Cooking great food is a family tradition for Jacopo Tendi. Jacopo has been cooking since he was a young fellow helping his mother (who, by the way, is also a really good cook!) prepare the meals for his brothers and father. Jacopo’s grandparents owned a trattoria in the Mugello, with his grandfather hunting and growing vegetables and his grandmother cooking them for the costumers. Jacopo has always been in love for good food.
While studying for a degree in political science at the University of Florence, Jacopo attended a professional cooking course and eventually started out as a chef, cooking in many restaurant in Florence, in the Chianti countryside, at the Tuscan seaside and abroad in Switzerland. By chance, in the year 2000, he was asked by Salvatore Ferragamo to hold a week of cooking classes for Salvatore’s guests at his estate, Tenuta il Borro, and from that moment Jacopo decided to focus his interest on teaching Tuscan cookery. He combined his passion for good food with his humanistic studies and his knowledge of history and tradition.
Jacopo and his wife Anna founded a non-profit organization that promotes educational programs regarding nutrition and sustainability for Italian students and also for the students of various American university in Florence. For more than twenty years, Jacopo has been holding a weekly cooking class in Syracuse University in Florence and he has been collaborating with several other educational institutes, including Georgetown University, International Studies Institute Palazzo Rucellai, Gonzaga University, the Food Studies Program at the Umbra Institute of Perugia, and Neca of Florence.
Italian students follow a program on the recommended rules for eating and spend one day in the association kitchen to cook and study the relationship between food and history, science, geography, mathematics. The foreign students are hosted for their field trips, cooking and visiting organic and biodynamic small farms in the surroundings of Florence.
The association has also founded a GAS, Gruppo di Acquisto Solidale, an association of buyers supporting the local farmers in the area of Montespertoli, promoting shopping for local organic products, from milk to pasta, from vegetables to soaps.
The daily teaching experience supports Jacopo’s belive that good cooking can be an easy and joyful experience that everybody can do. His hands-on classes transmits, in a familiar and unpretentious athmosphere, the down-to-earth character of italian cooking and the strong, vibrant and naturally genuine flavours of tuscan food.
Let’s cook!
Discover the flavour of Tuscan culinary traditions!
Learn the secrets of creating tasty, light and simple cooking. Enjoy using essential Tuscan ingredients: extra virgin olive oil, fresh herbs, the rich variety of local organic seasonal fresh products.
Led by professional Chef Jacopo Tendi, learn how to cook some tipical tuscan meals (fresh pasta, gnocchi, meat, tiramisù…) in the informal and familiar atmosphere of an old Tuscan countryhouse.
For more information contact us by mail: jacopotendi@gmail.com
