Interview to Gianna Greco of “Cooking Experience”

On Tuesday 6th February 2018, everyone of us guys that are part of of the online magazine “Fiori di carta” with Dr. Rosella Vigilante hosted Mrs Gianna Greco of “Cooking Experience” of Lecce at the Campi Salentina citadel of health to make her an interview. She straightaway told us that his cooking school was born in 2008 and that the lessons are directed primarily to foreigners. After that she talked about herself telling us she is not born as a cook, but that she started to work at 16 years old as a baby sitter, after that she did other jobs, she worked at Telecom and at Wind. At 35 years old she started to get passionate about ancient recipes and, turning house by house in the areas of Maglie, Marittima and Tricase she found more than 10000 of them. She started to prepare the dishes and to photograph them and she put them with the recipes on the website. She was born as self-taught learning to cook with her mother and her grandmother. Afterwards she attended cooking, sommelier, olive oil tasting and chef courses.
At the beginning she would have liked to open her own restaurant but then she saw fit to open a cooking school with his husband in a “masseria” of Supersano. The school is family run: she has the son that studies psychology in Rome and speaks English, the daughter speaks English, French and Spanish perfectly and both cooperate on the activity. Her work is very stressful and she would need 5 or 6 people, that are an assistant cook, another person that takes phone calls and that looks the emails and two ladies to clean, sanitize the kitchen and sterilize everything. She would like to open a cooking school in New York too to make our dishes and our traditions known: for example to show how to prepare bread the way our grandmothers did in South Italy, with mother yeast composed by water, flour, tomato juice. The dough was taken at rest for 4 hours at a warm temperature and after that every now and then you added flour few at a time. Bread was made with pounded “stumpatu” wheat mixed up with vegetables or with legumes. The procedure was to let wheat to soak and after a certain period it was “stumpatu” (pounded). Then with the addition of mother yeast you made pieces of bread that lasted even for a month. Her experience in the culinary area gave her the possibility to organize some courses in London and in China. At the end of the interview, Mrs Gianna invited us to visit her school in Lecce to make us taste her dishes and in particular her specialties for which she uses natural, fresh and seasonal products. We then took our leave with regard.