Kevin72

So, ludja, to answer your question, I haven't experimented to much with the other variations Kasper lists in Splendid Table, although I did make a ragu very similar to her giblet ragu and sauced some rosemary-sage pappardelle with it. The baroque ragu, the one with chicken thighs, sounds intriguing. But when I set about to make a ragu it often just gravitates back to the classic.

Let’s get this one out of the way. In my opinion, the crowning achievement of the crowning cuisine of Italy is Ragu Bolognese, the mythical meat sauce cooked for hours and hours. It was the first big culinary challenge I undertook and succeeded with when I was first really getting into cooking. It held a certain mysticism for me, reading about it in Marcella Hazan’s essential tome, The Classic Italian Cook Book. It cut to the very heart of my perceptions of Italian cooking at that point: the big pot of pasta sauce with rich meats and tomatoes, simmering together all day. I must have made it six times at least in that first year I learned to cook it and now I just cook it by recall. I’ve tinkered around with various recipes and of course eaten the real thing in Bologna now. While I accept that the “true” recipe likely has tomato paste and has a full-on, meaty flavor, I prefer Marcella Hazan’s technique in her Classic Italian Cookbook, involving canned tomatoes. I like how they cook down slowly, slowly, slowly, their natural sugars caramelizing with the meat to the point where the two are nearly indistinguishable from each other. Ragu Bolognese is a true exercise in synergy where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. But I’ve picked up some other flourishes from elsewhere: I use ground pork and pancetta in addition to ground beef, and also cook some stock in there. I have backed down a little on the tomato element over the years, but it’s still a definitive presence. In addition to the nutmeg Marcella uses, I’ve taken to adding just a dash of cinnamon for the most distant trace of something you can’t quite put your finger on. I don’t think it’s traditional though. So let’s start off with the base. Two carrots, two ribs of celery, and a whole onion. For the meats, as mentioned, I use ground beef (I wanted to buy and chop skirt steak as Lynne Rossetto Kasper directs in Splendid Table, but had some pre-ground in the freezer), ground pork, and pancetta, which I cube up and toss in the processer to chop into a paste. The vegetables, too, I chop up in a food processor. I like them to be minced really, really fine so that they completely fall apart and dissolve into the finished sauce. I cook them in a few tablespoons of butter and olive oil over low heat until they have softened but not caramelized. Then I add the pancetta and, still over low heat, let it shed its fat and cook down as well. After it has added a good deal of its fat to the pan, I then add the pork and beef, season them with salt, and cook them a bit. Here is a key difference between Marcella’s recipe and others I have seen, including notably Batali’s and Kasper’s: Marcella directs you to cook the meat only until it has lost it’s raw color and turned a little grey. Most other recipes have you cook the meats until they have shed their fat and are browning and caramelized. I tried this approach the last time I made this sauce and I must say I prefer Marcella’s technique: it lends a more delicate flavor and texture to the finished product. The latter technique creates a fuller, and again, more “meaty” flavor and is fairly close to the kind I had in Bologna, so I’d imagine it’s the more traditional way to go if that’s your preference. So, after the meat has cooked just to being a pallid grey and lost the raw red color throughout, add some white wine, enough to come about halfway up the meat and aromatics in the pot, turn up the heat a little to bring to a simmer, then cook it, uncovered, until it is completely reduced away. Next, I add the nutmeg, dash of cinnamon, and milk (the really Old School version in Splendid Table adds cream now and then again at the end of cooking). Again, you reduce it away to nothing. Now, finally, add the stock and tomatoes (or tomato paste if that’s the route you’re going). As if it hasn’t become clear enough already, this is something that demands quite a bit of your time and patience. The total time elapsed from starting the aromatics in the pot with butter and olive oil to this point: an hour and a half. And that’s just the base! Now it has to cook. And for quite some time, the longer the better. Recipes that call for an hour curdle my blood. At that point, it’ll still just taste like hamburger and canned tomatoes. I say, at least three hours, I usually go much longer, and in this particular instance, I cooked it overnight, covered, in a very low oven, put it away a couple of days to really deepen the flavors, and then finished it off the day we ate it. Here it is just after the addition of the tomatoes and stock: Rather limpid looking, huh? Now here it is at the end of all that cooking: Fairly red still from the tomatoes but it’s so, so much more than just tomatoes and meat at this point. Again, if you’re going the tomato paste/caramelized meat route it’s going to be fairly brown. So, a sauce that cooks for three hours or more demands, not just homemade pasta, but handmade pasta, the taglietelle of Bologna. This is the only time I go through the effort of making it by hand (though I still use a stand mixer to give the dough the necessary abuse to build up that gluten). One of the reasons Emilia Romagna so dotes upon its homemade, fresh egg pastas is the soft wheat that readily grows there. I actually had some “Tipo 00” flour ready to go for this purpose but it got infested. Luckily I had cake flour on hand and went with the 60/40 ratio of AP and cake flours you are directed to by some authors in order to replicate 00 flour. This was a “four egg” recipe which meant 4 large eggs and 400 grams of flour (100 grams of flour, about ¾ cup, per “egg” used in the golden rule of pastamaking in E-R). Here it is after it has been mixed, whacked around in the mixer for several minutes at high speed, and then allowed to rest and relax. I cut it into six pieces to roll out: Rolling it out using a wooden dowel on a wooden surface yields a rough-textured pasta that perfectly captures the sauce. After each has been made into a thin, sheer sheet (it’s supposed to be thin enough to read the newspaper through but I never can get it to that point), you set them aside to let them dry a little before cutting them. In Bologna’s city hall, there is supposedly a golden strand of tagliatelle that represents the exact dimensions of the authentic recipe. It’s 8 mm wide, or about 3/8ths of an inch. I cut them out with the sheets laying flat, though the more traditional approach is to roll them up and cut them that way for more precision. That’s all well and good but mine always sticks together then from the pressure of cutting them and I have to spend several more minutes painstakingly unrolling each noodle. Here they are all cut and laying on wax paper with a dusting of flour, waiting to be cooked. So, Sunday night’s meal offered some of the dishes we enjoyed in Bologna, including, obviously, Tagliatelle al Ragu (aka Tagliatelle Bolognese to anyone outside E-R). We started with a suggested antipasto in Splendid Table for this type of meal: wedges of raw fennel dipped in balsamic vinegar. Then, the tagliatelle. In this instance, I toss the pasta in the bowl with the sauce and a generous pat of butter, instead of in the cooking vessel, since the sauce has been cooked to exactly the right point and I don’t want to risk cooking it further as necessary when tossing it with the pasta over high heat. We continued with costolette Bolognese, cutlets of meat (I used pork, shhh!) breaded, sautéed in butter, and then topped with a slice of prosciutto and shards of parmigiano, then thrown into a really hot oven just to wilt the prosciutto and barely melt the parm. The contorno was “Autumn Salad DaNello”, based on a contorno we ordered at Montegrappa DaNello on our last night in Bologna. There, it was porcini and ovoli mushrooms, sliced very thin and tossed with slivers of celery and truffles, along with lemon juice, olive oil, and more curls of parmigiano cheese. Lacking all the key ingredients, I still made a fairly serviceable version with trumpet royale mushrooms (see my current av), cremini, celery, and apples, a spur-of-the-moment addition which everyone enjoyed. A mandolin is pretty essential to get them as then as necessary. You “cure” the ‘shrooms and celery with olive oil, salt, and lemon juice, then right before serving add the apples and cheese. We finished with a jam-stuffed crumbling cake out of Splendid Table. Ahh, Bologna.

I think we've alread laid to rest, you spoiled Aussie globe-trotter, over which has less availability: Dallas or Scotland. Need I remind you of the skin-on porchetta debacle or pull up butcher pics from your blog? You're dead on with the ST assessment; that you really get a sense of singular themes or patterns that are well woven in going back several hundred years and she really does a good job tracing the roots (though to be honest I have no interest in the Renaissance pasta recipes) and showing how they've evolved.

Yeah, gonna have a hard time with both the sweetbreads or the partridge breast element of that recipe. Actually, I've made another pasticcio before, though this was the tortelloni variation, which I originally thought is what you were talking about. There will be a similar dish in the next few months, however. So, NOW do we talk about Splendid Table?

Geeze, Adam, way to throw down the gauntlet on me. I considered that dish but then decided with all the other stuff I'm going to make it was just too much. "Surely, nobody will miss it if I leave that one out . . . "

I spent my lunch break the other day just looking at this thread (and getting hungrier even as I ate). I'll add to the chorus that it's chock full of beautiful photos, great explanations, and dishes I'd love to try myself. I thought I didn't know Dutch cooking at all but this all seems to familiar and comforting at once. Great job!

November is the “officially unofficial” beginning of the Holiday season in the U.S., and so to go with it I’m doing the classical, comforting cooking of Emilia-Romagna. This is my favorite regional cuisine of Italy. The sheer volume and depth of artisanal food products and that so many “classic” recipes originated or are perfected here is simply staggering. Parmigiano Reggiano, Aceto Balsamico, Prosciutto di Parma, lasagna Bolognese, tortellini, cotechino, zampone, rich, luscious egg pastas . . . need I go on? It is a cuisine unto itself. Just about any introduction to this region in Italian cookbooks points out everything I noted above, mentions that Italians from all over the peninsula regularly hold it in the highest regard--second only to their mothers’ cooking of course--and then the author themselves adds a testament to the greatness of this cuisine. Waverly Root devotes 103 pages of Foods of Italy just to Emilia-Romagna, most of it just listing the unique dishes in each province and capital or twists on the traditional dishes (frankly, it gets tedious). Only Fred Plotkin, who, while acknowledging it is one of the best cuisines of Italy, offers a complaint: that what keeps it from truly rising above the rest is having great wine to match the food (a fair point, but not enough to hold it back in my opinion, especially when you have Tuscany just to the south, the Veneto just to the north). Then there’s the fact that Marcella Hazan, and, to a lesser extent, Mario Batali, really carved out my initial understanding of Italian cooking during my formative period of learning, and both are extensively influenced by Emilia-Romagna. My Mom gave me her copy of Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbookas I was really getting into cooking (right after the film Big Night came out) and I was hooked. I read it cover to cover, twice, and spent the next year cooking almost exclusively from that book. Like the cooking of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna is practically ground into my genetic code at this point. I’ve broken in many a dinner party guest on regional Italian cooking by starting with Emilia-Romagna, and it is the one I go to most often when I need to make an impression. As if I need any greater authority than Marcella Hazan for reference for this month, but really, we can’t talk about this region without mentioning the very best Italian regional cookbook out there, Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s The Splendid Table: The Cooking of Emilia Romagna. This has it all: regional histories, folklore, stories about dishes, profiles of notable restaurants and chefs in the region, personal anecdotes, and a bewildering volume of recipes. There’s a whole chapter just on variations of ragu, and another on recipes of the Renaissance, which profited Emilia-Romagna greatly and lay the foundation for its elaborate cooking traditions. And yet, for as good as I say this book is, it’s that much better. I’m rereading it now to research this month and finding all sorts of things I’d forgotten. I’d need one month just to make my way through all the standards of the cuisine and then another to do more unknown, interesting-sounding dishes. Nobody who likes Italian cooking should be without this book. This, then, was the region I first chose when we decided to go to Italy for our honeymoon. Though, after our planning, we had the Veneto and Tuscany in there as well, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I’d have liked there. Our stay was pretty much restricted to Bologna, the epicenter of Emilia-Romagna cuisine. Here’s what I wrote about Bologna when we came back from the trip: . The first night there we played “restaurant lottery” and just wandered into the first place that looked good (and it was a tough choice!). Just some anonymous trattoria-style place with the hostess/waitress/owner sitting in a corner peeling chestnuts and popping them in her mouth (we compared chestnut peeling scars!). Every table had “riservado” on it, but we were eating at the Americano hour of 8 and when we left at 10, the first few Italians had just come in. How do you guys do it? Food was great, simple, honest, straightforward, right out of any Bolognese cookbook. Ate lunch at Tamburini, ate crepes with nutella for a snack, went to a piadineria, ate another lunch at Diana (we weren’t dressed for it and the service responded accordingly), and out last dinner there was at Montegrappa DaNello, fantastic. Our one foray outside of Bologna was to Villa Gaidello, a farmstead halfway between Bologna and Modena, for a night’s stay and a seven-course meal of E-R standards that still makes me misty-eyed just thinking about it. Emilia-Romagna is a cooking and feasting with a passion for the very best way to do a dish, no matter what the cost, wallet or waistline. Loosen your belts, tuck away your Atkins books, and hide the children.

That's about what I saw on the East Coast. Here in Texas though it goes for anywhere between $20-$24.

I was shocked and angered at how cheap Frantoio is on the east coast. I guess now I know why Mario says that it's his "cheap cooking oil" though.

No, if I'm going to shell out $20 for Olive oil I go with Frantoio, one of my favorites. It has a very grassy, peppery flavor and I love it. I don't think I've seen Colavita's brands. CM doesn't carry the Alessis though? How odd. Edit: Puglia is where that other kind came from. It is an olive oil powerhouse and produces most of Italy's olive oil, even, unfortunately, some branded and marketed as coming from Tuscany or other regions.

A good starter recipe is to wrap their breast meat in pancetta, stuff the cavity with garlic and rosemary or sage, and then braise them with white wine. They have a pretty delicate, almost sweet meat so alot of recipes play up that angle. I was quite fond of the quail in cognac I did for Le Marche, and normally, the grilled quail skewers with pancetta cubes and polenta that I did earlier this month is one of my very favorites. Here again, you marinate them in honey, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar to give them a nice glaze after grilling. I did quite enjoy this most recent preparation; it's something to consider once you've had them by themselves to enjoy their flavor on its own. I should note that the quail I can get here is almost exclusively "sleeve" or "glove" boned meaning the ribcage has been removes, which cuts down considerably on the production and makes them much easier to pull apart for this pasta recipe.

Yes, quite often. The papadelle, for instance, was homemade. About the only kind I don't make are the thin string pastas and the tubes. And yes, learning to make it was quite the challenge initially. I can't tell you how many temper tantrums that lead to on my part.

They have it inside out though. The prosciutto/pancetta goes inside the meat and the meat is folded around it, not the other way around. I've used a similar premise and wrapped trout and seabass in cured pork and then wrapped it in foil and tossed on the grill or into a very hot oven. I must say though that I find the prosciutto or pancetta not very tasty in this method; it absorbs all the really fishy flavors and tastes "off". Meanwhile the fish is suffused with that delicious, salty, fatty pork flavor!

Halloween night we tucked into some pumpkin soup, a now fairly traditional meal that is served at some point during this week. I roast the pumpkin for a deeper, sweeter flavor and add buckets of sage. I’ve done any number of condiments with this from chili oil, to parmigiano, to pecorino, and all are good compliments. I even made it Spanish-style once and added some pureed roasted peppers and a good jot of pimenton over the top. We had a similar soup, again at Cibreo, and this was probably the standout dish, quality-wise, from that meal. (The other standout, for other reasons, would be the roasted chicken head that came with the stuffed neck I ordered). So that concludes Tuscany. I again wish the weather had been a little more cooperative, and in fact once again the weather reports show some unseasonably warm weather possibly heading our way by week’s end (though Halloween was appropriately blustery and bleak). Too, I feel that I blundered some key dishes on the way and so that added to some frustrations, though I was pleased with the final group of meals we capped the month with. Two arch-Tuscan items I didn’t get to make but would have given just one more weekend: ribollita, the famous minestrone that is further fortified with bread and served in varying degrees of thickness. Truth be told, though, that damned pappa al pomodoro soup I made earlier in the month made for two weeks worth of lunches and just kept regenerating no matter how much we ate, so I was leery of another bread-based soup. The other item was arrista, a bone-in pork roast, very simply seasoned when compared to porchetta.

Sunday night was the foray into game I had hinted at wanting to do at the start of the month. It was based on descriptions glimpsed on various menus when we were strolling around San Gimagnano. We started with bruschetta e lardo, the cured fat in question having been taken back with us from New York last weekend. I chopped a good hunk of it up fine in a food processor, then spread it over the hot-off-the-grill bread and it melted right in to create a sweet, rich new layer of decadence. I had a version of this in Florence at Cibreo and this actually brought back memories of that item. The primo was papardelle with a quail ragu. Papardelle is a common pasta pairing for a game ragu of some sort or another in Tuscany, most typically boar, hare, or duck. I’ve done a duck version of this before and found that it got lost in all the big flavors of the dish (besides the added expense of having to buy and break down several ducks since duck legs aren’t so commonly available in Dallas). Of all the game birds I can easily get to, I feel that quail has a most distinctive flavor and decided to make a ragu of them based on a secondo recipe for roasted quails and tarragon from Pino Luongo’s A Tuscan in the Kitchen cookbook. I browned the quail off and then simmered them with white wine and stock until they were off-the-bone tender, then shredded the meat up and tossed it back in the pot with some tarragon. (Tarragon is actually a very common herb in Tuscany and Luongo relates that it's virtually a weed since it grows everywhere). Very distinctive, earthy, autumnal dish. The secondo was grilled boar chops with a chocolate-chianti sauce. I had mentioned that the Central Market (a gourmet, Texas-only chain similar to Whole Foods) nearest me carried boar last fall but they didn’t sell well. When talking to the butcher there, he revealed that another one, closer to downtown, did carry them. I called to confirm this, then headed off Saturday. Naturally I get there and nobody knew what I was talking about. I nearly had a nervous breakdown (oh what I do for my food!) but after insisting that they keep checking they finally dug some up. On the plus side, for all my stress, I did see those lovely little clams at the neighboring seafood stand and snapped those up for that night’s dinner. So I was going to marinate the boar chops in red wine, rosemary and juniper berries as Luongo recommends to do with all game. But then I decided I wanted the pure taste of the game to come through, which was in itself only a surface rationalization since I realized when I got home that I was out of juniper and didn’t want to go back out. So I seasoned ‘em and tossed them on the grill, then served a reduction of chianti, stock, cinnamon, and rosemary with bitter chocolate stirred in at the last minute. The boar was pretty good, different-tasting, a more rich note to it, and certainly not the fiasco that the attempt at rabbit was. Dessert was a Florentine apple tart from Mario’s show which he says in similar to the clafoute (sp?) technique. I’m not familiar with what that technique is but you basically layer fruit on the bottom of a dish, then spoon a leavened, sweetened batter over the top and pop it in the oven. A nice capper for the meal. I just recently realized, quite wistfully, that I didn’t have any vin santo to go with the meals this month, and here in particular it would have been a fine way to end the meal.

Panforte, take two. This time I used Divina's Recipe that she so generously provided. I heated the honey and sugar in the microwave so it wouldn’t seize, and baked it much less than I did the first time out. And I was well pleased with the results. Moist, intense, flavorful, no bitterness, and not at all hard. Thanks Divina, Anzu, and Pan for all the tips!

A Farewell to Tuscany weekend. Saturday night we had a Tuscan seafood sweep, dictated largely by the market, and inspired by recipes from my various Tuscan cookbooks. We started with shrimp in arugula sauce, based on Giuliano Bugiali’s Foods of Tuscany cookbook. The shrimp are steamed, peeled, then steeped in a marinade of pureed arugula, some of the shrimp’s cooking water, lemon juice, and olive oil for a few hours. Serve with bread to mop up all the marinade. We then continued with a spicy clam soup. For maybe the third time ever, my local market on this day was carrying very tiny clams, similar in size to cockles or vongole verace. They even made that nice tinkley glass-like sound stirring them around! Last week when we went to New York, we ate at Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant Babbo and had their steamed cockles in tomato broth. This was an attempt at a recreation, though I didn’t get anywhere close to the intense, tomato flavor that Batali’s dish has to it. Also, interestingly, I cooked it in a pot I normally cook our oatmeal in. I buy steel-cut oats and then cook them very slowly with a few cinnamon sticks overnight in a low oven. So despite being well-cleaned out, the pot had apparently, tagine-like, absorbed the cinnamon flavors and gave it up back into the dish. Not entirely unpleasant, either, but certainly unexpected. I got flashbacks from Sicily cooking! We finished with roasted snapper with potatoes and tomatoes.

Spec's does carry them, and a good deal cheaper than at Jimmy's.

Wow, that was fast. They were my go-to for anchovies as well. And their wine selection was always impressive, even more so for being all Italian. Very exciting!

There's a good dose of speculation in what I'm saying about the salumis, mind. Though I'm pretty sure on the whole prosciutto/100 days extra thing; I just can't remember where I heard it. And speculation again, maybe one way around the preservative issue was then to require the longer initial cure?

Previously, I've discussed my favorite way of cooking vegetables, learned from Mario Batali and Faith Willinger: braise it slowly in olive oil, an aromatic, and chilies, then finish with mint. This works not just as a contorno, but is also an excellent condimento for pasta. So, last night, we had spicy spaghetti with pumpkin. In this Batali recipe, you caramelize some onions and chilies, add the pumpkin and get them browning as well and cook until they are softened through (I add water and cook it off). Toss with spaghetti, mint, and pecorino, the key in these kinds of pasta dishes. Again, I can't emphasize enough how pure and sweet the vegetables emerge from this process. Try it, if you haven't already.

I'm thinking maybe something to do with likelihood of spoilage or bacterial infection? As in, if it's been in a cure for 300 days it has a 2% chance of spoilage or infestation but at 400 days it's .05% or whatever . . . figures are obviously made up on my end, of course. Or maybe it has to do with how well the U.S. felt that it would withstand shipping.

I think that's because of the longer cure, right? Sits longer in the salt and takes on a more assertive flavor.

We get that here, but it's obviously nowhere close to as fresh and I found it indistinguishable from ricotta salata at that point. We had "pork jerky" in Rome that was rubbed with chilies. Really good stuff; lasted us the rest of the trip.

Actually I am getting a little anxious about it ending. It's been my main, everpresent project all year and I don't know how to occupy my time afterwards. How will I call attention to myself? I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable about other cuisines and cultures so it'd be a while before I attempted others. I have some ideas, and actually I probably will do a little sabbatical afterwards and let my wife cook (and get us on a diet!). That said though, yes, I'm planning quite the blowout the next couple of months.