Nature, research and balance in Franco Montaldo’s natural cuisine
Private chef, Franco Montaldo loves to spread the beauty and the good in the kitchen. With courses and à-porter-experiences, the young nomad chef uses the ingredients spontaneously, without ever stopping to play.
Where did your career as a chef come from?
Originally from Milan, half Apulian and half Campania, I live in Bologna where I cook as a chef at home in private homes, I organize amateur cooking courses and I work as a private chef for Casa Bertagni, a guest house in the heart of Bologna.
Plants and Nature: an anecdote in your life/profession.
When I can I do foraging. I am a great lover of nature, who really offers us everything. I like to go to parks, stretches a little wild away from the houses and collect the plants I know, from aromatic herbs to pimpinella, parietaria, etc. I like the idea of being able to recover herbs that are not found in the classic trade, like greengrocer or supermarket. I see foraging as a way to get what nature spontaneously offers us.
When do you feel “healthy and wild”?
The first thing that comes to your mind? Roll me in the grass on the downhill meadows. It’s something I still do because it’s wonderful, it reminds me of childhood, when I went to the mountains with my family and I rolled on the lawns, with very tall grass, and then I lay down “in a star” creating the shape inside the lawn.
If I said “Share Your Nature”, what would you tell me?
Sincerity, purity, transparency.
Being natural for me means being pure, essential, sincere. Maybe it’s not easy for everyone to show themselves for what they really are, without paying attention to the judgment of others on their own way of being and behaving, but that’s what I constantly try to do.
Nature is pure. I feel close to nature and try to imitate it in its purity. Even in the Pure & Food kitchen there is nothing hyper-transformed. We have an exceptional raw material available, just a little processing is needed to make us feel the purity of the taste and flavors of that ingredient, without being too much there to work it. Food is something pure. Pure understood as purity, but also as simplicity. It’s true, sometimes contrasts are sought in flavors and textures, but at the same time I try to leave every ingredient in its being, as it is.
Can you tell us your recipe?
Reading the ingredients of your Remedia, some combinations came to me spontaneously: in the Remedium n.2 – Boost, used in this recipe, there is lemongrass, which in Asian cuisine is always combined with fish, a combination that I wanted to propose in my turn.
