The Sensitive Epicure

Erin Swing Romanos is The Sensitive Epicure.  She is currently a student at the Midwest Culinary Institute.  Erin has worked at the highly acclaimed China Gourmet in Hyde Park (Cincinnati) for 10 years; trained in Italian cooking by her step-father Fred Lazarus III (famous resident chef who spent 2 years training in Italy); and is a degreed Organic Chemist; worked developing food and beverages at Givaudan/Tastemaker; as well as formulating consumer products at Procter & Gamble for the past 14 years.  In her work at P&G, she spent over six years working in Pharmaceuticals R&D, and also she formulated lipstick & nail polish, and she formulated laundry detergents, conducted consumer research and process/scale-up for fabric care products.

She was diagnosed with Celiac Disease and Dermatitis Herpetiformis in 2003, and has been working on GF recipe development since 2005.  Recently, while conducting research for a cookbook, she read repeatedly the connection between gluten intolerance and any type of milk sensitivity, only to get tested and find out she has an allergy to the milk protein, casein.  Within two weeks of staying MF, her asthma symptoms subsided.

Her approach to GF/MF recipe development is to deconstruct a typical gluten-filled food and rebuild it with an optimization of GF ingredients and reinterpret it into something spectacular – like her Busken's style iced cookies which are legendary in Cincy.  Her success has come from understanding the physical properties of food ingredients and utilizing chemistry between these ingredients without using anything “unnatural” such as xanthan gum or bean flours in baked goods.

Erin wants to help those with such dietary restrictions by providing new to the world recipe format and approaches in her cookbook that will be titled “Cooking with The Sensitive Epicure” and providing recipe articles in local publications, as well as specialty national publications.  Erin works in client homes as a Personal Chef, and out of her Clifton home with an outreach locally with the Cincinnati Celiac and Autism ADNI Communities, as well as having a national foodie community in New York City.