes. By discovering new ingredients or unknown properties of more common raw materials, as in the case of the vegetarian menu.
In the vegetarian menu, the chef enhances one seasonal ingredient at a time, in a tasting journey that goes from appetizers to desserts. In the specific case of the Cauliflower Giardiniera recipe, the protagonist is not a single ingredient but a family of ingredients, that of the Brassicaceae, which includes cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower, which is its main ingredient. the chef – which I created inspired by the traditional Piedmontese recipe, which I revisited with the sole use of cauliflower”. “Normally, only white cauliflower is used in the pickled vegetables, while in my version, I have also included the yellow, green and purple varieties, combining them with a different sous vide each time”. Yellow is thus combined with turmeric and purple with beetroot. The dish is also characterized by a marked acetic acidity from the use of white wine vinegar and white wine and by the presence, at the base of the dish, of a cream obtained from white and green cauliflower scraps. A dish that not only pursues flavors but also important nutritional principles for the body by transferring the many properties of Cauliflower starting from the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant ones to the anticancer and antidiabetic ones. And its nutraceutical benefits don't stop here, cauliflower is in fact also able to counteract inflammation and aging, to reduce the risk of chronic diseases, such as diabetes 2 and cardiovascular diseases.
The recipe for Cauliflower Giardiniera
Ingredients for people 4
Soused
• 100 g beetroot
• 200 ml white wine vinegar
• 200ml white wine
• 200ml water
• 60g sugar
• 20 g salt
• 4 g black pepper
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• 4 sage leaves
• 1 teaspoon of turmeric
Centrifuge the beetroot. Mix water, vinegar, wine, salt and sugar to obtain the carpione.
Divide into three containers. In the first put the peppercorns, sage and rosemary, in the second the
turmeric and in the third the centrifuged beetroot. Store in three different saucepans.
Cooking cauliflower
• 1 purple cauliflower
• 1 white cauliflower
• 1 yellow cauliflower
Clean the cauliflowers, not throwing away the scraps. Insert the tops of the cauliflower into the boiling carpio
in saucepans (yellow with turmeric, purple with beetroot and white with pepper, sage and rosemary). Turn off
fire. Leave the cauliflowers in the soused vegetables to cool. Place in three containers. Store in the fridge.
Cauliflower Cream
• 1 green cauliflower
In a skillet, lightly brown all the cauliflower trimmings and the green cauliflower without the tops.
Cook with a drop of water. Blend until creamy. Store in a container
hermetic. Keep at room temperature. Cut the tops of the green cauliflower very thin and
put them in water and ice.
Parsley oil
• 300 g sunflower seed oil
• 100 g parsley leaves
Blend the sunflower seed oil and the parsley leaves at 75°C for 6 minutes. To freeze. Defrost
on top of an etamine. Insert into a sac à poche. Let decant. Remove the water. Store in
refrigerator, inside a baby bottle.
Finishing
• To taste extra virgin olive oil
Remove the cauliflowers from the soused, keeping the liquid aside for next use. Season with
a drop of oil. Arrange the cauliflower cream on the base of the dish. Lay the cauliflower on top. End
with a drizzle of oil.
Opera restaurant. Ingenuity and creativity
Via Sant'Antonio da Padova, 3
10121 Turin (TO)
Tel. + 39 011 1950 7972
www.operatorino.it
