Giada De Laurentiis Just Declared 2024 the Year of The Tomato

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If you flip through the pages of one of Giada De Laurentiis’s 10New York Times bestselling cookbooks or tune into an episode from her more than over two-decades long TV career, you'll quickly learn that the Italian-American chef has some serious culinary crushes. And by that, we mean that the restaurateur, entrepreneur, and mom treats a few signature ingredients as MVPs to deliver major Mediterranean flavor.

De Laurentiis’s staples are like a who’s who of regional Italian culinary lore: from lemons and olive oil to tinned fish and tomatoes—and especially, always tomatoes.

In any and all of the ways—canned or fresh, sun-dried or sauce-ified, cherry or heirloom—tomatoes are so essential in De Laurentiis’s eyes, that she deemed 2024 is the “year of the tomato" in an Instagram post.

In tandem with a photoshoot so she could act as the cover star of the January edition of Los Angeles Magazine, De Laurentiis sat down with the magazine to dish up pasta 101, to reflect on her life in food, and to spill about her favorite types of tomatoes and how to use them.

You’ve been able to watch De Laurentiis cook for more than two decades on TV, and she developed those cooking skills after almost a lifetime of practice. Her earliest kitchen memories begin at a “very, very early age,” she told Los Angeles Magazine, when she started helping and learning from her movie producer grandfather, Dino De Laurentiis.

After studying food anthropology at UCLA to try to learn more about “the reason why people cook the way they do,” she jetted off to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. After that came working restaurants (for the likes of Wolfgang Puck), then a Food & Wine magazine feature, and soon after, a TV offer. 

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