The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Giada De Laurentiis

My first food memory is making margherita pizza with my grandfather and my very young siblings [when] I was 5. My grandfather came from a large family in Naples, and his parents had a pasta factory there before WWII. My grandfather and his siblings would go door to door to sell it. His mom also made sauces and pizza, so my grandfather grew up eating lots of pizza, and every time he would entertain, pizza was the appetizer. He would make the dough on a Sunday morning, let it rise, and by the late afternoon he would sit us all down at a counter in the kitchen, all his grandchildren, and just put out a bunch of toppings and let us do whatever we wanted with it. I watched as my grandfather made the first and the second before I dove in, unlike my siblings who just took everything and dumped it on. I was very meticulous. It solidified the fact that food is a lot of fun, and because it’s something you eat, there’s a payoff at the end.

The way that I learned to connect with my grandfather was on a food level. I couldn’t get enough—of food, of the smells, of hanging out in the kitchen and asking questions. Sundays my grandfather would have the whole family over and we would have a big spread. And when I say a big spread, I mean it took hours to eat lunch. A lot of us kids would fall asleep at the table, it was so friggin’ long. My grandfather would make for myself and for him—because nobody else wanted to eat it—fresh ricotta he would basically smoosh down on a plate and top with plain old white granulated sugar and unsweetened cocoa powder. That was my dessert every Sunday. There’s crunch on top of something creamy and soft—it’s a texture thing. To this day I still look for those types of textures.

My mother was not a great cook, and she was fine with it, quite frankly. But there was one dish she made really well, probably better than anybody else, and it used to drive my Aunt Raffy nuts, because my Aunt Raffy is a great cook. Mom could make a béchamel that was the most velvety, smooth white sauce you have ever seen, so every year for my birthday, she would make a rigatoni béchamel, and I got to lop the entire top off and put it on my plate—I didn’t care about the inside creaminess. My mom loved putting things in the oven and getting them really dark and crunchy on the top. Much more golden brown than most people would ever do. I remember the first time I was on camera, they said to me, ‘It’s going to look burnt,’ and I was like ‘Yeah, but that’s the way I like it!’ Over the years I’ve had to downplay how crunchy and dark I like the top of baked pastas. 

When I went to Pepperdine, I lived in the dorms and I hated cafeteria food. I had a little electric stovetop in my dorm room, which I shared with two other girls—it was the first time that I’d lived that way. I couldn’t really cook, so I would make ramen, but I would add, like, an herbes de provence mix, grate in some parm, and either rip up some arugula or add some peas. It was my version of pasta. I was never a fast food girl, I never went to McDonald’s, never did any of that, but that frickin’ ramen, I adore it. I wasn’t allowed to have fast food when I was growing up, my parents kind of shunned anything that was packaged, and so this was my rebellion. Ramen and Oreo cookies were what I stashed in my dorm room.

I went to cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and it was a very difficult first year there. Not speaking the language, not knowing anybody—I was really lonely. In my pastries class we were learning to make puff pastry, and we made a shit ton of [it]. We would make 20-25 croissants, and it wasn’t like today, where you could put them aside and give them to this shelter or that. In those days they were like, ‘Take it home! Give it to your neighbors, your friends, whatever.’ I would take it home, and after school my dinner was to lay them all out on a sheet pan and unravel all of my croissants, and pick out the bars of dark chocolate in each and every croissant. That is how I spent many a night in Paris, in my one-room apartment, and how I realized I drown my sorrows in my food. To this day I do exactly the same thing, though these days I also peel off the top and bottom, the crispy, buttery parts. I don’t care about the dough inside.

When I started cooking, I wasn’t making enough money to make ends meet, and my family was getting a little frustrated with me, so I left Wolfgang Puck and I started a little catering business. My first job was for a family who hired me to do their Thanksgiving. So I go into this kitchen that I don’t know very well and I was making turkey and all the fixings. Everybody sits down and I’m really proud, I made a citrus herb turkey that is now one of my famous recipes. They had this golden retriever who was really lovely, and of course the dog loved the scent so it was around me constantly. I put the turkey on the platter, I start to walk out to the dining room table, and the dog gets in between my legs, which I can’t see because the turkey’s bigger than me, and I fall. I closed my eyes because I knew I was going down, and when I opened my eyes, I saw the dog ripping the turkey apart. The family and their friends were laughing hysterically—they still won’t let me live it down. I learned to handle the fact that disasters happen and they usually happen on the most important gigs, which happens to me a lot in life now, in cooking demos or on the Today show. But I don’t do Thanksgivings now. I let my aunt do it.

We had about 500 people at my wedding, and I spent the week before my wedding making these cookies to give to our guests. I had a tiny little kitchen—think New York City kitchen—and I made dough and froze it. I was a private chef at the time, and I guess I thought because I did this for a living it would go a lot faster. My brother came over to help me, my sister helped me, my fiancé helped me—it took a village to put these things together. I ate so much cookie dough that by the time I got to my wedding and put that dress on, it was rough. But I think it was a saving grace, because of all the nerves and stress that I had about getting married, I realized that cooking and being in the kitchen, being around food and being around my family, can be therapeutic.

When I first found out I was pregnant with my daughter and nobody knew I was pregnant yet, I was doing the Today show, doing food segments and co-hosting.  I had really bad morning sickness—I had to get up early and be in hair and makeup, and I had a hard time getting up and actually functioning. I had never been a huge breakfast person, because breakfast, for Italians, is something really small, like a croissant or some toast. But I knew I had to figure something out. I scoured the kitchen and I saw a pumpernickel bagel. I don’t normally eat bagels, but every morning I would down half a pumpernickel bagel, and I felt like a rock star for the rest of the day. Pumpernickel bagels followed me around for the first three or four months of my pregnancy.

The thing that turned me from being a private chef to a Food Network personality was my Food & Wine shoot—they asked me to do a brunch with my family, around the time my grandfather was getting a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. It was after 9/11, and they were all about family; people just wanted to stay home and cook. For the first time I wrote the recipes and styled everything on my own, and there were two recipes that I think really nailed it for them: the almond cornmeal cake—simple, but kind of just a little different from what you would normally see—and the baked rigatoni with mushrooms and prosciutto. It got me noticed at Food Network—executives thought the recipes were accessible to the home cook but unique enough to set me apart from everybody else who was already there. At least, that’s what they told me. So from that photo shoot I landed Everyday Italian, and everything from then on changed.

The summer of 2003, I went on a trip to Sicily with my aunt. It was sort of a strange trip, because my brother was sick with cancer, and I had been by his side since he had been diagnosed a year earlier. I felt really guilty about leaving him and going on this trip with my aunt, though she insisted it was time for me to take a break. She rented a sailboat, and we sailed the Sicilian islands for a week, maybe 10 days, and had probably the best food of my life—the food that has inspired the rest of my career the most, out of everything that I’ve had. At one of these little beach shack restaurants, I had a lemon spaghetti dish, very simple, just olive oil, a little bit of garlic, lemon juice, lemon zest, parmesan cheese, and pasta water. It had to have been one of the best dishes of my life, probably because it was so simple and so incredibly decadent in a way. It brought to the forefront how simple food can be and also how simple it can be to just nourish ourselves. I remember thinking that I needed to recreate this dish—it took months to get the measurements right, but it’s now one of my most famous dishes—and that it would be the dish that I would remember my brother by.