Daniel Ricciardo's Favorite Dish? Homemade Pesto!
Danny Ric allegedly makes a mean homemade pesto — and so will we this week
Welcome to Grand Prix Gastronomy! In 2024, this series is dedicated to cooking the favorite dishes of every driver on the grid.
The Foods That Daniel Ricciardo Loves
Ask Daniel Ricciardo for his favorite food, and you'll probably get a different answer every time. Since he's become a man of the people, Daniel has fielded a lot of fun questions in interviews, and many of those have involved food. He's claimed ribs as his favorite meal (which we've already made courtesy of Logan Sargeant) and ice cream (which we'll be making later this year). Instead, I found a fun interview in The Sydney Morning Herald where he gets a little more in depth.
He had two really great quotes. First, he lists his “signature dish” as homemade pesto with fusilli. Second, he lists his mom's “famous chicken cutlets” as the favorite dish his mom makes. As a result, we ended up with an answer that actually feels way closer to my initial question of this project — what dish reminds you of home? — than any answer given by anyone else!
So, thank you, Daniel. Thank you for inadvertently answering my question in previous interviews. I can almost forgive your team's ridiculous name.
This Week's Recipes
I think my favorite thing about the dish we're making for the Canadian Grand Prix is the fact that it means something personal to Daniel Ricciardo. I know that everyone's favorite food means something to them, but to me, it's so different to pick something hyperspecific (say, my own pesto recipe and my mom's chicken cutlets) rather than boringly general (say, choosing pizza as your favorite food but not even saying any toppings you like which is MORE IMPORTANT THAN JUST LIKING PIZZA).
However, those hyperspecific recipes also mean that there is the potential for me to get this very wrong. After all, how many of our moms never adapted one of their family's regional dishes, not one single time, to accommodate different foods and newer tastes?
I decided that for this week, I'd start off with a base recipe for Italian-style chicken cutlets, then modify them my way. I pulled a recipe from Marcellina in Cucina, a blog run by the American daughter of two Italian immigrants and one that has never steered me wrong for other recipes. For the pesto pasta, I decided that, since I'm serving the sauce on Daniel Ricciardo's favorite noodles specifically, then I should stick with an authentic pesto. This logic makes sense to me, but I will grant you that much of it is extremely arbitrary.
Core Recipes:
Cooking Pesto with Chicken Cutlets
This recipe can be made very efficiently and quickly if you're a psychopath like me who dedicates hours to determining the ideal way to make several food items at once.
Well before you're ready for dinner, my advice is to take 15 minutes to just get everything ready. You want your pesto ingredients and your food processor (or mortar and pestle) to be amply chilled, and you also want to slice, pound, and get your chicken marinating in wine, egg, and garlic for a few hours. Knock this step out about three hours before you intend to cook, and you'll be all set.
I also recommend starting with your chicken when you get cooking. Heat a frying pan with a layer of olive oil on the stove; you want it nice and toasty, so that you get a crisp crust on your chicken. Remove the chicken from the fridge and assemble your breadcrumb mixture. Marcellina in Cucina recommends Italian breadcrumbs with parmesan; I made mine with herbed panko and parmesan, and I also added several other spices to the mix: red pepper flakes, dried basil, dried oregano, salt, and pepper. Dredge your chicken in the breadcrumb mixture, then get it into the pan. If you've pounded your chicken thin enough, this should be a fairly quick process.
In the meantime, make your pesto. Remove your food processor from the fridge, then stick in your chilled basil, pine nuts, garlic, and parmesan. Pulse that until you have a nice chopped mixture, then add in some flaky salt and pecorino cheese. Again, pulse that up until it's nice and well mixed — then pour in your olive oil. You want a really gorgeous creamy green sauce by the time you're done, but you also don't want to overheat the sauce, so don't pulse at it too much.
While you finish your cutlets, get some salted water boiling on the stove and cook your fusilli noodles. Save a bit of the pasta water before you drain the noodles, then return them to the pot and add in your pesto, plus a bit of the pasta water to help it all combine nicely. And just like that, you've make your Canadian Grand Prix meal.
The Wine List
If you're cooking up a meat and pasta dish, I usually recommend pairing your wine to the sauce, since the sauce is generally the predominant flavor in the dish. Pesto pairs really well with dry, crisp, and acidic white wines — the ones that that have enough character to match the herby flavor but that are also strong enough to pierce through the oiliness. You'll get that with things like Pinot Grigio, Vermentino, or Sauvignon Blanc. I opted for a Spanish version of the latter. The wine and the pesto make a really delicious summery pairing.
As an aside, the Sauv Blanc also works well with the chicken cutlets, for many of the same reasons! The breading is salty, herby, and a little bit spicy, and it's cooked in oil, which means you're hitting the same the Sauvignon Blanc pairing targets as with the pesto. Bless me with this meal and wine pairing on a warm, breezy summer porch, please.
So, What's The Verdict?
Out of all the things I've ever cooked on Grand Prix Gastronomy, I think our Canadian GP dish is the most similar to the kinds of dinners I make on a regular basis. Literally my favorite weeknight meal is some kind of breaded chicken cutlet and some kind of starchy side; the same basic components can create so many amazing combinations: Chicken marsala on instant mashed potatoes, katsu chicken with rice, or cutlets and pesto pasta. Plus, it's one of those meals that I almost always have the ingredients to make. I always have chicken breasts in the freezer. I always have something to use to bread the chicken — buttermilk, flour, eggs, breadcrumbs, potato chip crumbs, milk. I always have something to season the meat with. I always have ingredients to make some kind of sauce — jarred sauces, bagged sauces, canned tomatoes, cream. I may not always have the exact same specific things, but there are always General Things.
I'd say that this was like one of my weekday dinners, but spiffed up a little bit. I usually don't pound my meat to make cutlets, because I am lazy; I just slice them extra thin. I usually don't get my food processor out on the weekday, because I am lazy. I also usually don't have ample amounts of fresh stuff on hand to make a sauce with, because that requires planning ahead, and I am often lazy. But taking those extra steps to make a really good dinner as opposed to a pretty good dinner was worth it, and also didn't take that long. Unless I'm filming something, I try to keep my weeknight dinner prep to about 30 minutes. For contrast, making this recipe took about an hour.
I won't keep tooting my own horn, claiming that I am the inventor of the best dinner format of all time — but I will definitely say that Daniel Ricciardo knows what's up.
Ready… Set… COOK!
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