albiston

Just wondering: is this cook-off limited to US style burgers and/or meat loaves, or are other recipes acceptable? It's just that I have this very intriguing Neapolitan recipe I never tried but which "I''ve always wanted to make at home", and it seems a perfect meeting point between burger and meat loaf .

How much time do you have for the cooking? Consider that you might nedd 3-4 hours for most classic meat braise fillings. Another possibility would be vegetable or cheese filled pasta. The filling takes much less time and if you absolutely want meat with that you can, especially with the vegetable ones, serve that as a ragout style sauce for the pasta. For example you could prepare artichoke ravioli with a mint flavored lamb ragout. Another idea would be some sort of roast in porchetta: that is with a filling of garlic, rosemary and fennel seeds. The classic porchetta is made with a whole partially deboned suckling pig but I guess that would be unpractical in a home kitchen. You could use a (boned) pork loin, possibly with the skin till on and wrap it around the filling. Otherwise rabbit works great, if you and your guests eat it, and duck can be nice too.

Jack, great to be back in Cambridgeshire if only through your blog, especially at this time of the year! I'm really looking forward to the next week. What about smoking some cheese together with the bacon?

Definitely a good point. We definitely did not invent the following and want nothing to do with these: Jello Cheese spray Marmite Tofu Pizza fried in batter Fish fingers Mozzarella that tastes of rubber... wait, we might have invented that Who said we invented everything, huh?

Any unique ingredients, or is it pretty much the same stuff: (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes)? Pretty much the same: those you mention plus zucchini and a good amount of basil at the end. Pizza can have a quite "interesting" meaning in Leccese, unfortunately the situations where you would use the term pizza as food and the other one are so different that you'll hardly get those mixed up... unless you eat pizza during sex that is .

In Naples it is a vegetable stew too, only it is often called cianfotta. Aren't Italian dialects fun ?

Thanks Chris! The cup contained some apple juice for my 3-year old son. No wine for him yet, though he gets a tiny bit diluted in loads of water on special occasions. Since the evening was so warm beer seemed the ideal choice this time. A wine pairing is intriguing though. Whenever I think of chocolate Port is the first thing that comes to mind, but it might overpower the dish. Too much alcohol I think. Still a full bodied red with a pretty high alcohol content might be worth a try, you need structure to balance the rich mole and a bit of sweetens from the alcohol would be good with the light spiciness. As you can imagine I have a soft spot for Italian wines so I was thinking an Amarone della Valpolicella, if you want to splurge, or a Primitivo di Manduria from Puglia. They might work fine. Or even better: an empirical experiment. Port, Amarone and Primitivo side by side paired with mole. Not something I would do if I had to drive home though .

I guess that if I ever had to pick what cook-off the definition was perfect for, mole would have been my choice. It is the ONE recipe I've been wanting to do at home from scratch since ages. And it would have probably stayed so if it hadn't been for these great cook-offs. So Chris, thanks again for coming up with the whole idea. I decided to go with abra's recipe because of her very positive comments, but also because it was the most complicated of the lot linked here and I'm always in for a challenge . I managed to find pretty much every ingredient needed except the mexican sugar, and used a dark cane sugar instead. As tuhallii wrote, the recipe is not as challenging as it seemed and I often enjoy dishes with long cooking times so that was no problem either. Plenty of time to enjoy the nice weather sitting on the balcony and sipping something fresh during pauses. My only "little" mishap was the "I forgot to tighten my blender's lid real tight accident " while preparing the chili puree. My wife is still laughing about that. I would have found it funny too if I hadn't had to scrub the kitchen walls and if I thought that mole splattered t-shirts look fancy . Instead of turkey we went for chicken, cut into pieces, and I tried out chef koo's tip of braising that into the mole which worked great. As sides we had the Chufi's special : guacamole, rice, black beans plus a few pan fried plantain slices, which were a nice addition. Definitely miles from the stuff you get in jars: you have no clue how happy I am that I still had loads of sauce to freeze!

You do get Cassata "gelato" in Italy too, but while this might originate from Sicily as the cake does (not sure about this though) it seems much more popular in regions where the cake is not. As it is, I've seem much more gealto cassata in Northern Italy than in the South.

It's not too difficult to those in Italy so I never made a serious attempt to candy fruit myself. Cherries, pineapple, oranges and citruses can be found almost everywhere. Others, like figs, mandarins, apricots or even better chinotti (the bitter citruis fruits used to make the same named soft drink) often need to be ordered way in advance. That, or you can order from a good s(but expensive) source like Romanengo in Genova, who makes some of the best candied fruits I've ever had. BTW I did not make the cake, it's my younger brother's work.

I understand and upon reflection your definition is definitely more exact, at least historically. The use of lasagne as description for a kind of pasta seems posterior to the mentions of dishes related with today's lasagne. In a sense it is similar to the way the sense of the word tortelli evolved. At first it described only the filling and today it is used for pasta and filling folded in a certain form. I don't know about the rest of the Roman empire, but Italy has quite a wide regional variety of lasagne dishes. Yet that has probably more to do with more recent exchanges of culinary knowledge and recipes, so your point remains valid. I see what you mean. Certainly a good point which makes sense to me. no worries. i trust your opinion. Thanks, I'll sleep better after this . That's a really intriguing question and one I've often wondered about myself. It seems that the dishes of old were probably baked and dressed flatbreads, like the testaroli Adam mentions, or consisted of sheets of fried dough, as described in Clifford Wright's article. Interestingly there are still examples of this: ciceri e tria is pasta dish from Puglia where the pasta is in part boiled and in part fried. When did it change? My thought (a bit far-fetched maybe) is that we have to look at the Arabs again: their dried pasta needed to be boiled in a liquid to become palatable again. And so it would be cooked in milk, broth or water . Maybe fresh pasta started getting prepared with the cooking method for dried pasta as the latter spread.

You mean like this home made one? (sorry for the bad picture quality: bad light conditions and ancient digital camera are a deadly mix)

Cy, it sounds like you had a great trip and the list is impressive. Clearly I do have a few questions. After all a few of us have been eagerly waiting for you to get back! You say you were disappointed from Da Vittorio and dal Pescatore also seems to not have completely satisfied you. Any particular reason for that? You also have a few "young guns" of Italian cuisine there: Calandre, Arquade, Villa Crespi. How did you find them? Did you get the impression that there's a common thread uniting the cuisine of these three? And last but not least:please tell us the story of the Metropole Hotel, I'd love to hear that .

Adam, what I've read is similar to what you write above. After all the Romans took loads of inspirations from Greek culture. My understanding though was that what the Greek called lagana is not exactly what the Romans ate under the name laganum, but it could just be a wild theory. And yes, lasanum should mean exactly that. Absolutely, I'm really enjoying this . I definitely agree with the similarity of old lasagna and testaroli, but I didn't mean to infer that the Roman laganum is the only ancestor of modern day lasagne (and tagliatelle, pappardelle and co.). The original model might probably be Greek and I would imagine Roman laganum developed from that. My point is that soft wheat pasta dishes like lasagne and pappardelle have in turn evolved from the Roman dish.

That's an answer I'd be very interested in knowing too. BTW just to avoid misunderstandings I should add that I'm not claiming in any way that China did not evolve noodles on its own (or through the influence of neighboring cultures). I think there are enough examples out there to see that certain dishes have evolved in independent ways in different places, and noodles are clearly one of these. Since the title of the thread mentions pasta expressly, my point should only be taken in regards to Italy.

I don't mind being called biased, though I honestly think I'm much less than most other Italians I know when it comes to Italian cuisine. And, well, you can trust my opinion or not. I might take that somewhat personally , but that's not the point. Since you're referring to this previous thread, and what I wrote there, let me go into more detail. You're mistaken when you imply that only Italians claim that pasta was around during Roman times. First of all, it is not an exact statement and not what I claimed. To discuss this issue one has to separate fresh pasta made with soft flour and dried one made with durum wheat. What is known from Latin sources (Apicius and others) is that Romans had a product called laganum, from which probably the word lasagne comes from. There are differing opinions regarding the question if this preparation resembled today's lasagne in any way, though there are good reasons to believe that the soft flour pasta we eat now descends from that. If we talk about dry hard wheat pasta, then the Romans have nothing to do with that (and I cannot recall anyone claiming this on these forums). Most scholarly books and papers I have read point to an Northern African/Arabic origin. And no, it's not only Italians. You should take a look at this extremely thorough and informative article from US author Clifford Wright. As you will notice he makes a very strong point for this claim. Going back to the Chinese connection, Wright dismisses it explaining that (emphasis added): I think we can agree that if Marco Polo described the wheat products he encountered with Italian names that were well established by the time, those products must have been known in Italy before his voyage.

Artichokes: as a kid I found they had a really weird sweet taste. Admittedly my dislike also had to do with my mother (sorry mom!) leaving plenty of hard "leaves" on the choke. There must be a good reason why chewing artichokes is not as popular as say chewing tobacco . Also lamb, for pretty much the same reasons Genny mentioned. Over twenty years later tagliatelle with a nice lamb and artichoke ragout is one of the dishes I prepare when I want to give myself a treat .

The only cassata I knew before reading this was the Sicilian original John mentioned before. It's comforting to know that there's always something to learn here on the eGullet forums . I was wondering if anyone has a picture (or a link to a picture) of this Cleveland Cassata: i'd be curious to see how it looks like.

That was quite common up to a few decades ago in the area south of Siena in Tuscany (the Crete Senesi) to produce the local Pecorino. Nowadays it's used only by the hardcore traditionalist cheesemakers, which I personally find a pity because it gives ewe's milk cheeses a much smoother taste compared to kid rennet.

Since this was raised here as an aside....My understanding has always been that pasta was introduced to China by Marco Polo. Some however insist that Marco Polo brought it back to Italy from China. Does anyone have a definitive answer to this burning question? Millions of Italians and billions of Chinese are potentially interested. ← You might want to take a look at this thread in the Middle East and Africa forum. There's lots of good information there, plenty I didn't know too . That's what happens when you're too busy showing off in the Tag Team foodblog thread

Definitely agree. "Fusion" was always there and always will be: just read a history of ancient Roman cuisine to see how far back that can go (and it probably goes even further back than that). On the other hand, do whatever you like just as long as it isn't forced and done just for the sake of showing how wildly creative a chef can be. If it works tastewise, it's fine by me. Psss... BTW the Chinese have nothing to do with spaghetti: fresh pasta was known since the Roman times and it's the Arabs that imported dried pasta to Sicily

Never heard anyone call the dish "parmesan" to be honest. It might be so in a specific dialect, but none that I know of I must admit. BTW regarding the zucchini variation: I like the eggplant version better, but if you have zucchini that actually taste of something it's a nice change. I perfectly know what you mean with the "for later" story . For the parmigiana I had the stalks where coated in batter and fried. Another nice thing to do with the stalks is to braise them like you would do with Belgian endive. OK it doesn't taste of much, but I hate to throw stuff away. BTW, do you always coat the eggplant with batter? That's what I do too, at least when my wife lets me , but I know of many who don't (my mom for one). I was just wondering what other people do.

And especially no ferrets down anyone's pants!

The artichoke parmigiana sounds incredibly inviting. That's one parmigiana twist I hadn't tried yet. I've had the classic zucchini one and one with chard stems before, both also delicious. So I'm wondering: any other takes on the dish out there?

Here. Unfortunately it was over ten years ago while visiting the winery, so it was only his "normal" wines. Pretty impressive stuff all the same, though I'd be very curious to try Gravner's new experiments. (Edited to remove a silly mistake of mine: mixed up Kante, also from the same region, and Gravner.)