Dishes are looked at, smelled, chewed, sometimes touched. But in the end it is the brain that processes all those inputs and decides where to place a particular flavour, whether to reserve a place for it in the short-term memory or to carve it out in the deeper cortex. That's why I did a research with Dr Maria Francesca Collevasone on cognitive memory and the study of the limbic system, which helped me decipher my memories, shape my emotions and bring them back into my dishes. This is how dishes such as BBQ were born, a spaghetti cooked on the barbecue in Cuneo ham extraction that has the consistency of a distant memory of Michelangelo as a child, when my mother and grandmother used to prepare barbecues on Sundays for lunch. One of the dishes to which I am most attached, precisely because it has to do with the most intimate part of me.