Chef Alessandro “Alex” De Luca wants customers to be pleasantly surprised when they try his Italian street food for the first time.
That's why he named his new business Bedda Matri, which is an Italian phrase that literally translates to “beautiful mother,” but means “surprised by something positive,” De Luca said at his company headquarters March 26.
“That's what I expect people . . . to think whenever they bite into whatever” they decide to order from Bedda Matri Italian street food truck, De Luca said.
Bedda Matri is the lastest venture of De Luca's, the chef behind the catering company and cooking class success known as Italian Kitchen, which is located in the heart of downtown at 540 W. McDaniel St. The food truck will start dishing out Italian delights in the first week of April, De Luca said. The plan is to start serving on the weekends at various places around town to begin, and then aggressively expand to a full-time schedule in the summer.
De Luca, along with his business partner and Sous Chef Jennifer Morris, hope the food truck will open Springfield to the world of Italian street food. Bedda Matri plans to feature offerings that are atypical of the normal Italian restaurant in America, De Luca said. His menu won't include fettucine alfredo, spaghetti or other dishes that you might find at other Italian restaurants in town.
“You cannot do a food truck for pasta,” De Luca said with a laugh.
Instead, De Luca plans to transport his customers to the real streets of Sicily and Torino, the small town that he grew up in until his early-teenage years, he said. There, popular dishes include the renowned arancini, which is rice that's rolled into a ball, stuffed, breaded and fried. Or the cipollina, a crispy, flaky puff pastry with sauteed onions, tomato sauce, mozzarella and ham.
“I literally grew up eating this stuff,” De Luca said. “And it makes me excited to be able to share that food with the people in Springfield because it's good food, but it's also fried. Springfield people love fried things.”
“This is something that is completely different and is a whole meal in your hand,” De Luca said.
Arancini, the main offering
De Luca said he believes arancini will be a hit in Springfield. He expects the dish to be “the big start of the food truck.”
Translating to “small orange,” arancini gets its name because the golden-fried round, stuffed ball of rice has the appearance of the citrus fruit. The deep-fried, breadcrumb-coated rice dish is arguably Sicily's most famous street food, De Luca said.
The dish carries different characteristics dependent on the region it hails from. For instance, in the small town, Palermo, on the west side of Italy, arancini is made into a sphere-like ball. In Catania, on the east side of the European country, the dish takes the shape of a triangle, reminiscent of Mount Etna, the highest Mediterranean island mountain and an active volcano.
The shape isn't the only thing dependent on the region, as the fillings differ, too. Some versions of the dish call for minced meat, while others fill it with béchamel sauce, butter and ham. There are many different varieties of arancini, which is also known in its masculine form as arancino.
“Every shape has a different” filling, De Luca said. “The one that looks like a cone has meat. The one that is a bowl, normally is ham and cheese. And then there are different shapes for other stuff.”
The famous street food requires a specific, high-gluten content rice, Sous Chef Morris said. The business pair had to find a specific supplier and special order a 200-pound supply to begin the food truck journey.
The rice “is real starchy,” Morris said. “It's like sushi rice that it sticks together. You have to have the proper rice for arancini and none of the local suppliers keep it in stock.”
Also special ordered: The molds the chefs will use to shape the arancini come straight from Catania, the commercial center of Sicily, Italy, De Luca said.
De Luca and Morris plan to offer three different versions of arancini at Bedda Matri. The first, Arancino Zio Franco, will be made with classic meat sauce. The Arancino Nonna Anna will feature béchamel sauce and sauteed spinach. The third, Arancino Nonna Grazia comes with béchamel sauce, butter and ham.
Other Italian delights
Besides cipollina and arancini, Bedda Matri plans to feature a plethora of Italian street foods to fill hungry customers.
There's the Mozzarella in Carrozza, which De Luca said translates to “mozzarella cheese in a chariot.” It's essentially a mozzarella stick in sandwich form, with the decadent cheese tucked inside plush bread, crusted with bread crumbs and fried.
“Basically, you take. . . the bread and a thick slice of mozzarella,” Morris said. “Then it's in flour, egg and thin bread crumbs and then fried. So the cheese is gooey and stringy.”
A twist on that dish makes another, the Mozzarella in Vespa. It's basically the Mozzarella in Carrozza with added anchovies.
Then there's the Pizzette Club, the Italian street food version of pizza, but more delicate, Morris said.
“It's a different type of dough than a regular pizza,” Morris said. “It's half semolina flour, which is the yellow, coarse flour they put on the bottom of pizza crust, but it's in the dough. And it has milk and lard.”
“It's softer,” De Luca added. “It's more like a savory brioche because it has that kind of texture.”
Decadent desserts
At Bedda Matri, you have to leave room for dessert. There's the Panzerotti, deep-fried Italian dough pockets filled with chocolate or pastry cream. The dish is like a croissant, but softer.
“It's basically a cookie filled with custard because it's a short-crust pastry,” Morris said. “I'm excited to be making them; it's one of my favorite doughs.”
Then there's the Cannolo, a tube-shaped pastry shell of fried dough, filled with either Ricotta, a sweet cheese that is a staple of Sicilian cuisine, or chocolate.
“Everytime I cook something that I love, I'm in trouble,” De Luca said, laughing. He admitted he loved their cannolis a little too much.
“He ate so many cannolis,” Morris said. “I was like ‘You can't eat the whole batch!'”
Bedda Matri will be found at a multitude of spots around town, including breweries, neighborhoods and festivals, De Luca said. One of the first spots the business pair would like to operate at is Pocket Park, next to Nonna's Italian Cafe in downtown Springfield.
Changing the Springfield narrative on Italian food
Through cooking classes and catering at Italian Kitchen, and now the food truck Bedda Matri, De Luca's dishes vary greatly but one thing has stayed constant: His desire to change the Springfield narrative on Italian food.
When he first started cooking in Springfield, he ran into a problem, he said. At a time when the company was trying to distinguish itself from competitors, De Luca struggled to make his Italian food fit into what customers thought should be served at an Italian restaurant in America.
“I didn't have experience cooking what an American expects from an Italian restaurant,” De Luca said.
After visiting family in Sicily and devouring all the food the city had to offer once again, De Luca said he had a revelation.
“Why don't we use that, our difference, as an advantage instead of trying to melt into the Italian-American restaurant scene?” De Luca said.
The cooking classes, which started in late 2023 and focus on a different region in Italy every week, was the first step in De Luca's plan.
“Every week we have a different menu,” De Luca said. “We try to find something that is delicious, has a lot of story behind it, but also is different.”
Bedda Matri is the next step in De Luca's plan to “open a new way to think about Italian food” in Springfield. “It’s not just pizza and pasta and garlic everywhere,” he said.
“There is another way. There is other food.”
