Artichokes alla Jewish Ghetto in Rome

[VivreManger]

As the fifty or so of you who looked at my earlier post --

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST...ST&f=3&t=21468&

-- on Carciofi alla Giudia must have quickly realized, there is a lot of arcane mystification in preparing them. Now that I have made them, I see that much of it is needless. They are much easier to make than the cookbooks claim.

Herewith, the results of my first attempt. Sharing the process should encourage others to try so that collectively we can improve the results. Make haste while the baby artichokes flower. Springtime is when they should be made.

This is a dish where ingredients are more important than technique. Of the four recipes I linked on the original post, Claudia Roden alone addressed this, although her claim that only tiny Roman or Spanish can work is too restrictive. In the States right now, good produce stores do sell baby artichokes, from California not Europe -- I presume. So one need not fly to Rome to eat this delicacy.

Baby artichokes obviate the elaborate sculpting repeated in many of these recipes. Furthermore these artichokes are tender enough so you need not bother to remove the fuzzy choke and the inner spiky leaves -- particularly since they are too small and tight to get at the chock without breaking the entire vegetable apart. Instead simply cut off the stem and the outer leaves. Cut off about the uppermost 1/5 of all the other leaves. That should remove the spikes and the toughest parts. The standard advice is to keep them in acidulated water, i.e. mixed with the juice of 2 lemons and the juiced halves so they won't discolor. I did follow that advice, but I wonder if it is necessary since frying changes the color in the end.

By the way it may be that similar results can be produced with full-size artichokes, but they probably would require the kind of painstaking work detailed in the Roden recipe, most notably choke removal, and in Machlin, careful sculpting of the leaves.

After they have been cut up. Do try to open, expand, and slightly flatten the artichokes so the leaves spread out like flower petals. Some of the recipe techniques seem absurd, such as hitting the artichokes against each other like cymbals to open them further. Squishing them slightly with the bottom of your palm -- the chokes, bottom up, leaves down -- on a cutting board, worked quite well. Generous salt and pepper are important. I sprinkled sel de mer and freshly ground black pepper.

Some of the recipes call for 25 minutes and two stages of frying. I did it in about 15 for one stage and I fear that might have been too much for the babies. Ten minutes in rolling, boiling EVOO (actually I cheated since I also had some left over peanut and corn oil as well) should be enough. I did not cover the artichokes in oil. I turned them over once.

The result was a vegetable that looked more like a marigold than chrysanthemum. The leaves tasted like green potato chips. The tiny heart had the consistency of fried clam bellies, but much more delicious. The seven of us scarfed them down.

A few of the leaves were tough, but discarding them was no more annoying than getting rid of a kalamata olive pit.

[Jinmyo]

Good stuff there, VivreManger.

[Craig Camp]

This is just what I discovered about the artichokes in the USA. You have to use the baby ones to get a flavor similar to the Roman artichokes.

[ned]

Tonight I endeavored to make this fabulous dish. I've only eaten it once before and must admit it's become somewhat of a holy grail for me. I had it at the restaurant Gualtieri Marquesi north of Milan. It was a formative gustatory experience. Found the baby chokes at Whole Foods today for a bargain and went for it. I think I had profound success. Here's what happened:

Chokes:

Chokes partly butchered:

Chokes fried once and partly peeled back:

Oil for the boiling (mostly canola part olive):

All done (boiled twice second time around oil at 360 to 380):

[SuzySushi]

All done (boiled twice second time around oil at 360 to 380):

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GMTA!

I made these the other night too... though mine were nowhere near as brown as yours. How long did you cook them the second time?

[ned]

The second time around wasn't long as the oil was so hot. Maybe 30 seconds to a minute. At the outside, a minute and a half.