A Chef's Secret for Savoring Food More Deeply: Rome, Italy

Food is one of the great pleasures of life and you eat three times a day, right? 

And when you travel to Rome, you want to maximize the pleasure of every forkful you put in your mouth, right? Well, one of the best ways to appreciate Rome's famous cuisine is to learn how to cook it yourself. And that's why you want to meet my friend Max, who will change your life.

Max was my fabulous teacher at InRome Cooking, which offers classes not only for preparing food, but for the art of savoring food the way chefs do.

Everyone knows that you appreciate music more if you learn how to play an instrument. And you enjoy a dance performance more if you have taken some dance lessons yourself. Why? Because you experience something more profoundly if you know what goes into it.

But what I love about Max is that by teaching me to cook, he also taught me how to eat.

Friends, our culinary story begins near Rome's Pantheon, in the fabulous neighborhood of Piazza Navona...

...and in this lovely neighborhood lives the lovely owner, Marilena Barberi...

...who has created this mystical cathedral of cuisine...

...where your beloved writer Dave met his new (and exponentially fabulous) fellow classmates:

But the star of today's show is definitely Max Sensei, who looks very modest here as he casually tosses pizza dough in the air...

Max is the kind of guy you want to hang out with. He’s charming, he’s charismatic and he has a great sense of humor. But he’s also a top-flight teacher--a guy who spent years sharing the secrets of Italian cooking in the US before returning to his homeland.

I have taken plenty of cooking classes, because it's one of my favorite ways to access a new culture when I travel. But Max taught me something that changed the way I savor food. He passed on a simple secret that he learned in culinary school, and my meals will never be the same:

When Max was in pastry school, you can imagine that pastry chefs have to develop a very discerning palate for all the subtleties of good chocolate in order to create their masterpieces of sweetness. They taught Max to take a piece of chocolate in his mouth, close his eyes and plug his ears, then to slowly chew the chocolate while moving it carefully all over his tongue. This is how he learned to distinguish not only flavors and ingredients, but also texture and the ever-important aftertaste when one swallows. Like a wine sommelier swishing the liquid around in his mouth, Max learned to focus like a laser beam on the chocolate he was melting in his mouth.

My fabulous friends, of course we know that we have five senses, but we seldom realize that those five senses never stop taking in massive amounts of information. Beneath our awareness, our brain is constantly processing a huge bandwidth of sights, sounds, smells and touch that we may not even be conscious of.

But what if we suddenly removed two of those five senses?

I never realized how much my eyes and ears distract me from tasting my food until I removed them from the equation. I followed Max's advice and closed my eyes and covered my ears. The first thing I noticed was what a relief it was to remove the constant background din and the visual distractions around me. I was left with nothing to focus on except the taste and feel of the food on my tongue.

The first thing that struck me was the texture. I had never noticed even half of the transformation that was taking place as my food broke up into smaller pieces and mixed with my saliva. Suddenly there wasn't just one texture of food in my mouth, there were several. And there wasn't just one taste in my mouth, there was a blend of multiple flavors: some lighter, others more striking. It was as if my tongue took a crash course in the profound subtleties of the food I was eating. I was so excited and joyful to taste my food more thoroughly and profoundly than I ever had before.

In America, we talk a lot about trying to live more in the present. In Italy, I learned how to actually do it. If I can be more present to my food for three meals every day, that means many more minutes of presence to one of the great pleasures of life: food. Thanks to Max, eating has become almost a spiritual experience of living my life more in the present.

Speaking of spiritual experiences, the owner Marilena told me of the special relationship she has with the Pope. This may be hard to believe, but the Vatican actually invited her to open another cooking school at Castel Gandolfo, which is the Pope's summer residence! In addition to being the Pope's second home, Castel Gandolfo also has a working farm that provides groceries to the Vatican on a daily basis. So you can imagine what an amazing experience it would be to take an Italian cooking course in this setting:

In addition to these exquisite gardens...

...there is also a team of hard-working (and presumably Catholic) cows who provide all the fresh dairy products required for these Little Darlings, which I proudly created with my own hands:

Yep, those are hand-made, Dave-made cannoli, but I'm not proud of myself or nuthin'. No sir, not me, not at all...

In closing, my fabulous friends, the choice is yours. If you want to do as the Romans do when in Rome, then come dust your hands with Italy's finest Doppio-Zero quality flour amongst these fine folks:

But if you want to upgrade your game and make art in the midst of some of Mother Nature's finest art, then perhaps this location will better suit your tastes:

Either way, I will be forever grateful to Max for giving me the gift of being more present to my food, and I predict he can do the same for you. The famous writer Goethe said you must visit Naples before you die. I say you must visit Max at Marilena's cooking schools before you eat.

I wish you more presence to every moment of your life, and especially to every forkful you eat!