TAVARNELLE VAL D’PESA, ITALY— For the past two decades my body weight has fluctuated substantially, up and down, gaining and losing, in both directions. It’s nothing I’m proud of, but it’s also not something I worry too much about. My personal physician stays on my case about dropping poundage (as he should) and— save the emails— I know constant weight gain and weight loss is not healthy. This is how I see it: In the early 1980s I gave up drinking all forms of alcohol and other dangerous recreational substances. In the 1990s I gave up smoking. I got married and basically gave up sex. I am going to eat. It’s the last vice I’m hanging onto before I check into a monastery.
My closet is full of clothes in multiple sizes. When we are recipe testing to open a new restaurant or developing a new cookbook, I pull from the larger sizes, when there is no major food development project going on, I pull from the less large sizes (there are no “smaller” sizes in my closet these days). There are, however a few bins with smaller sized clothes I used to wear on the top shelf, that are there just in case I ever get motivated to go on an all-out exercise regimen (note: early 1990s fashion will need to be back in style if that ever happens).
I have wintered well. I left for Italy at a record-high weight for me. The walking and food choices over here in Italy will help me be able to choose clothes in my closet that are one size down when I return home. Last spring, I dropped 15 pounds in a month while leading three tour groups over here.
When I tell our guests that I lose weight over here, they laugh and think I’m making a joke to help them feel less guilty about eating all of the food we are about to serve them over the next week. We eat a lot of food on these trips. Seriously, a lot of food. Though the food here, basically a modified Mediterranean diet, must process differently in my system. That, in combination with all of the walking, is the only explanation I have to offer when asked, “How can that be (that you lose weight)?”
I am always encouraged when people return home and send an email stating, “You were right. I lost a little weight.”
We don’t eat like Italians eat while on these trips. We eat WHAT Italians eat, we just eat more courses than Italians eat. It’s my desire to cover all of the bases for our guests. I want them to get on the plane on the ride home and look back over the course of the week and be able to check all of the boxes. I try to leave no stone unturned when it comes to eating authentic Tuscan food. It might be the only time that person ever visits this part of the world. I don’t want them to miss anything.
All of the food is authentic, and we never grace the doors of a tourist trap, but we order more food than Italians would typically order. Yet we still lose weight. It’s another reason I love this area.
I love bread. Seriously, I really, really, really, really, really love bread. I love the Almighty, my wife, my kids, my family, my friends, and bread— in that order. If there were a 12-step program for habitual bread eaters, I would be a candidate. “I am Robert, and I am a breadaholic. It’s been 30 minutes since I last ate some bread.” I would be living in constant relapse and would have way more problems living without bread than I have living without alcohol.
There is a reason many believe that the “manna from heaven” was bread. In Tuscany the bread is not made with salt. It’s one of the only things I disagree with when it comes to local food over here. Though, when you boil it all down, it’s my personal preference vs two thousand years of bread-making history. There is a reason they don’t put salt in the bread. I am told by a few of the locals, “bread doesn’t need salt.” Others state that it has to do with the way bread is digested in our systems. Tuscans are keenly aware of how foods react in their bodies. I love that. But I also love salt in my bread.
When I am eating bread and olive oil over here, I always sprinkle a little salt on it. The locals would never do that, but it makes sense to me. Wyatt Waters, my best friend, business partner, and co-collaborator, and I could both make an entire meal out of bread, salt, and the extra-virgin olive oil over here, and often do. If I lived over here full-time, I would probably have to start the first chapter of Breadaholics Anonymous. Though I don’t think I’d be a very loyal member.
My days start at the local bakery in town, Bagnoli Pasticceria. There, I go for a pastry that most Tuscans pick up in the morning to eat for lunch— a cotta-fontina sfoglia. It’s an amazingly tasty little piece of heaven-on-earth— a round, buttery puff pastry that is stuffed with just a little ham and fontina cheese. When I get to the bakery early in the morning, they are still warm. It is what all other breakfast pastries want to be when they grow up. I have been eating them for almost a decade, and if they were available every morning back home, I would have to add a third section to my closet.
If I were ever given the choice to have a 32-inch waist with 10% bodyfat or live without bread for the rest of my life, it would be one of the easiest decisions of my life— point me to the big and tall section, and hand me a pastry.
Onward.
