A home-cooked meal of eggs and turkey bacon helped launch a new role for Luigi Mastropietro.
The vice president of relationship marketing for Everi Holdings Inc., whose kitchen skills are well known to friends and coworkers, agreed to do a video explaining the steps involved in his special breakfast.
That spur-of-the moment cooking lesson spawned a series of YouTube videos called “Luigi’s Holy Cannoli Show,” in which he demonstrates how to make dishes such as grilled Italian lamb chops, stuffed portobello mushrooms and Italian steak, a broccoli-Italian sausage-pasta dish, pepperoni pizza, zucchini flowers, and enough baked ziti to feed a dozen people.
“(Cooking’s) kind of natural for me. I’m Italian; I didn’t know if you could tell by my name,” Mastropietro quipped.
The YouTube show is sort of small potatoes right now, with 16 episodes and fewer than 100 subscribers. But such numbers aren’t a big concern for the Everi executive. His zest for cooking and love of good food shine through in each episode.
“What I try to do is make it very basic and simple,” said Mastropietro, who grew up near Detroit and has no formal training in cooking. As a child, he frequently watched his mother and grandmother, both born in Italy, while they worked in the kitchen and he “just sponged up” how they prepared food for the family.
“I picked up the seasonings and the basics, the foundational things to cook,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed it since I was a kid.”
One key is relying on what he calls the trio of Italian cooking: extra virgin olive oil, preferably from Italy, Greece, or Sicily; Italian parsley (“it smells so intense”); and garlic. He uses generous amounts of garlic salt – no measuring spoons in sight – during several episodes of “Holy Cannoli.” One trick he learned from his mother is to make a blend of the trio in advance and freeze it, so sections can be cut off and thawed when time is short.
Mastropietro experiments with new recipes at home, but he said the show features only what he knows will taste good.
“I don’t put them on the air or record them until I know they’re delicious. I’m in marketing, so … I’ve really got to love it in order for me to talk about it,” he said. While a sales person might follow a script, marketing is based on the concept of “I already believe this is great and I know you’re going to love it,” he explained.
Each episode of “Holy Cannoli” lasts just two to five minutes and is shot in the kitchen of Mastropietro’s home in Las Vegas. Total shooting time varies with the recipe being prepared. One show opens with Mastropietro picking olives from a tree in his yard, then walking viewers through the eight-week process of curing and aging them upside down in jars. He also grows pomegranates, almonds, tangerines, grapefruit, basil, and rosemary.
Although his mother cooks dishes from her native Northern Italy, Mastropietro generally favors the Napolitano and Sicilian offerings of Southern Italy. Southern sauces tend to be red and sweet, he said, while Northern sauces often are butter-based and the dishes feature more vegetables.
However, “Holy Cannoli” steers clear of such foodie distinctions.
“I try to simplify the whole thing for people who don’t really know how to cook,” he said. “I think that’s what inspired me to do it.” For example, one episode showcases a beef roast cooked in a crock pot. That came about because a friend in Los Angeles said he’d owned a crock pot for 20 years and didn’t know how to use it.
Mastropietro’s solution included marinating the roast in olive oil, basil, garlic salt, and pepper, then cooking it for eight hours with fresh carrots, an onion, potatoes, celery, and an orange pepper, plus fresh fennel and garlic. “Garlic is a mandatory ingredient in all Italian cooking, no matter what you’re making,” he tells viewers.
Videographer Danny Bravo said Mastropietro has the ability to “Italianize” any dish. Bravo works as a box-office agent for Bally’s Casino in Las Vegas and formed Casa De Bravo Entertainment, which posts “Holy Cannoli” and other videos.
“How (Mastropietro) cooks is unique. It’s very fresh and always delicious,” Bravo said. “He has great seasonings, great combinations with ingredients. I’ve never seen him look up a recipe.”
One fringe benefit of working on “Holy Cannoli” is that Bravo gets to eat what’s cooked for the show, but that involves a tradeoff.
“He cooks,” Bravo said, “and I wash the dishes.”
