On one particular day of filming, with guests Kathy Lette, Tom Gleeson and Lisa McCune, Colloca accidentally sliced her finger open with a knife, fainted and an ambulance had to be called.

"I had to have three stitches," she says. "Operating with sharp knives, that's what happens – you just get cut all the time. All my chef mates are very proud of me for being so committed to being a real chef. They actually think that now my hands look better."

Colloca is always at pains to emphasise she is a cook, not a chef, and part of her latest show's appeal is its slant on accessible Italian home-cooking, with recipes inspired by seasonality and simplicity.

The actress and opera singer turned cookery writer and TV presenter says she was reluctant at first to head down the path of this particular career as she didn't feel qualified for the role. She says unlike her older brother Giammarco, who is a chef in Milan, she hasn't done the hard yards in a restaurant kitchen.

However, the flipside of that is she brings an accessible approach to her dishes and home cooking.

"You will notice that all of my recipes are easy," she says. "I'm not a trained chef, so if I can do them, anyone can. It's really just a matter of understanding what's in season, and subtracting instead of adding as a lot of the time flavours are a bit too complicated and things get a bit lost. In Italy we are very prudent with that. The principle is simplicity."

Food, however, isn't the centrepiece of Silvia's Italian Kitchen, it's the conversation. A harsh review drew headlines recently over its criticisms of  the show being "complicated and deluded" and amounting to little more than property porn  – Fairfax Media spoke to Colloca ahead of the review's publication – but there are some insights to be gained from seeing celebrities outside of the usual interview constructs.

Each episode sees three famous names join Colloca in creating and eating dishes amid chatter on a wide range of subjects, from family to feminism, to personal stories and revelations, like a real-life dinner party.

Still to come in the season are names including Marta Dusseldorp, Cathy Freeman, George Negus, Emma Alberici, Ian Thorpe and Claudia Karvan.

Colloca says what they were keen to achieve with the show was a real sense of who these people are: nothing is scripted, no one is there to plug their latest work.

"The idea of the show from the beginning for me was that it had to be authentic, and it is," she says. "We're cooking together, there's no one else cooking the food that we eat – we cook it, we eat it together and it took that long to shoot every day because everything was done in real time.

"It's all authentic, nothing is fabricated or questions are written down by someone, it's all the flow of the conversation and real spark [among the guests] and real interest."

She says the most memorable conversation she had was talking to Tim Flannery.

"I just saw this wonderful scientist sitting in front of me, crumbling right in front of my eyes, could not even get the words out of his mouth to express how endangered the Great Barrier Reef is," she says. "To see this wonderful man, devoted to science, so hurt by something of the scale that people are in denial about, it just made me want to do something myself and be part of the change."

WHAT Silvia's Italian Table

WHEN ABC, Thursday, 8pm