• 13 hours ago
Chef Nick DiGiovanni visits WIRED to answer his most searched for questions on Google. Where did Nick DiGiovanni go to culinary school? What is Nick DiGiovanni's signature dish? Where is he from? When did Nick start his YouTube channel? When was Nick DiGiovanni on MasterChef? Answers to these questions and many more await as Nick DiGiovanni tackles the WIRED Autocomplete Interview.

Director: Jackie Phillips
Director of Photography: Grant Bell
Editor: Louis Lalire
Talent: Nick DiGiovanni
Creative Producer: Justin Wolfson
Line Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Anthony Wooten
Talent Booker: Mica Medoff; Paige Garbarini
Camera Operator: Lucas Vilicich
Sound Mixer: Gray Thomas-Sowers
Production Assistant: Spencer Mathesen
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Jason Malizia
Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
Transcript
00:00I'm Nick DiGiovanni, and this is the Wired Autocomplete Interview.
00:04♪♪
00:07The last thing I Googled...
00:09Ah, I was trying to make a French omelet for the first time.
00:12♪♪
00:16Okay, first board.
00:17Where is Nick DiGiovanni from?
00:20I am from Rhode Island.
00:21Specifically, I was born in Providence.
00:23Rhode Island, you might know, is the smallest state,
00:25and it's also the ocean state, so it's surrounded by a lot of water.
00:28And I think that's where my love for seafood comes from.
00:31Where did Nick DiGiovanni go to college?
00:34I don't know still why they let me in, but I went to Harvard.
00:37I studied environmental science there,
00:39but I also got to take a lot of classes that had something to do with food.
00:43So I basically took every single possible class that I could take
00:46related to food in some way.
00:48And they actually had a lot of different classes that were about food.
00:52I spent a whole semester just learning everything there is to know about chocolate.
00:55Where does Nick DiGiovanni get his knives?
00:58That's a great question, too.
00:59The tough part is I use a lot of different types of knives,
01:02but my favorite type of knife in general would be an 8-inch chef's knife.
01:05And I usually get them from two different places.
01:08One comes from this company, a really old company,
01:10that's been making knives for a long time called Zwilling.
01:13And then the other, more custom knives that I use
01:15come from a knife maker who lives in New Hampshire named Zach Jonas.
01:19He just finds different trees, cuts out, you know, different handles from the trees,
01:24and then basically makes all these different knives by hand.
01:27And I can customize exactly what I want that really cool steel Damascus pattern
01:32on each blade to look like.
01:34I probably have about 150 knives.
01:36I love knives. It's kind of scary.
01:38Where did Nick DiGiovanni go to culinary school?
01:42I didn't go to culinary school.
01:43I did do a two-week-long boot camp at the CIA.
01:47Not like a special agent by any means.
01:49It's the Culinary Institute of America.
01:51And their main campus is in New York.
01:53That's one of the best or the best culinary school in the country.
01:56But I didn't actually go there.
02:01When?
02:02When did Nick DiGiovanni start YouTube?
02:06I think my first video I posted was probably in 2019 when I finished MasterChef.
02:11And then I didn't actually start making videos consistently until I think late 2020.
02:17So it took me a little bit of time to figure out a good formula
02:21and catch the YouTube bug where I just wanted to wake up and think about it every single day.
02:25We're definitely going to pass 1,000 videos pretty soon.
02:27When did Nick DiGiovanni win MasterChef?
02:30That's a trick question in a way because I didn't win MasterChef.
02:32I got third.
02:33I was on season 10 and I got to the finale.
02:36But then, yeah, I didn't win.
02:37Nice that people think that I did.
02:39When did Nick DiGiovanni start cooking?
02:41I forget the exact age to be honest with you.
02:44But I know it was between seven and eight years old.
02:46I saw my grandmother.
02:47I saw my great-grandparents cooking.
02:49I loved watching.
02:50I loved being in the kitchen.
02:51I liked the smells, the sounds.
02:53Just the warmth near the stove and just being with family and having fun with some food.
02:58I was just running around the kitchen just grabbing different things off the counter
03:02when somebody else was cooking and just trying to eat it.
03:04Helping, but probably not actually helping if you know what I mean.
03:07Right away, food was what I loved.
03:10When did Nick DiGiovanni get famous?
03:12That's a crazy question.
03:14What does famous even mean though, you know?
03:16I don't have an answer for that.
03:19What is Nick DiGiovanni's favorite food?
03:23Rotisserie chicken.
03:24It's the best.
03:25I love rotisserie chicken.
03:28I oftentimes go to the market.
03:30I get one.
03:31I eat the whole thing by myself.
03:33Then I take all the bones and I make a chicken stock
03:35just with maybe some onion, some carrots, some celery, butter, olive oil,
03:39and a few different seasonings and then just throw all the chicken bones in there
03:42and just slowly let it go for a while, all covered in water.
03:46You just make this delicious, comforting broth
03:49that I'll just take a cup all day and I'll slowly drink it until it's all gone.
03:54Then I'll top it off with more water and kind of make it again.
03:57It lasts forever.
03:58One other nice thing is that if you save the rind of your Parmesan cheese,
04:01throw that rind in there.
04:02It gives a really nice kind of cheesy umami flavor to your stock or your broth.
04:06That's my favorite food because A, it's delicious.
04:09It's fall apart tender and chicken is so good,
04:12but B, because I can find this really great second use for it
04:15where I can have this really flavor-packed broth that I can drink for so long.
04:19What is Nick DiGiovanni's signature dish?
04:22I would have to say my signature dish would be a fresh handmade pasta
04:27with some kind of seafood.
04:28It could really be any kind of seafood, but because I grew up in Rhode Island
04:31and there was lots of fresh seafood around and now I live in Boston,
04:34I love a good fresh pasta with whatever seafood I can get my hands on.
04:37Oh, this is a two-part.
04:38What camera does Nick DiGiovanni use?
04:43We use all Sonys, but sometimes I also just pull out my iPhone
04:47and I get shots that way now too.
04:49We've learned that people are much more comfortable
04:52if there's just an iPhone filming versus a bigger camera.
04:55And so there are certain places and certain times
04:57where it just makes sense to pull out a phone
04:59and it's so much easier that way and it's so much more comfortable for people that way.
05:03There's something about a camera and a lens
05:05that just scares a lot of people for some reason,
05:07whereas they're just fine with a cell phone.
05:09What oil does Nick DiGiovanni use?
05:16What is that?
05:20Oh.
05:23Just set off the fire alarm and I wasn't even cooking.
05:26How crazy is that?
05:27What oil does Nick DiGiovanni use?
05:29I mean, I have a bunch of different types of oil.
05:31It just depends on the situation.
05:32It actually took me a little while cooking to learn what types of oils to use when.
05:37I just feel like you can really separate it into two categories.
05:39You have your low smoke point oils
05:41and then you have your oils that have a high smoke point.
05:43It's actually really easy to look up.
05:44You can just look online, find the smoke point of any oil,
05:47and if it's over 450, you can use that for a super high heat steak
05:52or chicken or whatever you're doing.
05:55If it's got a lower smoke point, that's often not so good for high heat cooking
05:58and maybe a little bit better to finish off a dish,
06:00like a nice olive oil on top of a salad.
06:04Last one. Thank you.
06:07Now, finally, we have the hows.
06:09How to pronounce Nick DiGiovanni.
06:12Oh, we've been practicing that one the whole video.
06:14This is funny because it's also something that I feel like it even took me a long time in my life to figure out
06:19because everybody kind of pronounces things slightly different.
06:22If you split my last name into two different ways, it's DiGiovanni,
06:26so that makes it easier to think about DiGiovanni if you put it all together.
06:30Okay. Nick DiGiovanni, anyone can cook.
06:33Yeah, I sometimes use that little tagline that I kind of stole from Ratatouille
06:37because it's my favorite movie ever, but I do believe it.
06:41I feel like it's true. I feel like anyone can cook.
06:44You just need to learn some of those basics, and then after that, you can make anything.
06:48And the coolest part about it is that there's so many different ingredients,
06:51so many different types of food all around the world,
06:53so if different people in different places learn those basic rules and then start experimenting,
06:58you can come up with some really crazy things.
07:00Nick DiGiovanni, food hacks.
07:02Trying to think of a really good food hack.
07:04I will say most pizza that I've ever had from takeout is actually better the next day
07:10if I've put it in a pan with a bit of moisture in there and a lid on
07:15and just let it kind of steam and crisp up on the bottom.
07:18The bottom gets way more crispy than it was the day before,
07:21and then the top is nice and melty and cheesy, and that extra bit of crunch and crisp,
07:26I think it's better than it was when it was fresh.
07:29Last one. Nick DiGiovanni, Dino Nuggets recipe.
07:32Great, great, great question here.
07:35The key to a really nice, juicy Dino Nugget is to make sure
07:38that you're putting some milk-soaked bread in the filling.
07:41That bread holds some of that moisture, that milk,
07:44and when it cooks, it retains all that moisture so that when you finish the whole thing,
07:49it's got a really juicy bite to it.
07:51But the full recipe for my favorite Dino Nuggets is actually in my cookbook,
07:55so if you want to try to find that, it's all there.
07:58Toss it.
08:01All right, those are all the questions. Thanks so much for watching.