albiston

Friday evening: a plate of assorted antipasti to nibble while enjoying the nice weather outside. grilled aubergines marinated in balsamico and basil, artichokes fried in beer batter, Maroccan cured black olives and pan fried smoked scamorza cheese "cutlets", followed by a simple green salad. Yesterday, a simple dish of spaghetti with baby calamari sauce, enjoyed sipping a nice Alsace Pinot Blanc.

Wow! Francesco, or Ciccio, Sultano is considered one of the best young chefs in Italy, by some even THE best. Kudos for the guys at Ital.cook for getting him to do the Sicily lesson. What I find even more interesting is that he thought you really classic Sicilian dishes though his own cuisine is definitely creative albeit rooted in the local classics. And who would you be? The one choking the poor guy ?

It depends on what kind of chefs they are and where they work . BTW, if you want to read a modernized recipe for ragu Bolognese take a look at this description from chef Igles Corelli's chat in the Italy forum a while back.

Stimulated by this discussion I leafed through an Italian cookbook on Emilia Romagna's cuisine I had bought a few months ago but did not have a chance to read yet, "La Cucina dell'Emilia Romagna" from Alessandro Molinari Pradelli edited by Newton Compton. (Newton Compton's Regional Cuisine editions are some of the best Italian sources when it comes to traditional recipes IMO.) Reading the recipe for ragu I stumbled upon this closing line: It should make everyone happy, I guess .

I agree with Sam. No chicken or chicken liver in classical ragu Bolognese. Although I have lived most of my adult life in Naples, coming from a family which is 3/4 from Emilia Romagna, I've had more than a share of ragu recipes and I must admit I've never heard anyone mention liver for the classic sauce. We've argued on practically every other ingredient in the recipe and their doses though, so maybe I should introduce liver as a topic of conversation for our next family meeting. That should be fun . There actually is a coded Bolognese ragu recipe from the Italian Culinary Accademy, which calls only for beef and pancetta as meats, something which sounds quite wrong to most of the people I know in Bologna. As it is, they use two or three kinds of meats (pork, beef and even veal), apart pancetta, to make their ragu. Clearly the mere concept of coding a sauce like Bolognese is risky since such a dish is family cooking: every home in Bologna probably has a different recipe which could be called "the right one". So I'd say that Bolognese with liver is not the way most people would go but I wouldn't be surprised to find some people doing so. Using stock sounds a bit unusual to me too, but I know it is not uncommon. I've personaly learned to cook bolognese using mainly milk instead of stock, so maybe Sam is referring to this.

As a backup option, once you move to Germany, you might want to consider Mex Al. I just found out about them and will definitely give them a try since the four hours drive to Munich is slightly too much only to get chiles . Seems I'll be joining the fun after all, without transatlantic chile shipments being needed. I'm only sorry for your relative Nadia, seems she'll never get that CD . But thanks again for the extremely kind offer.

Ditto here, or better:does it make sense to look for substitutes? I've been dying to make mole poblano from scratch for ages but I never dared to because of the difficulty in finding the right ingredients. I can get poblanos without any problem, mulatos maybe, but I've never seen pasilla on sale around here. Any suggestions?

Veronelli (who passed away last year) and Vissani, both men of strong character, had a egregious fight two-three years ago about frying oil, widely reported by the Italian press. Veronelli suporting the olive oil thesis and Vissani suggesting sunflower oil as a much better choice. I'm not sure if this was the main reason, but it could be a good explanation for this.

halalsushi, you might want to have a look at this thread on the Middle East and Africa board. I think you'll find quite a bit of information there.

Ed, you can find plenty of tips for Piemonte searching the olde rposts in this forum. Among the threads started in the last year or so you might want to have a look at this thread and its close relative . Have fun.

Dana, there is an Italian version of the 1984 edition. Bibliotheca Culinaria, an Italian gastronomy book reseller has it in their online catalogue here

Michael, very nice pizza. Only one correction, if I may. What you have there is pizza al taglio for which Rome is famous. Neapolitan pizza is quite different: MobyP posted a few good examples some time ago. In Naples you cannot get pizza al taglio as delicious as the one you get in Rome.

For all those interest, I would suggest you give a look at Seth's comments to his Roman experience, which have been moved here.

Sam, that's probably my favourite among the beautifull array of pizzas you baked. Just wondering what ramps are. Are they in any way related to mustard greens? I ask because your pizza reminds me of "pizza carrettiera" as it is often called in Naples, i.e. tomato-less pizza topped with sausage and friarielli, the somewhat piquant Neapolitan mustard greens.

A call for food porn if I ever read one .

Rachel, I'll add a few things to what Sam already said. Bread flour as you know it in the States was pretty much unknown in Italy till after WWII, so all traditional Italian breads (except those using semolina or other flours) where made with relatively soft flour. I made the same assumption regarding bread flour, but often noticed that Italian pizzaioli advise against using it even if it is quite easily available today. I've read and asked around a bit to understand the reasons of this preference. Essentially it is not a problem of low vs. high protein flour rather the dough should be prepared according to certain standards and ripened enough to have the proper character and be easily digested. Without going into the details (which I still haven't completely researched) the real problem of strong bread flours is that they give you the chance to obtain a dough with the proper mechanical characteristics, because of the higher gluten content, using quick 2-3 hour rises with larger (compared to the standard amounts used) amounts of yeast, something that cannot be done with softer flours which necessarily need longer times. This might seem an advantage at first sight, but what one gains in speed is lost in "lightness" of the dough, which in turn is connected to ripening. According to what I've read, soft flour needs between 12 and 36 hours of slow rise to reach the proper stage, dough made with strong bread flour on the other hand need at least 24 and up to 72 hours. Furthermore, dough made with more yeast tend to have a more compact crumb instead of the irregular and large holes you see in proper Neapolitan pizza crusts. I never tried both flours side by side, but it would be worth a go. Next time I make pizza, maybe. Yeah yeah yeah, Usually I go for the Margherita kind, but there is no way I'm posting a photo after you, man Maybe I will provide an example of a few wonderful German versions, such as, for example, tunafish with hard boiled eggs and sweet mustard sauce, chicken with sweet indian curry sauce pizza, or the ever popular ham, pineapple and corn niblets The only problem is, somone would actually have to eat the thing. ← Nadia, where the hell did you go for pizza in Germany ? OK, the pineapple, ham and niblets ones is a classic, which I carefully avoid. I'm allergic to pineapple on pizza: makes me hydrophobic . But the tuna, mustard and eggs one? Maybe you should give it a go, at least it would quench my thirst for pizza-kitsch. Actually the more I think about it... would you post that margherita, please? Edited to add: just noticed you did after posting. Looks really good. As Sam said, you might want to try adding the prosciutto to the pizza after it's baked. Tastes better IMO.

Jason (and Susan, Patrick), thank you for being so kind . Neapolitan and American pizza have so many differences that they shouldn't be compared, I think. I like both though I won't hide I prefer the Neapolitan one, but I'm Italian after all . I really hope I didn't put anyone's pizza to shame: I find everyon has done a great job. All the pizzas I've seen in this thread up to now are extremely mouthwatering.

After two days of stuffing my (e)Gullet full of pizza, here's my contribution. On my last visit to Italy I brought back some flour expressly for pizza. I knew there was a reason to save it for a special occasion: an eGullet cook-off! The flour is a relatively soft one, only 10.5% protein content, as tradition wants. My intention was to try and reproduce a classical Neapolitan style pizza at home, using a few tricks I learned through experience and tips from friends who are pizzaioli. I think the results are not too far away from the original; what's really lacks is a wood-burning oven! Until I manage to convince my wife that, 1) a wood-burning pizza oven is an essential item for our baking needs, and 2) that we need therefore to move to a house with a garden in order to be able to build one there, I guess I'll have to stick to my old but reliable electric oven. There are a few basic things that mark Neapolitan pizza in comparison to most of the ones I've seen in this thread up to now, so I'll just point them out to explain why I did a few things the way I did. - While I sometimes amuse myself creating baroque pizzas with rich toppings, in Naples traditional toppings are simple, even minimalist. Because of this I've made a classic margherita and a one with grilled aubergines. - Mozzarella should melt but not brown. Easier to say than to do in a domestic oven: to overcome this I always bake my pizzas without cheese for the first few minutes and then add the cheese. - Neapolitan pizza should always have cornicione a rim of puffed up dough which should ideally be almost hollow. To get this you really need to work with a very moist dough; I'm close but not exactly there. To make my dough I used the classic recipe as a guideline, but modified taking inspiration from a method I found on an Italian food forum for pizza al taglio, the rectangular pan pizza typical of Rome. The original recipe (qsomewhat different) was developed by a cook-pizzaiolo called Gabriele Bonci, who's considered a bit of a pizza guru. I first made a rather fluid starter which was left to rise 2 hours at room temperature and the 20 in the fridge. 550 g lukewarm water 400 g pizza flour 1/4 tsp dried yeast The followoing day I added 600 g pizza flour 125 g water 1 1/2 tsp fine sea salt and kneaded the finished dough for about 20 minutes in my mixer set at the lowest setting. Pizza flour needs a rather long time to both hydrate properly and to fully develop the gluten. Once the dough passed the windowpane test it was left to rise 2 hours at room temperature plus 10 in the fridge, after which it had nicely doubled in size. I then punched it down, split it in 4 pieces, the so called panetti each to be used for an individual pizza, and let them rise in the fridge for another 12 hours. To shape the pizzas and get the cornicione you need to leave the dough thicker on the rim. Since I can't shape the pizzas with the wrist work the pizzaioli use I use a trick which I think I first read in Peter Rehinardt's "Crust and Crumb", i.e. I pat the dough in a rough circle and then pick it up from the rim and flick it downwards, moving around the rim with every new flick. After a little practice it works very well. As "sauced" I simply used good canned plum tomatoes, finely chopped, sprinkled with salt and a little tasty EV olive oil. I would have loved to use real S.Marzano but found none this time. The mozzarella was cut a day ahead and left to drain in a sieve overnight in the fridge. The aubergine margherita before going into the oven, cheese-less. Finished, with a couple of basil leaves added for decoration and a little aroma. The basil should actually go on the pizza before baking but I find it always bakes too log in a home oven, loosing it's nice fresh smell, so I compromise. I left the cornicione too thick, but nobody complained . The margherita. I was quite happy about the pizzas: while fully baked they didn't get too crisp even in the thinnest spots, and the cornicione puffed up nicely and was almost as it should be. The dough came out with a nice flavor of its own. It doesn't beat sourdough pizza though. I had one dough ball left today, but didn't exactly feel like pizza again. So I decided to recycle the dough to make panuozzi a sort of pizza dough panini created in Gragnano (a town on the slopes of mount Vesuvius) exactly for this reason. The dough is shaped into a long oval which is then baked till it just puffs up. At this point it is split open and stuffed with whatever one fancies. I had a little mozzarella and aubergines left from the previous evening, and added some prosciutto to that, closed the panuozzo and baked it till the cheese melted. I waited a tad too long (telephone salespeople be damned) so the top became too crunchy. Quite palatable all the same .

Chef koo, as much as I consider Larousse Gastronomique a great reference for French cuisine, I cannot help feel the urge to rip the book apart whenever I look up anything Italian in it. Most of the entries are superficial and sometimes downright wrong. There's better references for Italian cuisine out there, starting with Marcella Hazan's books. My comment on the anchovies in the sauce is only limited to the classical Neapolitan recipe, not to pizza in general, since this is a dish that has changed as it moved. If you want to read a thorough article on pizza Napoletana, with a few recipes, have a look at this one from Wine News magazine. There's a lot of info and both classical recipes (look at the Pizza Margherita Extra DOC one, ) and newer ones.

'Nduja. Great on bread for breakfast if you have a hangover .

Absolutely agree, basil and Parm do not share any notes at all. What I meant to say is that pesto is a sauce based mainly on basil, olive oil and garlic though, and those are the flavours you should notice first; parmesan and/or pecorino, pine nuts and eventually prescinseua (a clotted milk product used in some Ligurian recipes) should work as background melody. If the cheese (any of them) is less then adequate or if you use old pine nuts you certainly do notice. Yet, as you can read from my and Busboy's messages above, I think we've been talking about different products here. I'm only arguing that a good young DOP (protected denominatgion of origin) Parmigiano Reggiano is enough for pesto. No need to use that expensive back of the refrigerator aged stuff Busboy has been saving for special occasions .

The recipe you post is identical to a contemporary Algerian one. I suppose we can ask the question if such dishes are found in the rest of Italy. ← Agrodolce is quite common in Italian cuisine especially. Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, in their book "Italian cuisine, a cultural history", describe two periods where sweet and sour marked the tastes of the times. Initially, starting from the Roman times, agrodolce meant strictly dishes with vinegar and honey, a combination that remained very popular up to the middle ages. According to the two authors the Arabs succesively introduced a more delicate version of agrodolce, based on citrus fruits and cane sugar, that established itself in Sicily and Andalusia first and then spread from there. I personally cannot help notice that a Sicilian dish like "sarde a beccafico" (stuffed sardines), is made with vinegar in Catania and with lemon (and sometimes orange) in Palermo, where the Arab influence was stronger.

Only those who have "chef" in their nickname The origins of cannelloni are much disputed. Piemonte is one of the regions who claims to have invented these. According to Italian Author Angelo Martelli they were invented in Amalfi, others claim they come from Sicily, without forgetting Emilia Romagan as candidate. I have no firm opinion, as long as it tastes good . The interesting result of the dispute above is that you can find quite a few different cannelloni recipes in the various Italian regional cuisines. The recipe you posted above, for example, has a definite touch of Emilia Romagna to it.

I've seen at least two receipes for amatriciana sauce that uses onions. These may not be true to the origins though. Have you checked with any other sources than Downie on this? Be careful young Jedi . Amatrician/Matriciana is one of those topics people could argue forever upon. Take a few Italian foodies, lock them in a room and ask them to discuss their version of Amatriciana and come back a six hours later... they'd still be arguing , and that only if they haven't stabbed each other to death first. I'll try to sum up what I know without taking parts (which I secretly do ). Amatriciana comes originally from the city of Amatrice, in Latium today, but formerly belonging to Abruzzi. The original dish was simply pasta (spaghetti or penne, definitely not bucatini), guanciale and pecorino, eventually with a little dried chili pepper. The introduction of tomatoes seems quite recent since regional recipes collections, like Anna Gosetti della Salda's "Le ricette regionali Italiane" still has a white Amatriciana recipe. That said today the version with tomatoes is called Amatriciana while the white one is usually called Gricia. The change from "purist" Amatriciana to the version with onions and also to the name Matriciana happened in Rome, where quite a few people from Amatrice had moved to right after the WWII. Apart onions, and occasionally garlic, the recipe also included a dash of white wine or even vinegar in some versions, like the famous one from the late Italian actor Aldo Fabbrizi, brother of Lella Fabbrizi, the original chef/owner of the restaurant "Da Sora Lella" on the Tiberine island in Rome. Some people even argue that the version with tomatoes originated in Rome and moved back to Amatrice. Almost all recipes I've seen on saltimbocca alla romana uses marsala. Why, one might ask, if a true roman version uses white wine? ← Good question, I can only agree with calimero that the Roman recipes I have (my mom's too, and she's a born and raised Roman) call for "vino dei castelli", i.e. whites form the Castelli Romani area like Frascati, Est!Est!!Est!!! and similar. One reason I could think of for the marsala substitution is that Frascati used to be mainly amabile, i.e. a wine with a certain residual sweetness, in the past, less so today. So maybe the Marsala just tries to simulate that sweet note.

As a Neapolitan myself I would really like to have a few words with your teacher , quite a lot there I don't agree upon. Definitely not. Neapolitan pizza crust is just flour, water, salt and yeast (eventually sourdough). All the pizzerias I personally know in Naples use such a dough with slight changes in water percentages and rising times, which are usually quite long. No oil, milk, soy flour or stuff like that. And since there's no oil in there it is not a focaccia dough. Absolutely agree on this one. Especially when baking in a home oven that takes longer than the traditional wood fired brick oven. It's important to spread the sauce really thin though. This is the first time I hear such a thing. In Naples you don't even use a sauce per se, just chopped canned tomatoes. I personally find it makes little sense: if I'm topping my pizza with grilled vegetables or meats I wouldn't really like to taste anchovies there. I'll leave those, toppings are really a matter of choice. I agree on the raw onion thing though. Yes and no. A nice drizzle of olive oil before the pizza goes into the oven is a must, but too much makes the pizza heavy. I have to admit that this is one of those sentences I've learned to dread. Unless his mom was a "pizzaiola" (pizza baker) then I'm pretty sure there's plenty of better pizzas around. The "like mom didi it" concept is something many Italians believe in, at times with a reason. But remaining stuck with that is IMO a great limit in extending your gastronomic horizons. Definitely count me in on this one, I just bought a special pizza flour last week and was waiting for a good chance to use it. I'll be making the dough tonight so that I can bake on Friday.