Kevin72

Same body of text, just a new intro by a different author.

Yes, I have the paperback version. I think that's the only one available anymore . . . ? Root's book is fast becoming my go-to recommendation for anyone looking to really get in-depth on Italian cuisine. My one caveat continues to be that it is somewhat dated and it is likely he either didn't entirely get ingredients in some dishes right or took a shortcut to explaining them to American audiences who would have been completely unfamiliar with the concepts at the time (1971).

This is great, and, as someone pointed out upthread, a natural move for her as a protege of Julia Childs'. Now if someone could just put a bug in Mario's ear . . .

It's very complicated. T. monococcum (=piccolo farro = "einkorn"), the most "primitive," is diploid. T. dicoccum a.k.a. T. turgidum subsp. dicoccum (=farro medio = emmer) is tetraploid (i.e., the offspring of T. monococcum and a wild relative with a different genome). T. spelta a.k.a. T. aestivum var. spelta (=gran farro = spelt) is hexaploid (i.e., emmer plus a third genome from a different wild grass). You are unlikely to see piccolo farro, so you will have one of the other two or a mixture even. At the end of the day it most likley doesn't matter too much. But to in case you are ever in Montana "Emmers marketed and grown in Montana and North Dakota are often mistakenly referred to as spring spelt.". So in the USA real emmer non-spelt farro medio could infat be sold as "Spelt". ← Well, that REALLY cleared things up.

Indeed it was. I'm guessing there's a difference between pearled and regular farro? This did taste alo like barley, no nutty flavor that farro is supposed to have. I really missed the boat on regional ingredients this month, didn't I? Ah. Did not know that; I always assumed that the asciutta was referring to the fact that it was sold dried, not fresh. Finish your trip thread!

By the way, the soup above was made with farro, not spelt. Get those two mixed up all the time.

The final meal for this month was a last-minute addition based on stuff we had on hand and a few intriguing descriptions in Waverly Root’s Foods of Italy chapter on Le Marche: Is the asciutta part of the name right? Is it a dried pasta? I rolled it out and used it fresh. The condimento was a ragu of sausage, rosemary, and ginger. The ginger flavor really perfumed the dish well. The pasta puffed up beautifully the second it hit the water, but then collapsed upon further cooking. Not at all al dente either, but it gave up a lot of starch, which leant a creamy flavor and texture to the whole dish. Culinaria: Italy gives a completely different recipe than either of the two mentioned above involving bechamel, marsala, and shaved truffles. So I pounded some beef flat and rolled it around a slice of ham, sautéed mushrooms, and spinach, then browned them off and braised them with white wine. The contorno was grilled zucchini. That caps off Umbria and Le Marche. This month went very quickly and I feel like I didn’t quite get in one more Umbrian dish (probably all this porchetta talk). And as with Abruzzo, I didn’t give desserts from these regions their full due. Wish the weather had cooperated more.

Only two more months for us down here! I pretty much agree, though I did have relatively good luck with the fresh kind packaged with rice. Granted I've never had a this-was-just-in-the-ground-two-hours-ago truffle experience, but it did make much more of a pronounced flavor. What's the tartuffi funghi mix you're referring to and where can I get it? In a similar vein, that truffle "salsa" my parents brought back for me was much more flavorful than the canned kind.

Onion and pancetta simmered together for the base. I used some homemade broth/stock for the liquid. A nice dusting of parm and olive oil to serve. As della Croce notes, the escarole and the sweet pumpkin (red kuri) play very nicely off each other and the farro adds a great earthy depth to the whole thing.

Similar to what chefboy said, I'd reccomend searing them in a very hot pan with olive oil. They really open up that way. They do tend to be pretty dirty, particularly in the center or under the folds; I use a wet paper towel and give them a good scrub.

Fresh pasta, esp. tagliatelle or papardelle, with wild mushrooms (chaunterelle, lobster, or money permitting, porcini). Savory Mushroom Tarte from Seasons of the Italian Kitchen by Diane Darrow and Tom Maresca. I've just gotten into marinating shitake (shiitake? shitaake?) mushrooms in olive oil for about an hour, then tossing 'em on the grill. And, I must again rant: my biggest pet peeve is seeing a "wild mushroom" dish on a restaurant menu and it winds up being cremini or portabello . . .

Truffle fest! No single item represents the reverence for terroir and localized cooking that the Umbrians are famed for than their black truffles. Waverly Root even gives Umbria’s truffles the nod over the white truffles of Piemonte. I ordered a small jar off of Amazon’s new gourmet website after being clued into it by a link from Adam several months back. Quite an amazing selection. I got four in a jar; I’d say they’d been soaked or preserved somehow initially but there was no liquid in the jar itself. They tasted fairly salty right out of the jar; I had to give them a good rinse. Unfortunately afterwards they didn’t taste like too much to me. Our Central Market here does, occasionally, break out fresh truffles resting in rice, but not until much later in the fall, if in fact they do that at all. To amplify the flavors, I also had a jar of truffle “salsa” my parents brought back with them from their own Italy trip. It contained truffles, regular white mushrooms, black olives, and garlic, but kicked up an amazing and unmistakable truffle aroma when heated. Antipasto: Truffles with scrambled eggs. Primo: Spaghetti with the aforementioned truffle “salsa”, along with more garlic, anchovies, and a whole truffle pounded into a paste in a mortar. Secondo: Trout stuffed with truffles and baked. Dolce: Chocolate truffle gelato. Comments on all the dishes were that the truffles made everything seem more elegant and yet earthy and comforting all at once. With the exception of the fish, you couldn’t necessarily point to the truffles’ flavor on their own, but they did lend something more to the dishes than the sum of their parts.

Saturday was supposed to herald the arrival of cooler weather with hurricane Rita passing by, but it went further east, resulting in howling winds and overcast skies but no break in our month-long drought. Sunday it was 98F! How sad is that that we have to rely on a hurricane to bring us rain, and even then it doesn’t work out? Nevertheless, I can’t wait around forever for soup weather to get here, so Saturday night I made another batch of soup, this time using another famous Umbrian product, spelt. We actually bought this on our trip to Italy last spring. This was a spelt, pumpkin, and escarole soup from Julia della Croce’s Umbria. Served it with some crusty homemade rolls, a nice bottle of Orvieto, and a salad, and watched some sorta creepy movies while the wind rattled outside. Seriously though. Needs to get cooler soon.

As promised earlier, a pic of our newly-painted dining room. Any compliments should be directed to my wife, the overseer of the project, patience of a saint when I stomped out numerous times, and eye for detail that brought everything together. Oh, and she did probably 70% of the work, too.

Oops! Actually, upon closer inspection, and after reading the Rome chapter, he only really states that Le Marche claims to have originated porchetta, but he leans more towards it being of Roman orgins; as in, somewhere in Lazio.

Not so much cook it down first but cook the watermelon and the cornstarch together to get it to set up.

Oooh, I'm upset Behemoth. You didn't follow my Sicily cooking very closely, did you? The recipe I used was from Victoria Granof's Sweet Sicily, and the thickening agent was cornstarch. I want to say I added more than the recipe called for and "cooked" it longer as well. You may need to reheat it and stir in more cornstarch.

Off to a great start! No herbs in the pepper sauce then? Pecorino? Mint? How spicy are the peppers?

Your honor, I would like to submit "No Chains" (i.e., more than three sites) as a rule as well? This should be an interesting thread. You've got courage, my friend! Your rules may raise some hackles though; it seems to be skewing things in favor of Central TX/Austin barbecue styles, particularly the "no sauce" bit. That said, 3 of my top 5 would be Austin-area joints. Some essential reading threads on the Texas Barbecue scene: Texas Gluttony, Road Trip Across Texas: barbecue & more Lockhart TX Barbecue Tex Mex and BBQ in the Dallas Area My top five, in my very limited experience: 1) Kreuz 2) Cooper's in Llano 3) Angelo's in Ft. Worth 4) Salt Lick 5) Goode Co. in Houston Goode Co. was, for the longest time, my favorite, until I started tracking down the pantheon. I went there a few years back and was really disappointed (and sad) about how it didn't measure up any more. Everything seemed really underseasoned. Others who have been recently echo my sentiments as well. But I won't write it off just yet.

Man, what a great year you've had: Tuscany, France, and now Greece? Was Spain this year too?

That's the book I was talking about, yes. I have to agree that those "fizzy wines" make all the sense in the world when you have them with culatello or prosciutto.

Wow. What a noble quest. You really know what you're going there for; kudos. If you can find Italian Food Artisans there's a chapter on its production in there and a place to visit. I had it in Bologna and it was rhapsodic.

Same here. Have you had any of the other game birds that abound there: thrush, wild pigeon, etc? Don't get me wrong, it was still good, perfectly acceptable fare. I have to make fish soup at least once, usually twice, a year, and often have very limited seafood to go by. Just for all the ingredients in there I'd want a more pronounced, distinctive flavor. One of my great regrets of my trips over there is that I've yet to sit down to one of their regional seafood soups, though, and taste it done right. Well, before the opinion on me gets too great around here, I must again stress that I used pre-pitted olives, the real work in that item. Yin and yang. Seems like Umbrian reds were easy to come by a few years ago, now they're nowhere to be found and the Marchese wines are much easier to find. I forget, is Orvieto Umbrian? For some reason I haven't gotten a bottle of that yet. I did get an "Umbrian" red by Vitiano but that stuff is mass-produced and tastes the same for whatever region they're doing (they also do Primitivo from Puglia and a merlot from the Veneto). It's good but lacks that peppery kick to other Umbrian reds (sangiovese) that go so well with their full-flavored food. I did manage to track down a red from Umbria I've enjoyed before; has a rabbit on the label? Guess I should've had that last weekend but I'm saving it for the big Umbrian send-off feast next Sunday. Where did the month go?

Wait, did I somehow miss one of your travellogues?

Ah the joy (and power) of keeping others in suspense . . . Why say what regions are left now when I can enjoy the outcry at the left out regions at the end of the year?