Rustic Italian

As Peter Kaminsky, Food Editor of The Wall Street Journal, writes in his book, Culinary Intelligence (Knopf, 2012), “Think before you eat, choose good ingredients, understand how flavor works, and make an effort to cook.” If you follow Peter’s philosophy for maximizing flavor per calorie and eating only delicious, flavorful foods, in the end you will be more satisfied with smaller portions while enjoying more one of life’s greatest pleasures – food.

You can’t talk about exceptional food without talking about people; the people who grow or make amazing food products, the people and companies (like ChefShop.com) who seek out those products and work to bring them to “the masses”, and the many people who buy, cook and eat those products in their restaurants and homes. If we learned anything in our high school economics class, it’s that it takes all three for a market to exist and thrive.

ChefShop.com has been supporting family owned artisan food producers and growers who both preserve old and create new food traditions, and create and preserve flavorful foods, since 1997. It’s small food producers who keep us close to the ground and the roots of where real and flavorful food comes from.

And it’s the promotion and distribution of these original and heirloom foods that help these important foods and food traditions survive and thrive, and help stave off the continued commercialization and mechanization of large-scale food production and distribution in the US, and thus the inevitable loss of the most precious part of our food - its flavor.

At ChefShop.com, we live by the quality, purity and provenance of our products; we scour the world to discover producers and growers who make exceptional food their life’s mission, because we feel that delicious, quality foods nourish our bodies, our minds, and the earth in equal measure. Because quality, flavor and healthiness go hand-in-hand-in-hand - every time! That’s why we work with farmers like Kevin Stennes from Stennes’ Family Farms who provides us with the perfect Rainier cherry harvested at its peak of sweet, juicy lusciousness, or Mark and Maria Whitehead of Hawkshead Relish Company in the Lake District in the UK who reach for the perfect chutney - a delectable balance of exotic spices with tart, pungent, and fruity flavors made from locally grown fruit.

But, the quality of our products doesn’t tell the whole story. We also work closely with family farms and producers who study and integrate traditional food techniques into their products – from locally grown heirloom emmer and spelt, to hand-dipped couverture chocolates made the old-fashioned way, from naturally and traditionally fermented Japanese Shoyu, to cold-harvested raw nomatic honeys; we seek those that work hand-in-hand with history and tradition, not against it, and who understand that it’s nature that ultimately drives not just a sustainable food system over all, but exceptional flavor in our refrigerators, in our pantries, and ultimately on our tables.

When you buy from ChefShop.com, you are seeking the purest foods made by family producers whom we’ve individually selected for the quality of their ingredients and their adherence to tradition and purity and flavor. It’s mouth-watering food for home and proessional chefs alike, born from passion and commitment to  tradition, the power of the natural world, and nature's most under-valued resource - time!