In Umbria there is a chef who prepares up to 3 thousand preserves a year and uses them all in his dishes
Dozens of different preserves rest in UNE's pantry, up to approximately 3,000 jars a year.
It's the heart of his "canning" cuisine, crafted at the UNE restaurant in the Capodacqua district of Foligno, where his love of jars began long before his professional career: as a child, Gigli prepared pickles, jams, and marmalades with his grandfather Franco. The restaurant's official website links the origins of this passion to him.
Gigli sees preserves as a "distributor of long-term well-being," just as, ultimately, cooking is about providing immediate well-being. It's the importance of the gesture, of giving something of yours, something good. During her professional experience in important national and international kitchens, she began specializing in preserves while at Disfrutar, working on a dish that featured walnuts, which needed to be available year-round.
Gigli, beyond the recipes passed down from his grandparents, is ultimately a self-taught person who has experimented and continues to experiment, because this is a passion, which he jokingly calls an obsession. An obsession that leads him to document and record not only the recipes but also the locations, altitudes, and harvest times, to better understand his year-to-year journey and find the right ingredients.
The variety of preserves he works with is impressive—we're talking more than 100 varieties, with a production of around 3,000 jars a year. What's interesting is that, precisely because of creative and technical reasons, he began to emphasize not just the fruit or vegetable—the solid part—but also the liquid part of the preserve: the preserving liquid.
A liquid that, depending on the fruit or vegetable, replaces the acidic or sweet components that form the basis of various sauces used in cooking, as well as in the finishing touch of some stocks. A perfectly exemplary dish is made with the special patisson zucchini: these are wilted overnight in the oven, and a juice is extracted from the larger ones, to which black chickpea miso and an umeboshi vinegar are added, and the juice is then preserved.
The dish is prepared with preserved zucchini, green chickpeas, tenerumi sauce, and raw zucchini, with a clever reduction of the cooking liquid and black chickpea water as an additional sauce: a truly remarkable dish, both in texture and flavor. For the chef, preserves offer both a year-round supply and a great opportunity to create dishes with absolutely unique flavors. His cuisine is, in fact, strongly distinctive, creative, and constantly evolving.
