39: Nadia Fragnito from The Vegan Italian Kitchen

I am speaking to Nadia Fragnito who has a fabulous business called the Vegan Italian Kitchen, all her recipes are magnificent.  Nadia writes cookbooks, she writes recipes, she runs food tours in Italy and helps people write cookbooks. Nadia also is a regular guest presenter on Channel 10's Freshly Picked, with Simon Tui. She also runs cooking and travel retreats in Australia and Italy. 

In this podcast we discuss

How Nadia became Vegan 

Italian meals that are naturally vegan 

Nadia also shares what her favourite recipe was growing up, and tips on eating more plant based food

Her spaghetti fritters (the recipe she shares with us) are so worth trying.

Links mentioned in the show  

https://www.theveganitaliankitchen.com

https://www.veets.com.au/vegan-foundation-cooking-course  Check out the vegan foundation cooking course where you can take your plant based cooking to the ultimate level 

For full show notes go to www.veets.com.au/39

Hope you enjoy this podcast 

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Follow Veet on https://www.facebook.com/VeetKarenVegancookingandnutrition/

Hope you have a delicious week

With gratitude, Veet

Sign up for the free creamy scrambled tofu class

https://mailchi.mp/veets.com.au/creamy-scrambled-tofu

Transcript

Veet

Hello, wonderful listener. I'm so excited. Today I'm interviewing Nadia Fragnito. I first came across Nadia Fragnito's recipes when my beautiful friend Ramona hosted a dinner party. I was invited to it. Yay! And the entrée was tofu carpaccio with an incredible egg-based dressing. I just had to get that recipe. She told me she found it from the Vegan Italian kitchen. So I did a search online and I found Nadia. Nadia has written three cookbooks. The first one was Vegan Italian, Discovering Vegan Italian. I have that one. Vegan Summer in Southern Italy. I have that one.

And Natal. I also have that one. I am a fan. Nadia writes cookbooks. She writes recipes. And she also is a regular guest presenter on Channel 10's 'Freshly Picked' with Simon Toohey, and also runs cooking and travel retreats here in Australia and over in Italy. 

So for the relevant show notes for today's podcast you can head on over to www.veets.com.au/39 and without further ado let's get on to the interview.

Veet

Oh welcome Nadia, it's so lovely to have you here.

Nadia

It's so lovely to be here and finally be able to chat with you.

Veet

Yeah, it's such a great format to do it.

And I just thought I'd start with, you know, the first thing that I'd love to know too is, what's your connection with Italy?

Nadia

Oh, well, I'm half Italian.

My dad was born in Italy and he came over to Australia when he was nine.

And so, of course, I had half, I guess, half of my family making delicious Italian food on my dad's side. And I guess that was the biggest, that created the biggest passion for me, the food, the culture and the love. And there's nothing like Italian food and culture and how it's made with such passion and simple ingredients as well. And so, yeah, I've just always loved it. And yeah, it's the connection with the family that has led me down this path.

Veet

That's beautiful.  I love how the whole family gets involved in cooking as well. That's just so beautiful. And what part of Italy is your family from, your dad?

Nadia

Yeah, so from the south, in the region of Campania, which is, you know, the capital of Campania is Naples. And then if you drive for about an hour inland in the middle of the Italian countryside that's where my family are from — so a little outside of Naples where it's countryside, it's farming folk, it's slower, simple living.

Veet

Oh, beautiful. Were the recipes for your second cookbook, Vegan Summer, in Southern Italy, from that region or from all of Southern Italy?

Nadia

Basically all of the southern regions. I included every — well, most southern regions. I missed out Sardinia and Calabria, just because I hadn't travelled there. But yeah, the rest of the southern regions from Campania and down to Sicily. But a big chapter was on where my family were from. So yeah, I had to include that, of course.

Veet

And when you were growing up, what was your favourite thing to eat?

Nadia

Well, that's a big one. It's a big question, isn’t it? I mean, I always loved my mum's cooking and she's Aussie. So it was all about the cakes and the cupcakes and the jelly slices and all those sorts of things that I loved. I had a real sweet tooth.

But the thing that I loved the most was my Nonna's pasta sauce. And so did the rest of my brothers and my cousins. We always loved Nonna's sauce. There was something about it. It could have been the excessive amount of oil she cooked with. It could have been the extra salt. It just could have been just the perfect tomato passata that she made — that she used, you know, as the base of the sauce. But it was just always so smooth and just delicious. So any pasta that included her sauce was just — you couldn't beat it. Number one.

Veet

And was that naturally vegan or was there meat in that?

Nadia

That's a great question. I think she might have cooked with meat in the sauce in the big pot, and then when it came to actually spooning out the sauce there was barely any meat in it — sometimes none at all.

But then when I became a vegan, Nonna started making batches of sauce just for me without the meat. And she'd put it into Tupperware containers — mostly like old margarine or ice cream containers — and she'd put in texta “NM” on it, which meant “No Meat.”

Veet

Oh, that's so lovely.

Nadia

It was really special. The fact that she made that effort — whereas nobody else in her family, I don't think, were vegetarian let alone vegan — so it would have been a bit of a learning curve. However, back in Italy, back in the 30s and 40s and even 50s, they probably couldn't cook with meat, so it probably reflected a time before they immigrated to Australia where meat just wasn’t available.

Veet

Yeah, absolutely. Like using lentils in things. And I don't know if you know, but I was married to an Italian, so I had — yeah, they were from Calabria. But I just loved all the food that they made. But I was vegetarian and they — I'm supposed to be interviewing you! — but they at first were very reluctant to try my vegetarian food, but then ended up loving it. So I just love that they were open to that.

And they made things like lentichia, you know, pasta soup with lentils in it, and it was so great.

Nadia

Yeah, if you just go digging a little bit, you probably find that there's a lot of just naturally, traditionally vegan recipes within the Southern cuisine. And Calabria has a lot as well.

So it probably was still very much in the essence of the food — the vegetables, the lentils and legumes. That's what they do so well, is beautiful plant-based food. But with a little bit of wealth and availability, then the meat starts creeping in more, and it becomes more common in many dishes.

But in many places in Southern Italy, including Calabria, meat was not an everyday meal.

Veet

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And have you published your Nonna's recipe for the tomato sauce or is that a family secret?

Nadia

It's so simple. It's hardly a recipe, I suppose. But no, it’s definitely in there. It’s in “A Vegan Summer in Southern Italy.” There’s probably about a three or four double-page spread of making the pasta through to the cooking of the sauce itself. So yeah, definitely highlighted on paper for eternity — hopefully.

Veet

And then moving just a little bit onto your vegan journey,  when did you become vegan and what made you become vegan? How easy was it or was it an easy transition or, yeah, your journey with that? 

Nadia

Yeah, there's always a journey, isn't there, to get there? And, I mean, growing up, I was always very empathetic and sensitive to animals and caring for them and just, I guess, feeling their pain, or, you know, whether it was pets or, you know, any other animal. 

I think I was just sensitive to that. But did not connect the dots fully until I left home. So it was pretty much, I guess, a coming of age of getting into my adulthood. Then I started making choices for myself and leaving the family home. When I was about 21, I became vegan and I first went vegetarian. And then a few months later, I went vegan because I read, I got a book from a library just for some recipes. And I read about the dairy industry and what happens with eggs and with chickens, with the eggs. And I thought, oh, being vegetarian's not enough. 

I was like, oh, the whole point of being vegetarian is to try to step away and not contribute to the animal suffering. And then I realised, oh, wow, that's not, yeah, there's a lot happening still with the dairy and eggs. 

That’s when I chose to go vegan. And, yeah, and ever since then it was, as you know, things have changed a lot in the vegan scene in terms of awareness and products. And so the early days were kind of tough. Like I mentioned before, it was a bit of a learning curve, I guess, for maybe my family for a little while, with not quite knowing what to cook when we had, you know, family gatherings and things like that. But I was living interstate from where my family were. So I really was quite independent from all that. I didn't see them that often. So I was pretty much just at home, experimenting with new ways of cooking and doing the best that I could with the lack of options. 

 Veet

Yes, and the ingredients. 

Nadia

Yeah, but it certainly made me a better cook. and I learned a lot of different sorts of cuisines and yeah, it just became a bit more inventive with my cooking. But it was hard to eat out in those days. Like I remember trying to order a soy latte and I'd just be really excited if a cafe actually had soy milk. So, I mean, naturally I could just lean into the Italian-ness and have a short black or espresso. But yeah, it's certainly got a lot easier. 

Veet

Yeah, definitely. You had quite a quick transition. Like mine took me years before I became vegan. What do you think was the most difficult thing for you? Was it the lack of things available or was it something else or becoming vegan? 

Nadia

I think once I made the choice, it was, you know, easy in myself. But I think it was the lack of connection. It was before social media, the internet was still, I guess, finding its feet. So there wasn't a heap of websites and blogs out there. There wasn't even a YouTube where you could watch videos. 

Veet

And there wasn't you on YouTube that people could watch. 

Nadia

Oh, yeah, I was a long way off from all that, right? I think there was a lack of connection. And I, I just didn't know anybody that was actually vegetarian, let alone vegan. I was doing it very much on my own. 

I guess it's, you know, to be honest, there was a period of time where I went from being vegan to vegetarian because it was just so normalised to just eat eat dairy or eat meat or what all those things that I think I just slipped back into the pattern of, like, I didn't eat meat again, but I was vegetarian for a period of time because I think it was just so abnormal just to be living my life where no one else was doing that or anybody I knew.

I think slipping back into that was a lot easier back then when there wasn't any information, there wasn't anybody around so I see now how important the connection is, whether it's social media, internet, people, groups, cooking classes like yours.

Veet

Definitely, because it was easier to be vegetarian, you know, like you can still get a cake, there are still a lot of things that are vegetarian, but once you went to being vegan, it was very difficult, but it is like you say, much more accessible now. 

Do you have any tips for people who are wanting to add more… not all my listeners are wanting to be vegan, many are, but many also are just wanting to add more plant-based food into their diet. Do you have any tips for them?

Nadia

There are a couple of different ways you could go. One is just starting with the foods that you love already and not thinking that you've got to completely uproot all your recipes you've ever made. I think sometimes it can feel really overwhelming to go, 'oh, what do I cook now? What do I shop for? It's just, it can be too much, so I often just go, well, you know, stick with your meals, and then try to find some ingredients you can swap.

For example, if you want to keep your coffee and your milk, you can just substitute to a plant-based milk or even things like, hey, if you have things with eggs in it, things like scrambled egg? Sometimes you can go to, you know, silken tofu as a replacement, and then find the lovely flavours that go with that.

 Or if that's too weird, you know, if it's just going straight to the tofu to replace the scrambled eggs and look at other things like, you know, if you've got a stir fry that you often put chicken with, could you try tofu?

Could you try a plant-based meat alternative? So yeah, I usually just start with, you don't have to throw everything out, just start to do some simple substitutes. And it's also about learning. You are learning something new to try and get excited about your new education. And let's Google some recipes and then there's so many recipes out there. 

And there's a lot of great ones as well. So you can just go to the people that have tried and tested these recipes before and just go, I'm going to try that one this weekend or something like that, and just follow those. And then you've got a new recipe to add to your weekly repertoire.

Veet

That's also, yes, it is so much easier now, isn't it, because I remember knowing, looking at the recipes and there being cheese or eggs in there and like, what am I going to do instead.  But you know it's all done for us now, so it is much less difficult to convert vegan recipes.

Nadia

Yeah. And it is about your own learning and your own knowledge. And I think when you become more plant based, you're adding some new understanding of food and preparation and methods. For example, I'll look at a recipe and let's just say it's an Italian recipe and it's not vegan at all, but I want the challenge of turning it into a vegan one. And so, you know, if that could be something like a dessert, so let's just say it might normally be an egg based pastry cream that you pipe into a cannoli shell or something like that, then I will immediately know, okay, to make an egg custard. I know I need corn flour. I know I can have soy milk. I don't need eggs. A dash of turmeric for the color. I know how to do that. So I think, once you know certain ingredients, you can replicate maybe an animal-based product or a sauce or something or other, like also chickpea flour is a great replacement for eggs as well. It's a great binder. I know you would know all about that. 

Veet

Yeah, and the beautiful Italian farinata, which you have in one of your recipe books, don't you? 

Nadia

Oh, the farinata. Isn't it lovely? Yeah, one of my favourites too, just chickpea flour and water, and a bit of oil and salt, and you've got this beautiful bread or quiche type snack.

Chickpea flour can be a lot like eggs and it can bind and it can be a great batter, so just knowing those things. I hear, like, the price of eggs is quite expensive, so knowing these things are really helpful, not only is it so much cheaper, it's not that difficult once you know how and it's also good for you. The fibre in the chickpea absolutely. 

Veet 

There's no fat, there's no cholesterol, and it has lots of protein. We all love our protein. That's great advice and if I wanted to go back to Italy, so I'm going all over the place, but you know, when if people want to go travelling in Italy, how hard it is to find vegan food there?

Nadia

By the way let's go back to Italy anytime in this conversation. Yes yes yes. Well, I think once again, it's just that knowledge is power, isn't it?  It's like if you go to Italy or any country it's always a good idea to learn the traditional dishes that happen to be traditionally plant-based so you know for example if you go to most restaurants in Italy, you know you could probably have the spaghetti agliolio which so delicious and so simple, so it's just spaghetti with garlic and olive oil and parsley and sometimes some, you know, chili pepper, and you'll find a lot of restaurants just have that on the menu and you know it's vegan friendly.

You just make sure they don't add any parmesan. They usually don't, but 99.9 percent of the time you're gonna have that as a vegan choice, wherever you go, so you're never gonna go hungry. So it's just knowing certain dishes that you know you're safe to eat .

I’d also say, jump on to Happy Cow.  With the Happy Cow app, you type in any city you want to in Italy, or a town, even smaller towns, and people have already done the work for you. They will list the vegan-friendly restaurants and cafes and bakeries, so you just pop them down on your list as a place to visit, and then you know you're going to be able to have this wonderful experience, to eat the things that other people are eating that you can't, like the pastries and carbonara. 

In Rome, for example, there's the most amazing vegan restaurant that does all the classics with the vegan twist. Like you've got carbonara, you've got like really meaty secondi kind of dishes that they've used seitan and all sorts of things, and yeah, it's a real treat there. 

Veet

You are doing an Italian tour soon aren’t you?

Nadia

It launched it this morning. It's very exciting, yes. So I was approached by a villa in Tuscany, a little bit towards the south of Tuscany, and I'll be doing a five-day guest cooking and food retreat. 

So, and I'm just going to be really, we're going to be really focusing on Tuscan cuisine and local cuisine. So really drawing out the regional produce. There's going to be lots of porcini mushrooms, chestnuts, of course, olive oil. It's just a beautiful time of year to be able to play with those ingredients. 

Veet 

With your cookbooks, I saw online that you are offering to help people with writing their own cookbooks, and I did think that, you know, of course not all listeners are going to write a cookbook. However, I actually think that everyone has a cookbook in them.  

My friend from primary school, we're still very close, her Gran had very classic recipes. Of course they're they're not vegan but her Gran had never written any of them down, so before her gran died, my friend wrote them all down and she created a cookbook for her whole family, and of course, they gave me a copy and I veganised a lot of the recipes. 

I just think that everybody has a cookbook in them. I just wanted to say that if anyone does have a cookbook in them and they need help with publishing Nadia is the person to go to because she's also also offering a program, aren't you, to help people write cookbooks.

Nadia

Yeah. I've just opened that up, this year actually, because a lot of people have approached me over the years and gone, how on earth did you get that book published? A lot of people struggle to try to go down the traditional publishing route which is almost like trying to be in a secret society, you know, if you're allowed in you get to publish, but for the rest of us it's, how do we get our work out there?

How do we get these recipes that are meaningful to us, and self-publishing is a fantastic way, and you can create really beautiful high quality books. So I've  learned a lot about the self-publishing world and the highs and the lows, and I've learned what not to do and what to do.

I'm offering, at this stage, cookbook coaching, so whether or not people need help from the start to the finish or if they need just a little bit of a chat to get started, whatever it is, I'm opening that up as well. Their grandmother, their uncle, their  auntie, whoever it is, that's the story. 

Veet

There's so much possibility, isn't there? So I'll be coming to you when I eventually get around to writing my second book.

Do you have a recipe that you could share with us?

Nadia 

There are so many aren't there? It could be my nonna's veganised pasta sauce recipe, but we were talking about chickpea flour before.

I like the idea of a waste-not want-not. So we talk a lot about, you know, ending food waste. It's very much a buzz thing at the moment, for good reason. But I know I quite often cook a bit too much pasta. And a lot of people say they never have leftover pasta. 

But if you ever have leftover pasta sitting in the fridge, and just plain spaghetti or sauce, or pasta with sauce on it already. If you make up a bit of a chickpea flour batter with chickpea flour and some water, and you know, maybe some seasoning, and you pour that like a batter into your leftover pasta, and then you fry it up with a little bit of oil and you turn it into a big fritter, or mini fritters, and it becomes this great little lunch snack that you can have and, it turns into like a pasta frittata kind of.

Veet 

I'm one of those people that never has leftover pasta because I measure it out exactly, but I think I'm going to make extra, yeah, because I'll just eat it, you know, I just eat it all. I had a friend recently remind me that, when we were flatting together in our 20s, we ate 500 grams of pasta between the two of us. That's a lot of pasta.

I’m going to make extra pasta, just to make that, because I think you could also put veggies through it. It would be divine – so thank you for that recipe.

Nadia

It's really a pleasure. It's really versatile, so yeah, it is a great opportunity just to transform that leftover pasta into something different, like a fritter, so yeah, I'm making little little ones as well, like in my cookbook I've got a large one. Still, since writing the cookbook and a few years later, I just love doing little mini patties out of the same mixture. Then sometimes if you've got like a bread roll or a wrap, it's really delicious to pop into a wrap, so for work lunches and things like that  Veet, when people are rushing off and don't have time to make breakfast, you know, if that's already been made. It's sitting in the fridge or in the freezer, they can just grab a few and know that they're getting their complete protein because there's definitely complete protein in those patties.

Veet

I love how you bring the nutrition into that snack. 

Oh, thank you, Nadia. And do you have a fun cooking tip or was that your recipe, your fun cooking tip as well? 

Nadia

Oh, yes. It was a little bit in that, because I think I was talking about that before. The tip is about the egg replacement, really, because I think, yeah, let's start replacing eggs for multiple reasons. But the chickpea flour is a really wonderful ingredient, or farina di cecci, which is the Italian word for it, flour of the chickpeas. 

Veet 

Or besan flour 

Nadia

If you actually turn the chickpea flour into a batter, you can coat veggies like cauliflower and then, you know, have them as a fritter. You can put the chickpea flour into pancakes as an egg replacement. Create a frittata or little fritters. 

Veet

And yeah, I think the chickpea flour batter is a great little tool to have. And generally, for those people who are not quite sure about batter, it's normally, like, it depends on how much you want to make. But when we make an omelette in the foundation course,  with chickpea flour and we will put in three tablespoons of chickpea flour and three tablespoons of water. Sometimes we have to put an extra tablespoon. So it's generally half and half, isn't it, to make a batter, half water, half flour.

 Nadia

But it also depends on what you need it for. So, yeah, like an omelette, it might be half and half. For a farinata, you want it to be extra watery. So you want it to be a really loose kind of batter. Something like for a fritter, or let's just say for frittata, yeah, maybe a few tablespoons, maybe four tablespoons of chickpea flour and, you know, half to three quarters of a cup of water. 

Veet

But people who,, if you're using it as an egg replacement, for people who are used to eggs, it's so long since I've beaten an egg, but it' the same as an egg consistency if you're using it .

Nadia

As an egg, oh yeah, you're right, so you probably have one if you just want to have it like a yolk, you just put it into something, I've used  a lot of chickpea flour in my panettone, my enriched dough and easter bread,and so it's something like a one-to-one but maybe just a dash more water, so a tablespoon of chickpea flour to a tablespoon and a half,  and then sometimes I add a dash of sunflower oil or some kind of oil, to mimic the fat, yes, right, so eggs have fat, so if you really want to replicate, it add a dash of that oil to make the fattiness that sometimes recipes need, but then we're talking about the science of things as well, so you can start playing around. 

Veet

That's an awesome tip Nadia, that's fabulous, yeah, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I'm sure everyone is going to have enjoyed this. And, it's so lovely to chat with you this way. 

Nadia

Oh, thank you Veet. Thank you for having me. I love chatting all things food with you. Knowing how much of a foodie you are. 

Veet

Ciao, Nadia. 

Thank you, wonderful listener, for listening to this podcast. I loved chatting with Nadia Fragnito. And until next week, I hope you eat the most sensational and scrummy, scrummy, scrummy, scrummy food. 

Before you go, I have a favour to ask. 

It takes a lot of time and money to create this podcast each week. So I'd be super, super, super grateful if you could hit subscribe, write me a review and share any of your favourite episodes with your friends or your audience over on social media. The more people we can reach with this podcast, the more we can empower others to eat healthy, plant-based food. 

Thank you. 

Bye. 

Have a great week.