He meditated on it for six months. She tried it again and again, changing small details, studying the sensations, the perfumes, the flavours, the colours, the combinations, the cooking technique with meticulous obsession. It had to be her challenge dish. There must undoubtedly have been the Mediterranean inside, but there also had to be his Lombard culinary culture of birth, he is originally from Busto Arsizio, and there also had to be, indeed above all, the contamination with the gastronomic cultures of Northern Europe and the East great passions of him.
That dish was supposed to be a sort of portrait of Dorian Gray to represent his intimate self or, if we want, to become the epitome of his gastronomic philosophy. And the result has arrived.
Let's hear his words: "In the end, after 6 months, this dish took on consistency and shape and above all it gave me perhaps the greatest emotion of my life". And yes, because with that dish Stefano De Gregorio, 45, a somewhat atypical character in the panorama of Italian cuisine, won the world championship of Girotonno", the event that takes place every year in Carloforte on the island of San Pietro in Sardinia which is based on the preparation of a dish based on bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean, an event attended by chefs from various countries where one is judged by a technical jury of journalists and industry insiders, and by a popular jury of 130 people.
Last year De Gregorio finished first overall with the colors of Italy thus pursuing an objective that he strongly wanted to achieve “Not so much for a podium speech – he says today – as for personal satisfaction. I wanted to give a touch of modernity by inserting myself into a millenary Mediterranean culture”.
Smiling, sunny, like the dishes he brings to your table, Stefano De Gregorio, however, behind this apparent bonhomie, nonetheless has a very determined character.
In all likelihood it derives from the fact that as a young man he had played professionally in football, coming to be considered a real promise. Then, the dream of a great team that was about to materialize was interrupted by a rude awakening due to a bad injury. Having said goodbye to football, at this point De Gregorio throws himself headlong into the studio.
His grandmother, from Molise, remembering how the young Stefano liked to play with pasta as a child, making the old tradition cavatelli next to her in the kitchen, had tried to direct him to a hotel management school to find a job. But Stefano is not the type to take advice too easily, things must mature inside. He prefers to study as a mechanical expert: he is attracted by the design, study, assembly and installation of mechanical components and automation systems. And so he carries on his studies and takes his good diploma. The funny thing, or at least a bit contradictory for a former athlete, is that one of the reasons he gives for not immediately embarking on the road to hotel management lies in the fact that he was far from home.
But life, as we know, then takes its own paths. All of us are, willingly or unwillingly, absorbing papers of sensations, memories, experiences that remain imprinted, often without our knowledge, unless they come out at the right time.
And the fact that at the age of 5 he loved to eat veal sweetbreads – and find me a child who doesn't turn up his nose in horror at such a dish – as well as that he enjoyed supporting his mother in making pasta at home with the princes received from his grandmother from Molise, as well as the memories of walks in the countryside with his grandfather, when they went to spend their holidays in Molise, to discover plants, herbs, smells, and, always speaking of smells, the unforgettable scent of the Torcinelli, the typical roulades made with lamb or kid entrails in Molise-Apulian casings of which he was fond, well this whole world of memories suddenly exploded one day.
And what about that game he played with his mother, on his return from school, when he had to guess blindly, only from the scents that circulated in the kitchen, what he had cooked for family lunch? In short, the predisposition was all there, it just had to be channeled and metabolized as it was then.
One day he found himself meditating on the fact that the road of the mechanical expert appeared to him extremely distant from that world of nature and traditions, of human warmth, of the scents and flavors of the fields that brought him back to the sensations of youth and thus said goodbye to gears and computer shuffled the cards of his life prefiguring himself with a toque on his head and a great desire to put together the world of his grandparents with the mentality of design and assembly that he had developed in his studies as a mechanical expert which translated into his desire to know other destinations, other borders, other traditions and build a cuisine of his own.
Determined, but not thinking about it, when he decided he would have to spend the rest of his life in the kitchen, he decided to start from the bottom, without any shortcuts.
He chose to take over the trade from the humblest tasks: washing and peeling the vegetables, peeling the potatoes, all of this approached the moods, the atmospheres of life in the kitchen, he had to convince himself that he would go on without second thoughts and he did it for free, something very difficult to imagine today.
Then, growing up, he attended some professional courses, but it was already clear to him in those years that he didn't want to shut himself up within the four walls of a restaurant, he was interested in traveling around Italy and the world, getting to know each other, making new friends, experiencing new experiences. And in fact he can be considered a nomadic Chef, he is the resident Chef of Saporie Lab in Milan where food events are organised, video recipe recordings, photo shoots, he is the Director of the Company of Chefs, a team of Italian chefs who work to promote the agri-food excellence interpreted with creativity and attention to the territory, and carries out consultancy for the whole peninsula.
He also gave himself a battle name "ChefDeg", a smart definition that well translated his propensity for a concept outside the ordinary paths. In short, the ancient soul of the footballer pushed him to run alone to get his shot on goal without binding himself to anyone or anything.
Solitary yes but with solid foundations formed in short but instructive passages to Tartufotto by Savini tartufi in Milan, at the Tano restaurant, pass me the oil by Tano Simonato, a very Milanese chef with a Michelin star whose recurring saying is: “there are two ways to eat, one to feed and the other to have fun, the beautiful thing is that the latter does not eliminate the former”.
Then pass by Igles Corelli, great father of quality Italian cuisine, professor of Gambero Rosso Channel, author of dozens of books that have built textbooks for many young chefs and above all patron of the legendary restaurant Il Trigabolo in Argenta two Michelin stars where several then starred chefs are trained, who passed on to Stefano De Gregorio the passion for what is called circular cuisine a philosophy of respect for the ingredient where, as happens in nature, nothing is thrown away but everything is transformed with the help of technology in the kitchen of which he has always been a fervent supporter.
Also worth mentioning is his experience with Luigi Pomata, the starred chef of Cagliari, famous to the general public for the show La prova del fuoco, called the tuna chef, obviously that of Carloforte, the chef who says of himself: eating and drinking is not only the satisfaction of human need, drinking and eating is pure culture, passion, enjoyment, discovery, novelty and, for those behind the scenes, even sacrifice". And from each he took a piece to build his role as Chef.
The experience in Carloforte is perhaps the one that marked him the most: the lumbard discovered the scents and colors of the sea. His feeling of passionate attachment to the meaning and culture of the Mediterranean in the kitchen is deeply rooted and with extremely satisfying results. Like when at the Cous Cous Fest in San Vito Lo Capo in 2015 he first won the Italian championship of Cous Cous and then the World Championship together with the chef of San Vito Rocco Pace comparing himself with delegations of chefs from nine countries of the world.
If you ask him to describe himself through his cuisine, he has no hesitation: the dish that best represents him, that he feels the most inside, is Parma Modena Carloforte, the dish that allowed him to win the world championship at the Girotonno. “To make it I was inspired by Japanese techniques and ingredients but it is conceived with Italian ingredients and has a concept of sustainability at its base”. The dish focuses on three main ingredients and Italian excellences, hence the name Parma Modena Carloforte. It is a marinated bluefin tuna fillet, crusted with bread and raw ham, smoked raw ham broth with a heart of dried tuna (5/4 of the tuna, used thinking of the Japanese Katsuobushi but using a less noble part), a fake "soy" with traditional balsamic vinegar of Modena and finally a tuna ice cream using tuna in oil.
From this we understand that his cuisine is a game on a globe of flavors, made up of stimuli and flavors like the game he played with his mother as a child after returning from school.
East and West, North and South mix in a result that wants to amaze but also to reason, his is a gastronomic wind rose that wants to affirm an ecumenical vision of cuisine.
And he also wants to amaze a second course he is very fond of "Mixed in white", born after a visit to a Parmigiano Reggiano dairy in Modena. It was the first time he entered this world and he was fascinated to "see the perfection of all these forms of Parmesan. The “Mixed” therefore becomes the memory “of the fantastic perfume in which I was enveloped, fantastic, enveloping. Our thoughts immediately went to the Parmesan crusts cooked in the fireplace, with their rich taste of umami and the smokiness of the fireplace and the burning of the ash”.
De Gregorio thus creates a recycled white pasta, as a pasta format he uses mixed pasta (one of his favourites), as a symbol of the recovery of waste grains in the shops, whose custom is consumed in "soup". With the Parmesan crusts he obtains a water with which he subsequently cooks the pasta, and the same crusts (for continuous recovery) become a cream that is served over the pasta as if it were its part of a "soup" with a scent - he explains – which almost recalls the crusts cooked in the fireplace as a symbol of the recovery of this magnificent ingredient”.
Rebellious by nature, difficult to classify, open to the world, to the exotic - he keeps an incalculable quantity of spices at home and a collection of at least 50 varieties of pepper from all continents - open to news, to social networks, De Gregorio after all he always continues to cultivate the memory of that youth of culinary passion that he had almost hidden from himself.
Curious by nature, eager to learn about new things, something that always takes him around the world and when he doesn't do it in person, he does it through social networks where he is very popular, he loves competition, as a good former athlete, but also considers it essential to listen . because "humility is important in this job and in life".
If you ask him to define his cuisine as traditional or innovative, he replies “I think there is only one way of cooking: doing it well. In my opinion, in every kitchen there must be fixed points: conscience, knowledge, sense of responsibility and culture.
I've evolved over the years and today I think I've found the right path that best represents me: it's a cuisine based on taste, I try to make the most of every single ingredient, exploiting it for a sense of ethics and to capture its the flavour, the essence as much as possible. My cuisine is often contaminated, but it is based on solid typically Mediterranean foundations. Among my favorite ingredients are the anchovy sauce and lemons.
My main goal is to express myself through my dishes: I start from the principle that behind every dish there must be a story, thus trying to add mental involvement to the taste, and to choose ingredients that can give a memory or an emotion. I think that each of us has two palates, one mental and one gustatory, and my commitment as a chef is to stimulate both".
And, it can be added, following all the indications of the wind rose, but always bearing in mind, that the epicenter of Civilization for the bust Stefano De Gregorio is in the Mediterranean.
