Vocabulary

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Lesson Transcript

Hi, guys! Ciao ragazzi! I’m Desiree and today I’m going to talk to you about 10 Italian foods.
1. bagnacauda
Bagnacauda is a typical food of Piedmont. It’s a dialect expression so in Italian it would mean cauda from calda “hot” and bagna is “sauce” so hot sauce. Basically it’s made with garlic, oil and anchovies. Since it’s hot, it’s typical of autumn, but I would say winter, but it’s a strong taste and people say that you can know if someone ate it the day before. So yeah, don’t eat bagnacauda before a date.
2. crostata
It’s basically a tart like this big. So it’s sweet and you can find that with marmalade. Recently also, chocolate cream, the stripes that you put on top, they’re like this so a cross. That’s why I would say it’s easy to remember crostata because it’s made of crosses basically.
3. lasagne
This is probably what everyone knows after pizza and spaghetti. Lasagne is made of this flat pasta. It’s flat and long and large that you put at the bottom and then you put cheese and ragu that is meat sauce and then again; pasta, ragu, cheese; pasta, ragu, cheese; pasta, ragu, cheese. You can go on forever if you manage to. My grandma goes on with floors like fourteen. I counted that once, while my mom stays with seven at the maximum. Also, if you don’t like meat or you don’t want to eat that, you can just put pasta and spinach and cheese. There’s a lot of things that you can do with a shape of lasagne but it’s not real lasagne. Still, lasagne is the best.
4. minestrone
Okay, this is basically a soup with vegetables and it can be with pieces of vegetables so you cut it and you put it inside the water, make it boil, blah, blah, blah… or you do that and then at the end, you chop it to make it more like a cream. As long as it’s a soup and you like it, you can call it minestrone.
Minestrone literally means "a big minestra” because when you put one at the end of a word, it becomes bigger. Minestra is a soup so it’s a big, big, big soup like tavolo “table”, tavolone "a big table".
5. orecchiette con le cime di rapa
This is a dish that is typical from South Italy. It’s made with turnip especially with the part on top of that, the green one. We have endless types of pasta, like hundreds. For example, this one, orecchiette, it’s small like this and it’s not flat, okay. So the sauce can go inside. It literally means “small ears”. “Ears” is orecchie and ette makes things smaller like one made things bigger, ette makes things smaller so small ears with turnip.
6. pannacotta
Panna is the cream that we use. It can be sweet or salty. It depends on which one you are using, but we use the same word that it’s panna. Cotta means “bake”. In fact it’s cook and you can eat that as it is or add chocolate cream, chocolate sauce or caramel. So yeah, it’s a kind of pudding but not flavored. It’s just panna so a cream, a white cream.
7. parmigiana
Okay, do you remember what I told you about lasagne that you do a lot of floors basically? It’s the same, but it’s not made of pasta, but eggplant and then you put again tomato sauce and cheese. This time, cheese is different because with lasagne, it’s bechamel, while with parmigiana, you can use a lot of them. I would say maybe pecorino.
Here too, there are a lot of types of parmigiana, but yeah, remember that parmigiana has eggplants and a lot of the times, Parmigiano, a name of cheese.
8. polenta
The first thing that you think when you think about polenta is winter because it’s hot and it’s salty. So it’s flour made of cereals. There are a lot of types of polenta, not the polenta itself, but how you eat that. For example, polenta valdostana so you eat polenta with cheese or carbonara. Maybe the most famous one is called polenta concia made with basically fat things.
9. tiramisù
Tiramisù is a dessert. What you really need to do tiramisù is mascarpone. It’s a particular cheese; sweet cheese, fat cheese, I would say. The classical one is biscuits with coffee mascarpone and chocolate and that’s delicious. And yeah, also, sometimes people would add alcohol to have a stronger taste.
10. salame dolce
It’s a salame, but it’s sweet so it’s made of chocolate and the white things so the fat that you would see inside salame is made by biscuits. You can do that with children. It’s kind of fun because you smash biscuits and then put it with chocolate that goes with sugar and butter and then you shape it as a salame and then you put it in the freezer maybe and then you wait and then you eat that and it’s good. Yeah that’s my favorite.
That was it for our 10 Italian foods. I’m kind of hungry now so I hope you can taste them soon or that you tasted them already. If that’s the case, tell me which one was your favorite and yeah, remember to subscribe. Ciao, ciao!
Apparently, we like making things with floors; pasta, ragu, cheese; pasta, ragu, cheese.

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