The Culinary Institute of America

In the early morning hours, on side streets and street corners, Hanoi’s hard-working cooks begin setting up their pho stations. A soup, a meal, a national treasure—pho is a widespread addiction. Many Vietnamese start the day with a steaming bowl of this divine noodle soup. Often mispronounced, but immediately appreciated, pho is pronounced like “fur” with a soft “r.” Once the broth is prepared, it takes only seconds to assemble—and not much longer to eat. Truly, pho is a fast food that even a dietitian can love.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/wca/vietnam/

Her name is Rosalba Lo Greco and she cooks for Barone Pietro Beneventano at his agriturismo, or farmhouse inn, Case del Feudo, outside Siracusa. She learned to cook, Rosalba says, from watching her grandmother. My mother was a terrible cook, she told us, but every summer she sent me to spend three months with my grandmother in Piazza Armerina and she was a great cook. I’m passionate about good food—I love to cook, I love to feed people. To cook just for the sake of cooking, no—they say what I cook is pretty good, for me it’s just normal. And they’re the smallest secrets that make the difference—for instance, the eggplant in a caponata, it should be a little crunchy, it should have character...

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

East of Palermo on Sicily’s north coast is a fishing village called Porticello where the day boats go out every morning to harvest what’s in the nets that were set the day before. Chef Franco Crivello has his restaurant here—he calls it Frank the Fisherman, Francu U Piscaturi, but its proper name is Trattoria del Arco and Franco is truly a chef, not a fisherman at all.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

In the hills north of Ragusa—the Monti Iblei, they’re called—there’s an unusual restaurant that’s famous all over Sicily – maybe all over Italy – famous because nothing is served here but pork. In fact, the restaurant’s motto is: Qui si magnifica il porco—here pork is glorified. And it’s true. From the time it was founded by the great-grandparents of Salvatore LaTerra, Ristorante Majore (My-YORE-ray) has existed by, for, and about nothing but pork, and much of the time pork cooked over live fire, which might be the best way of all.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

Surrounded as it is by three seas—the Tyhrrenian, the Mediterranean, and the Ionian, it’s no wonder that seafood plays a prominent role on the Sicilian table. The variety is simply astounding—anchovies and sardines, squid, calamari and octopus, a huge variety of mussels and clams, tiny sweet shrimp and big, meaty red shrimp, mackerel, prized red mullet, familiar fish like grouper and unfamiliar varieties like scabard fish, a great favorite, or... Eels, a great flavor boost for a zuppa di pesce or Sicilian fish stew.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

Different climates, different terrains, mean that even a product as simple as cheese is produced in dozens of different varieties from mountains and valleys, from the sea coast and from inland plateaus, all over Sicily. Francesco Guccione, who, with his partner Boni, has a tidy shop called La Dispensa de Monzu in Palermo, is an expert on all these varieties, many of which are sold in the shop—the name of which you could translate as “The Butler’s Pantry.” We asked him to sort through the panoply of Sicilian cheeses and tell us something about the best.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

At the opposite end of the island, on the very slopes of the Etna volcano, the Benanti family is also proving that old vines and new ideas go hand in hand to produce superior wines—so superior that in 2007 Benanti was named winery of the year by the prestigious Italian magazine Gambero Rosso.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

Nearby, in Trapani, we discovered something the Arabs brought to Sicily—or so they say—when they occupied the island more than a thousand years ago. This is couscous. Pino Maggiore, chef and owner of the trattoria Cantina Siciliana in the heart of Trapani's old ghetto, showed Steve Jilleba, executive chef at Unilever Foodsolutions, how it's done and Mary Taylor Simeti, an American writer who has lived in Sicily and written about its food traditions for a good 40 years, helped us to understand it.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/WCA/Sicily/

Travel with Mai Pham, (pronounced "My fahm") a chef, cookbook author and Vietnamese food authority, through the street-food stalls of Hanoi and the floating markets of the Mekong.

Watch the full series and find recipes at http://www.ciaprochef.com/wca/vietnam/