“Off the shelf” dishes by award-winning chefs available in Varese

Some will have already heard of JarIt, which has been in existence for almost a year. JarIt, take-away culinary excellence, the chef’s jar, was created in Varese, and is the idea of Matteo Pisciotta and Andrea Piantanida, of the restaurant Luce, in Villa Panza, and seeks to bring a bit of Italian, award-winning cuisine throughout Italy and beyond.

A single-portion jar, with seasonal gourmet recipes, that changes taste every two months; can eat it at the bar or take it away. But the latest recipes have something extra: the name of four award-winning chefs, one of whom is the popular Claudio Sadler.

The award-winning chefs that have created the recipes of the new November/December JarIt collection are: Claudio Sadler (Sadler Restaurant, in Milan), Antonella Ricci and her husband Vinod Sookar (Al Fornello di Ricci, in Ceglie Messapica), Katia Maccari (I Salotti di Villa il Patriarca, in Chiusi), and they are the first great chefs of Italian cuisine to go “under glass”, with unusual, obviously autumnal recipes.

Sadler presents a “Soup of chickpeas with chilli and roasted octopus”, which is also served in his Milanese bistro; Antonella Ricci (the daughter of the “Gualtiero Marchesi of the South”, as Pisciotta called her) presents her recipe of “Dried fava bean soup with mussels and sautéed turnips”, and her husband Vinod Sookar (the Mauritian chef who came to Italy for love) presents a “Vegetable couscous, with coconut milk, curry and lemon grass”. Finally, Katia Maccari presents a delicate and very unusual recipe: “Cream of pumpkin and Jerusalem artichoke and honey mushrooms, bacon-flavoured extra virgin oil and calamint.”

Chef Pisciotta’s jar philosophy is simple: eat something good, made by skilled chefs, with fresh, seasonal ingredients, without paying frightful prices. To achieve this result, it was first necessary to carry out a long search to find the methods and products that would provide sufficiently long preservation of fresh ingredients, but were easy to use, and more importantly, that always taste the same, just as the person who prepared it intended.

To achieve this, tyndallisation, a sort of “Scottish shower”, between pasteurisation and lowering the temperature of the dish, was used. “It’s an ideal preservation method, that allows us to keep our dishes perfect for 18 days,” Pisciotta explained.

It works with nearly everything. “The only things you will never see in a JarIt jar are risotto and long pasta.” Apart from those, the choice is extremely large. “Up to now, we’ve created 158 recipes suitable for JarIt.” The jar can be eaten at a bar, or you can take it home; if you have a microwave oven, it takes just two minutes at maximum power, to heat it up, closed, as you bought it, and you can taste Sadler’s latest chickpea soup, or whipped salt cod, cooked to perfection.

In Varese, Pisciotta’s idea, which began a year ago, has a stable home, thanks to an agreement signed with Pasticceria Zamberletti and Edo Bulgheroni. “The agreement was made over dinner; Matteo invited us to his house, presented a few of these “jars”, and we were really surprised,” Bulgheroni explained. “So, we’ve created a corner in the shop in Via Volta.”

This means that, for a price that varies from €8 (for the vegetable dishes) to €14 (for Sadler’s recipe, and for more complicated second courses), you can eat a main course like those you would eat at Luce, or in any of the other award-winning restaurants involved.

The dishes not labelled with the names of other chefs are the work of Matteo Pisciotta and Andrea Piantanida, the chefs at the restaurant Luce, in Villa Panza, Varese. They have worked together for many years and are always in search of new techniques and recipes, offering cuisine that is unpredictable, and highly personal.

JarIt is not only to be found in Varese. There was the first tasting of the precious jar at the Hangar Bicocca bistro in Milan, one of the city’s trendiest exhibition spots (extremely popular during the Furniture Show), which Matteo Pisciotta has been running for a year and a half. But now, Milan can also count on the first JarIt, single brand shop: in Piazza Santo Stefano, between the State University and Via Larga, in a very popular area. The final goal, however, is to spread to the main Italian towns and cities, and maybe every abroad, by franchising.

Matteo Pisciotta will also be the protagonist of our Festival of Journalism GlocalNews, during a special evening at Ville Ponti, on Saturday 21 November. The event is entitled “Taste 900: History and taste of the cuisine of old.”

The evening will seek to bring back tradition, with the help of Maestro Gualtiero Marchesi, who will recount part of the history of Italian cuisine, telling his own story to the expert Anna Prandoni. But he will be assisted by the chefs Matteo Pisciotta and Francesco Testa, who will be presenting some old recipes, “live”, together with the culinary archaeologist Samanta Cornaviera, and with the assistance of Silvia Giovannini.