About José

I was born in Valparaiso, Chile, where Italian immigrants arrived through the 1800s and 1900s and never stopped cooking. My grandmother's kitchen was my first Italian cooking school, and everything I have eaten since gets measured against what she made. I worked in restaurants through college in San Francisco, then spent more than twenty years in marketing, working on organic content and topical authority. I have travelled through Italy, north to south and the islands, and my heart is in the south and in Sardinia. Back in Sacramento I source ingredients at Corti Brothers, and I cook with these ingredients constantly. I do not run tests: no panel, no scored comparison, no ranked set. What this site can tell you is what an ingredient is, how to judge a good one, where to find it, and how it behaves in a pan.

CalItalia Food is not a recipe diary. It answers the questions worth asking in an Italian grocery aisle: what is this, where does it come from, how is it made, how do you tell a good one from an ordinary one, and how does it behave once you cook with it?

Where a page says how an ingredient is used, or what it does in a pan, that is the kitchen talking and it needs no footnote. Where knowing something would take a conducted test, this site does not claim to know it. No comparison has been run here, no panel tasted, no set ranked.

If something here helps you buy better, that is the point. Questions or a Sacramento tip are welcome.