About Blaschetto

My name is Antonio Setzu. I am Sardinian. This is not a recipe site — it is a record of a food culture that most of the English-speaking world has never encountered properly.

Where This Started

I grew up in a village in the Barbagia — the mountainous interior of Sardinia that the Romans never fully conquered and that still feels, in certain lights, like it belongs to a different century. My grandmother made her own pasta, her own cheese, her own mirto. My grandfather kept bees. The olive oil came from trees that my great-grandmother's family had planted.

I left Sardinia in my early twenties. I've lived in various cities since. And one of the things that happens when you leave a place is that you start to miss it with a specificity that you never had while you were there. I didn't miss "Italian food." I missed the specific smell of pane carasau toasting under the grill. The exact weight of a seadas fresh from the oil. The way corbezzolo honey tastes — bitter and complicated and like nothing else.

Why This Site Exists

I started noticing something a few years ago. Every time I searched for Sardinian recipes in English, I found the same five dishes, described in the same shallow way, usually by people who had visited Sardinia once on holiday or had never been at all. The results were generic. They were wrong in small ways that mattered. They treated Sardinian food as a subset of Italian food rather than as a distinct culinary tradition with its own logic, its own history, and its own very particular ingredients.

This is the site I wanted to find. Recipes that are actually correct. Ingredient guides that tell you what something tastes like, not just what it is. Food stories written by someone with a personal stake in getting it right.

What You'll Find Here

The focus is Sardinian food first — because it's what I know best, because it's genuinely underserved in English, and because it is extraordinary in ways that most people have no idea about. But it expands into Italian food more broadly, because Sardinia does not exist in a vacuum, and because I grew up eating both.

The recipes are authentic. I don't simplify them to the point of dishonesty. If a dish is difficult — if it requires technique, time, or ingredients that take some effort to find — I'll tell you exactly that, and I'll tell you why the effort is worth it. I'll also tell you what the reasonable substitutions are, because I know most readers aren't in Sardinia.

The culture articles go deeper than recipes alone. They're about ingredients, history, producers, traditions. They're about why people on this island live to be a hundred years old, and what that has to do with what they eat.

A Note on Authenticity

"Authentic" is a word that gets used carelessly in food writing. I use it deliberately. It doesn't mean there is only one correct version of any dish — there isn't. In Sardinia, culurgiones vary by valley, by family, by which aunt is in the kitchen. Authentic means true to the tradition and the logic of the cooking, not frozen in amber.

What I'm trying to avoid is the kind of recipe that's been smoothed out and simplified until it no longer tastes like anything in particular. The kind of "Sardinian pasta" that could be from anywhere in the Mediterranean. That's what this site is against.

Get in Touch

If you're a producer, brand, or culinary tourism operator interested in working with Blaschetto, use the contact form. I'm open to partnerships that are a genuine fit for this audience and this content.

If you spot an error in a recipe — especially if you're Sardinian and I've got something wrong — please tell me. I mean this sincerely. This site is a work in progress, and I'd rather be corrected than wrong.