La Cenetta is a foodie experience built to deliver amusement and joy through the richness of taste. Great food makes people happy: cook for someone you love and gift your special ones with a memorable food experience.
Our italian meal kits are not just about eating. Every box is an alchemic craft of flavours, textures, fragrances and esthetics.
Everybody can.
Can you light a stove?
Are you able to pour stuff in a pot and set a timer?
If yes, that’s enough.
You’ll need the very basic cooking equipment (check the needed tools in the recipe cards). A kitchen, clean water, a pot and a frying pan are usually enough, by the way.
…and a brain, of course! Not even a great one, no worries. We made it so easy for you that you won’t need to be a Nobel Prize to cook the recipes. You just have to read the instructions!
We’ve already done the hard work for you, therefore not much at all. The cooking time varies depending on the dish, but on average it’s always roughly around 20-25 minutes.
You can find more detailed info on each product page, section Meal Kit Details.
Click the link and check it out!
Ideal for 4 people, or 2 people for a double meal. Otherwise you can keep 2 servings to go back for seconds, if it’s a date among gluttons.
Or you can eat them all by yourself, if you’re a greedy one. We won’t blame you, ke know our meals are yummy.
Please, don’t ever think about it! Our meal kits are precisely crafted according to the recipes that italian grandmas have perfectioned across generations. Decades of love and work intended to give birth to some of the world’s greatest and most iconic dishes.
Italian food is recognized as a candidate to become an UNESCO Intangible Heritage, and our grandmas who handed down those recipes would beat us up with a rolling pin if we messed up with their inventions.
My friend, if you’re not scared of the spirit of all the italian grandmas who told us their traditional recipes… well, we live in a democracy, after all.
If you really want to take the risk, we won’t stop you. May God have mercy!
Before opening, just keep it in a cool dry place.
Once opened, keep the remaining ingredients in the fridge according to their expiring dates.
You can find all the expiring dates on each ingredient. Being most of them freeze-dried, their expiring dates are usually very long, so you do not need to worry about it very much.
On top of that, you will not want to wait that much to eat those delicacies, we guarantee.
Sure thing!
Our journey is just at the beginning. We decided to start with three ultra-iconic italian dishes from different parts of the country: one from the North, one from the South and one from the capital, in Central Italy.
But Italy is made of 20 regions, and each of them has literally thousands of finger-licking traditional recipes that are damn worth to be cooked and tasted. Stay tuned!
You can find all the allergens’ list on each product page, ingredients section.
Check it out.
The ingredients in the food boxes are freeze-dried in order to last longer, avoid overnight shipping and make their preservation easier. Freeze-dried food can be stored for years with no quality loss.
As long as the ingredients are carefully selected, their organoleptic qualities are equal to fresh ones. And – guess what – our ingredients are selected among the top class local producers.
Marco and his team select the ingredients with great care, among the best in class producers. Most of the producers are located in Italy, in the regions where each ingredient is more typical.
Some of them (such as pepper or breadcrumbs) are local, from the US. They’re packed in Brooklyn in order to reduce shipping related emissions and ensure optimal preservation.
Why should you choose a restaurant over fast food?
You’re hungry, you’re in a hurry, you go to a fast food place. If you’re staying home, you can buy any meal kit. That’s what they usually are: a quick and lazy tool to eat.
But if you want to give yourself a treat and have a special dinner, you would rather choose to go to some fancy restaurant. La Cenetta is the restaurant: a restaurant in your home where you can be the chef for one night.
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Have you ever cooked a special dinner and awfully messed it up? I bet you have!
That’s something that really makes you go bananas.
Well, worry not! This is NOT gonna happen this time. We have already made all the tricky
work for you: our magic meal boxes contain all the pre-weighed ingredients you’ll need. No
more cutting, chopping, measuring and weighing from your side.
Moreover, you can find below both our ridiculously easy and detailed video guides and
written instructions for each meal kit. By following them, you’ll avoid ANY possible mistake
and yours will be the first-rate dinner you’re craving to achieve.
As italians, we don’t want you to mess up our recipes!
We take the risk, you get the glory!
Our italian gourmet meal kits came to existence thanks to Marco Cattaneo, who gave birth to the concept of La Cenetta and finally launched the brand in 2022.
After a successful past as a restaurant owner in Milan, he moved to NYC in 2011 in order to
bring his deep food knowledge to the US.
Proud of his italian roots, since then he worked in
the food industry for over 10 years and has deeply contributed to develop the local know-how
and expertise.
How could you possibly cook as a real chef, enjoying your cooking time and being sure to obtain a guaranteed, delicious result instead of awfully messing it all up?
In order to give you that mighty power, Marco Cattaneo put together a team of experienced italian chefs.
Together they took some of the most mouth-watering recipes from the italian traditions and they made them modern, chic and elegant, emphasising the original flavours and aromas. These recipes come from the expertise handed down across generations of italian families all around the country.
Marco and his team carefully selected any ingredient from our farms and lands, assuring freshness, authenticity, and an excellent preservation. Any of them is also weighed to perfection in order to give you the precise amount that will make your dishes perfectly balanced in taste, and indistinguishable from the ones you can eat in Italy. Like two peas
in a pod.
By following the instructions, you will no longer need to walk on eggshells while cooking.
If you want to amuse your guest through a culinary experience that has zero risks of goofingit up, do yourself a favor: shop now your first gourmet meal box and get ready for the magic.
We don’t know where we'll be in a week or in a month. We do what we want for as long as we want, always trying out new experiences.
Linguine Burro e Alici
Linguine burro e alici is a typical homemade pasta dish from the south of Italy that today is quickly earning a seat in the fanciest restaurants.
Burro e alici stands out for its creamy anchovy – butter sauce that smacks you down with a punch of flavour and savoury. Its taste is round and intense, like every culinary jewel that comes from Southern Italy.
Pasta has to be cooked al dente by blending the starchy water with butter and anchovies. The salty proteins of the anchovies gift the pasta with a fishy and umami complexity of flavours, enriched by the crunchiness of breadcrumbs and the glazing layer of butter.
The final outcome is a bliss for your palate, that will spice up your dinner with a cheeky twist.
Whether your guests are dear friends or something more… they’ll look at you with new eyes.
The birth of burro e alici sinks its roots in an almost gone, ancient history that melts into the legend.
According to the story, its origin has to be found when the Emperor of the Roman Empire Giulio Cesare joined a banquet held by his friend Valerio Leone. The host served the companions a dish of artichokes dressed with butter instead of the olive oil, commonly used in Rome.
The host explained the oil in that region was unbearably costly, but all the guests at the banquet complained about the choice, addressing it as weird and disgusting. All but Giulio Cesare, who instead scolded the hell out of the guests and enjoyed the butter so much that he kept asking Valerio Leone about it.
On the day after, the legend says that Giulio Cesare smeared the butter on a slice of bread and topped it with some garum, a fermented fish sauce typically used in Ancient Rome.
The Emperor’s intuition led to a mix of sweetness and savoury so delicious that those flavours have been handed down across generation, finally getting to be used on pasta in what today has become the mouth-watering recipe we simply named burro e alici.
Linguine Burro e Alici
Linguine Burro e Alici
Linguine di Gragnano (500gr/1.1Lb): Durum wheat semolina, water. Produced in Gragnano (NA)- Italy
Italian Fillets of Anchovies in pure Olive Oil (90gr/3.17 Oz). Produced in Italy – Imported in Brooklyn, NY USA
100 % Grass Fed Ghee (Clarified butter), (2 x 1oz jar): Cultured organic grass-fed butter.
Plain Breadcrumb (2 x 0.18 Oz): wheat flour, dextrose, yeast & amp; salt. Origin USA. Produced and packed in Brooklyn, NY
Coarse Sea Salt (2 x 0.88 Oz): Mediterranean Sea Salt, harvested from clear waters of the Mediterranean Sea and dried by natural solar evaporation. Packed in Brooklyn, NY
FOOD ALLERGY WARNING: CONTAINS MILK, WHEAT, ANCHOVIES
4 Servings
Cooking Time: 20 minutes
Anchovies
Anchovies are small fish from temperate waters such as the Mediterranean Sea.
They’re mostly used as a seasoning or garnish due to their unique salty, umami, flavours. They are indeed capable to add a twist when melted in a sauce, and their rich taste is the reason why you can find anchovies in quite a number or dishes, from pasta, pizza to tasty soups.
The best way to make the most out of anchovies is balance. Their salty and fishy meat, when correctly weighed, provides flavour and savoury to the dish, sometimes replacing any added salt.
Linguine Burro e Alici
Linguine Burro e Alici
Bucatini Cacio & Pepe al Tartufo
Cacio e pepe (literally cheese and pepper) is one of the most iconic pasta dishes from Rome, the capital.
A perfect cacio e pepe is recognizable by its rich, creamy cheese gravy that melts in your mouth leaving you speechless for a while. Its flavour is round and strong, and its legendary savoury is well completed by the grains of black pepper that enhance its balance by adding some spice. Finally, we added a special twist to our Cacio e Pepe: a charming sprinkle of black truffle that makes it the ultimate gourmand’s obsession.
Despite its simple appearance, a proper cacio e pepe is well known to be an extra tough
recipe. Its difficulty lies in the choice of the best cheese’s quality and ageing, the cooking technique and the balance between the ingredients.
Although there are different school of thoughts regarding the cooking process, one thing’s damn sure: obtaining a cream with the perfect texture and flavour is an art jealously guarded by the Roman cuisine.
The history of cacio e pepe brings us back in time. More precisely at the age of the transhumance, the long seasonal migrations of the shepherds who were used to travel around the Roman fields with their herds.
Before the winter they would head to the plains chasing warmth; before the summer they used to travel back towards the mountains, where thay could find cooler climates.
During those grueling travels, they needed to bring with them food easy to preserve for a long time. That’s how they started to bring pasta as carbohydrates with them, the local sheep cheese that we call now pecorino romano, and pepper, because of the warming property of the spice.
Across the centuries, cacio e pepe has become one of the culinary symbols of Rome, where grandmas and innkeepers refined their own versions of the recipe, guarding to death their secrets.
Bucatini Cacio & Pepe al Tartufo
Bucatini Cacio & Pepe al Tartufo
Bucatini di Gragnano (500gr/1.1Lb): Durum wheat semolina, water. – Produced in Gragnano (NA) – Italy
Pecorino Romano cheese and Summer Truffle cream (90gr/3.17 0z): Milk, Pecorino Romano Cheese (sheep milk, salt, lamb rennet, lactic ferments) 17%, cream, butter, rice flour, summer truffle 2%, corn starch, salt, pepper, natural flavor. – Produced in Piobesi d’Alba (CN) – Italy
Pecorino Romano grated and lyophilized cheese (2 x 1.06 Oz): Produced in Fontanellato (PR) – Italy
Coarse Sea Salt (2 x 0.88 Oz): Mediterranean Sea Salt, harvested from clear waters of the Mediterranean Sea and dried by natural solar evaporation. Packed in Brooklyn, NY
Grounded Black Pepper (0.14 Oz) origin India. Tellicherry Peppercorns – Packed in Brooklyn, NY
FOOD ALLERGY WARNING: CONTAINS MILK, WHEAT.
4 Servings
Cooking Time: 20 minutes
Pecorino Romano
Pecorino Romano is the worldwide famous sheep cheese commonly used in all the most
iconic dishes in Rome.
The history of this incredible meal kit’s ingredient goes back for thousand years, and its name comes from the fact that the cheese was the main nourishment for the Roman army. It’s mainly produced in Italy, today mostly in the island of Sardinia, and its taste is rather salty and strong.
Its flavors and texture vary accordingly to its ageing time. Therefore, a perfect cacio e pepe needs a pecorino romano whose specific ageing process and quality is a key secret of the Italian cuisine tradition.
Bucatini Cacio & Pepe al Tartufo
Bucatini Cacio & Pepe al Tartufo
Risotto alla Milanese
Risotto alla milanese is by far and by definition the knockout italian dish of seduction.
Typical from Milan, saffron risotto is the magic trick that makes any date successful. Romantic and elegant, its quintessential yellow colour is highly recognizable as a true culinary icon.
Despite its charming and brilliant esthetics, risotto alla milanese is also rich and complex in taste. It’s creamy and smooth, even if there isn’t any cream in the ingredients: its sensual battery texture is due to the perfect blend of saffron, rice starch, broth and parmesan.
On top of that, the killer feature of risotto alla milanese lies in its magnificent aroma, that gives you a complete sensorial experience. You can definitely guess at this point why saffron risotto is probably the most seductive dish of all the italian cuisine.
The history of saffron risotto has noble origins. According to a manuscript found at the Trivulziana Library, it dates back to the 1574. At the time, the Belgian painter and master glassmaker Valerio of Flanders was working on the Milan Cathedral, and held a big event in the city to celebrate his daughter’s wedding.
Saffron risotto seems to be born quite as a game by the hands of the master’s disciple, commonly known as Zafferano (Saffron) because of his habit of adding saffron to the colours of his palette to make them more brilliant.
At the wedding, he convinced his master to mix saffron into risotto in order to give it a unique colour and flavour. Their guests were so amused and impressed by those flavours and the golden colour that they named the dish Risotto alla milanese. A culinary legend was born.
Risotto alla Milanese
Risotto alla Milanese
Riso Carnaroli superfino Riserva San Massimo (2 x 8,8oz)- Origin of rice: Italy. Produced in Groppello Cairoli (PV) – Italy
Parmigiano Reggiano grated and lyophilized cheese (2 x 1.05oz): Produced in Basilicanova (PR) – Italy.
100 % Grass Fed Ghee (Clarified butter), (2 x 1oz jar): Cultured organic grass-fed butter
100% Premium Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil (25ml) – First cold pressed extra virgin olive oil produced in Pomezia (Rome) – Italy.
Freeze-dried onions (2 x 0.35 Oz): Organically grown, non GMO minced onion packed in Brooklyn, NY
Aged White Wine Vinegar (25ml) produced in Pomezia (Rome) – Italy.
Fine sea Salt (2 x 0.53 Oz): Mediterranean Sea Salt, harvested from clear waters of the Mediterranean Sea and dried by natural solar evaporation. Packed in Brooklyn, NY
Saffron threads (0.2 gr) from Spain. Packed in Brooklyn, NY
FOOD ALLERGY WARNING: CONTAINS MILK.
4 Servings
Cooking Time 25 minutes
Saffron
Saffron is obviously the ingredient that makes risotto alla milanese so special. Its charming colour, aroma and aphrodisiac properties are the luxurious key for any romantic date’s success. Prove us wrong!
Frequently named Red Gold, saffron is one of the world’s most precious and priciest spices. Its rarity and expensiveness are due to several reasons.
The main one is harvesting: it takes more than 40 hours of labour and 75000 flowers to collect just one pound of the spice. You can use indeed just one small part of the flower: the three coloured stigmata. Moreover, saffron requires warm climates and sunlight: it flowers only during October and November, and it’s produced almost only in Italy, Spain and Iran.
Here’s why one pound of saffron costs around 5000$ (more than 10000$ for 1kg).
Risotto alla Milanese
Risotto alla Milanese
