Our tribute to the cooks and chefs that I had the pleasure of getting to know in the more than 10 years that I have been documenting culinary as a photographer will continue weekly in 2021.

I hope to be able to bring a beautiful project to everyone with great recipes and stories. The "Recipe of Chef in Studio" has this goal: to combine good dishes and good wines with good stories.

Our first recipe of 2021 was sent to us by the dear Brazilian friend Chef Wagner Alvarenga, whom I met in 2014 at an Samba Chorinho event in Búzios, a beautiful Brazilian peninsula located in Rio de Janeiro. This was the first time that I could see the chef hands-on, literally, as he prepared handmade rustic pizzas for the event guests. We soon became friends and in 2015 he was invited to become head chef of the kitchen in a hotel where I was responsible for branding, and we ended up creating the menu together.

So I got to know his culinary history, which started in 1999 in Massachusetts, USA, where he cooked at the greek restaurant Stefani's until 2005, when he returned to Brazil and spent 5 years traveling in search of knowledge of Brazilian cuisine until he arrived in Búzios, where in 2010 headed the kitchen of the hotel Gravatas for 2 years. He was then invited by the Chef Danio Braga to be sous chef at the Sollar restaurant, receiving the medal of excellence of the Guia 4 Rodas in 2013 and 2014, a prestigious brasilian award in the hospitality and restaurant sector. And it was in this place that he specialized in the production of artisanal pasta. A year later it was then when we met, he headed the hotel's kitchen, but he continued and continues today to look for new experiences, becoming the hotel's executive chef, sub-chef at the Rio Olympics in 2016, where he won a silver medal, in the same year he returned to the kitchen of the hotel Gravatas until 2018, then he was chef of the concert hall Luv on the Orla Bardot, the famous Buzio’s waterfront beloved by Brigitte Bardot, and his last restaurant as a chef was Casa Blanca where he stayed until the end of 2019, when he left at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Chef Wagner is one of those passionate people about his profession and with the pandemic he decided to reinvent himself and open his own business, a dream that I had known since 2015. Today he is the owner and chef of his own kitchen and restaurant, the Fornace Alvarenga, where he makes his pastas and pizzas for delivery. As a pasta expert, he sent us a recipe like those you don't want to stop eating: Fettuccine al Nero di Seppia with sautéed Prawns in White Wine, Sun-dried Tomatoes, Anchovies and Fresh Rocket. This is a dish of great sentimental value to the chef, as he can place his recipe in many of the restaurants he has headed and see his creation becoming the menu's preference.

Fettuccine al Nero di Seppia with sautéed Prawns in White Wine, Sun-dried Tomatoes, Anchovies and Fresh Rocket

Fettuccine al Nero di Seppia:

Ingredients
- 250 g of flour 00
- 250 g of semolina
- 6 egg yolks
- 2 whole eggs
- 3 g of cuttlefish ink

Preparation
Mix everything to form a dough. Pass the cylinder until it is very thin and cut like fettuccine with a long and well sharp knife, into strips of more or less 1 cm.

Shrimp Sauce with Rocket, Sun-dried Tomatoes and White Wine:

Ingredients
- 250 g of shrimp
- 3 dried tomatoes cut à la Julienne
- 8 fresh rocket leaves
- 2 anchovy fillets
- 1 glass of white wine
- 1 drizzle of olive oil
- salt and pepper to taste

Preparation
Stir fry the prawns with the sun-dried tomatoes and the anchovies, then add the wine and salt and pepper. Add the pre cooked fettuccine and finally, when you turn off the heat, add the fresh rocket. Mix and serve.