PROS
- Ease of preparation
- Cooking speed
- Wide choice of kits
CONS
- Price: for 4 people it is €8 euros (without the promotion) and the doses do not feed
- Some are not very useful: it is better to buy the foods separately (penne and ragù or ready-made bean soup)
Price: €10 on offer for 3 kits
December 26, 2020 – Cooking in a motorhome, at least in a “small” one like ours, leads you to make some sacrifices and even some sacrifices. Goodbye oven, goodbye microwave, goodbye Thermomix… little space to move, small support surface … and at first you have to get used to and organize accordingly. But anything can be done. We bought the Kasanova “oven” that is placed on the stove, we buy fresh bread, we heat the milk and water for tea in the saucepan on the stove, etc. etc.
But we have not given up cooking and we do everything: from pizza (it comes so and so) to crepes with Nutella, from risotto in many ways to lemon chicken with basmati rice. Just to give some examples. All this to say that we are gourmets and good forks, even if we do not mind occasionally experimenting with more practical and quick solutions, such as ready-made sauces, canned soups or risottos in bags.
The social algorithms, which know everything about us, have proposed us Barilla advertising: 3 CucinaBarilla kits of your choice for €10. But yes, let’s try! Said, done and we had them sent to the address of the campsite where we spent the whole period of the red zone of Lombardy and Piedmont. One a day we “cooked” and ate them, and now we will tell you how it went.
A look at the packaging
Each kit is contained in a small box of a different color for each recipe: for example, red for the risotto with red radicchio, brown for the bean soup and blue for the penne with meat sauce. On the front stands the image with the ingredients of the dish and on the back are the cooking instructions. This can be done in a “traditional” way in a pan or pot, with a food processor, such as the Thermomix, or with the dedicated CucinaBarilla oven. In this regard, an RFID label is printed on one side, which must be brought close to the display and the oven “reads” the cooking instructions by itself.
The ingredients are complete and nothing else needs to be added except, of course, water and, depending on the dish and if you like, a little grated cheese. The doses of a kit are for 2 people, if there are 4, you need 2 boxes and so on.
Risotto with red radicchio
This kit contains 2 bags: one with Carnaroli rice and the other with the dressing. Following the instructions step by step, I poured the two ingredients together with 600 milliliters of cold water into a pan, quite large (let’s say about 24 centimeters in diameter), stirred and lit the fire. Once it boiled, keeping the heat medium and stirring occasionally, I waited for the water to be consumed and the rice to be cooked. Barilla recommends cooking for about 15 minutes: I tasted from time to time and even less was enough to have the right consistency.
We liked the result: beautiful to look at and also good. The doses are not super large but just right for two people who don’t have a lot of appetite or want to stay light for lunch or dinner.
Bean soup
This kit contains only a carton with the soup inside: it was enough to pour it into a pot and add 50 milliliters of water. Easier than that! For the soup too, I waited for it to boil. Cooking took much longer than the three minutes specified in the instructions, or at least 10 to have a soup with the right consistency. At this point there could also be pasta, like the typical ditalini, and we would have had an excellent pasta and beans, which would have satiated our hunger better.
The dose is good for two people but only if you have little appetite, which is not the case, or if you eat something else. We hadn’t prepared anything else and so we sacrificed ourselves. We heated a flatbread in the non-stick pan that we ate with two single-serving packs of Nutella!x
The bean soup was pretty good, so we could also go off balance and recommend it, but don’t stick to the specified cooking times, but taste and, above all, judge for yourself the consistency you like and once you reach it stop, without looking at the timer. Croutons, as an alternative to pasta, and the addition of a drop of extra virgin olive oil would not be bad.
Pennette with meat sauce
Inside the box we find the pennette in a transparent bag and the sauce: Barilla pasta and also the ragù, we think the same as found in supermarkets, so much so that the can is identical and only the label that has been personalized with the CucinaBarilla logo. Here too… minimal work: it’s just a matter of putting the pasta in a pan, adding just over half a liter of cold water – 520 ml to be exact – and bringing it to a boil. The instructions say to boil for less than 7 minutes and we did it, then add the sauce and cook, over medium heat for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. We did this too. We did not mind the whole thing and the doses were quite abundant – the sauce in our opinion was too much – but we would have spent less if we had bought pasta and ragù separately. And some pennette would be left over too, just the dose for another meal.
All other CucinaBarilla recipes to use in the motorhome:
- Hot chocolate
- Vegetarian cous cous
- Cous cous with lentils and curry
- Fusilli with pesto
- Rice and Quinoa Salad
- 5 cereals pennette with vegetables
- Pennette with meat sauce
- Pennette alla puttanesca
- Risotto with cheeses
- Mushroom risotto
- Risotto with red radicchio
- Saffron risotto
- Tortellini in broth
- Ziti with turnip greens
- Chickpea Soup
- Soup of cereals and legumes
- Bean soup
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