Italian cuisine week in Copenhagen, staging rice - News from Embassies

With an event dedicated to rice, Culinary Week 2025 opened in Copenhagen at the Italian Residence. Protagonist of regional recipes and famous abroad especially in the “risotto” version, rice is part of the national history and economy. Presenting all different aspects of this food product were: the President of the Ente Nazionale Risi, Natalia Bobba, and the Head of the Commodity Chemical Laboratory of the Rice Research Center, Cinzia Simonelli.

As the largest producer in Europe (57 percent of the total), Italy boasts various types of rice, each suited to different processing and uses, with a crop that is now at the forefront of technology, yet always maintaining respect for the ecosystem and the highest standards of health controls and sustainability. Continuous, painstaking laboratory work in the center dedicated to it near Pavia supports an unbeatable quality record that makes Italian rice an important pillar of the Italian and European economies, as well as an unmistakable expression of Italy’s culture and history.

To an audience of local operators, restaurateurs, culinary experts and trade journalists, institutional representatives and the international community, rice was also presented in some of the national culinary versions (from arancino, seafood salad, truffle risotto to sweet pudding), together with other local products (parmesan cheese of different seasoning and gorgonzola, successfully promoted in Denmark by a recent ICE campaign; piedmontese salumi and panettone), also supporting the candidacy of Italian Cuisine in the Unesco intangible heritage.
An exhibition of samples of nineteen types of rice, of which the characteristics and most common uses in typical recipes were explained, accompanied the event, also providing interested parties with a recipe book for domestic “do-it-yourself.”