A year of Italian cooking

[hathor]

Do not be intimidated! Adam is only in Tuscany!! You are all over in Italy...at least in spirit.

Anchovies, onion and parsely may not be photogenic, but they are mighty tasty!

Where are we next month??

[Kevin72]

Patience, Hathor, I can't give it all away!

Weekend's cooking:

Friday was grilled polenta topped with marinated and grilled radicchio and portabello mushrooms.

The mushrooms and radicchio were both marinated in olive oil, red wine vinegar, lots of garlic, mashed anchovy, thyme and rosemary.

I've been using the squat Verona style radicchio for all my cooking. The elongated Treviso variety are hard to find, $6 a head when I can find them, and fairly small.

Saturday's meal:

Aperitivo: Spritz

Antipasto: Scallop and basil frittata

Primo: Baked tagliorini with shrimp, peas, and leeks

Secondo: Striped bass with a potato crust

Venice has given the world two great cocktails: the Bellini and its cousins, and the far less known and somewhat bastardized spritz. More commonly you see the spritzer which is wine and club soda, but with the spritz you mix in a little citrus juice and a dash of bitters. It is refreshing and really gets the appetite going.

The scallop frittata is from a Molto Mario episode based on Paradiso Perduto, a trattoria in Venice that Mario speaks quite highly of. It's along the Miserchordia canal in far North Venice, along with many other interesting looking restaurants. Unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity to go as we were there on its closing day (Wednesday). If anyone reading this has been, or been to any of the authentic little gems we saw near the Miserchordia canal, please share.

The primo was baked tagliorini with shrimp, peas, leeks, and bechamel. It was a combination of another Mario episode and a recipe in the da Fiore cookbook:

And again, just a taste of the exotic: the bechamel was simmered with just a dash of cinnamon, nutmeg, and bay leaves to give it a more complex flavor.

The secondo was baked striped sea bass with a potato crust, from the da Fiore cookbook.

Finishing the night off we had frisee and radicchio salad and more of the banana-ricotta gelato from Valentine's.

Sunday was a tribute to Antica Trattoria da lAmelia in Verona.

We went to Verona right after Venice and found it an excellent counterpoint to Venice and a great way to decompress from the tourist crowds. The people in Verona were the nicest we met on our whole trip. So far, it's my choice for the city in Italy I'd most like to live in. A great mix of modern, medieval, and ancient Roman influences, but small enough to where you feel comfortable and not just part of the tourist hordes.

Anyways we were wandering along the Adige river after dinner the night we were there and I spotted this trattoria and checked out the menu posted outside. It looked really interesting (despite the English translations, but more on that in a minute), quite different from Venice's seafood extravaganza; much more robust and fitting of the hilly and mountainous terrain we were in. So we decided to stick around a little later the next day and try it for lunch. The next day we lingered around and pestered the owners a couple times about when they opened and were they open yet, etc. etc. Finally we walked in right on the opening time, while the staff was still eating their lunch, no less. Our hostess was a cross between the German and Italian grandmother archetypes, apple-cheeked and insisting we eat more, more, and more, and then hugged and kissed us when we left. The chef was a gruff grumbly type who spent equal time in the kitchen and stomping about fixing this and that in the trattoria. Really a great place I thought.

Incidentally, this is the place I referenced in the menu misprints thread on the General Food board. The English translations on the menu are headscratchers, for sure. The consensus seems to be that it was translated by way of an online site, probably the same ones I'm using when corresponding in Italian with our propective hotels for our trip!

Here's the actual website for the place, but again, don't be put off by the translations and check it out if ever you're in Verona:

http://www.trattoriaamelia.com/index.html

One of the items we ordered was what I made last night: porcini-stuffed gnocchi with a taleggio cream sauce and radicchio. A height of autumn in the mountains dish, everything we went to Italy in the fall for in the first place.

Arrgh I can't get the damn focus to work. This unfortunately is the best of the 5 shots I took!

So the gnocchi dough is folded around finely minced reconstituted dried porcini and then sauced with taleggio and cream and finely shredded radicchio. One interesting thing I've noticed about the cooking of the Veneto is that they use radicchio almost as one would herbs to garnish a dish, in addition to being part of a salad or as a vegetable component.

Wine note: with the meal we drank a 2000 Ca'Pitti Valpolicella Classico which we actually bought in Verona. It was pretty stringent-tasting at first but with the food it mellowed quite well and helped cut the richness of the sauce. It also took on a floral or nectar-like finish later on. Normally I don't notice these things but it was quite pleasant.

Wine rant: the store I shop at recently restocked, and now have a number of inexpensive Friulian whites that weren't available to me last month when I was cooking from that region.

Finally, I made some Venetian-style bread from Carol Field's Italian Baker book. It's called rossette Veneziana, and while it is normally a recipe for dinner rolls, I kept the dough in one whole loaf rather than breaking it up. Haven't tried it yet.

[Marco_Polo]

Great work, Kevin. You've transported me to Venice, the Veneto and Friuli most enjoyably and vicariously this month, and I'm already looking forward to new places and foods in March.

I love your approach and dedication. Nerdy? Hell no. Obsessive? Maybe, but nothing wrong with that. Damn admirable, I'd say.

MP

[Kevin72]

Thanks for the kind words, MP!

I guess I better get used to this sensation I get around the end of the month where I feel like there's so much I haven't cooked from the current region, and yet I'm really looking forward to the next region. Right now I feel like I haven't adequately represented the Veneto, particularly by cooking so few risotto dishes. Also, since we're backing off of meat for Lent (more just to give us a break from richness of the Holidays) I haven't really cooked much from the inland areas that use lots of wild fowl. One dish I wish I'd had the time to make was peverada, a roasted partridge or pheasant or guinea fowl with a sauce made from its mashed up gizzards, lots of black pepper, and oranges. Likewise I didn't get to cook pastisadda from Verona (see the horsemeat thread for details--but I'd use beef instead!). Or grilled steak topped with mushrooms and radicchio, or duck valle sale, or risotto alla Chioggia, or . . .

[hathor]

Kevin, everything looks wonderful as usual! The scallop frittata really looks yummy.

And as far as my being patient...patience is a virtue, and no one has ever accused me of being virtuous!!

That's the beauty of cooking, there is always something new to try, just around the bend!

[Pan]

[...]Right now I feel like I haven't adequately represented the Veneto, particularly by cooking so few risotto dishes.  Also, since we're backing off of meat for Lent (more just to give us a break from richness of the Holidays) I haven't really cooked much from the inland areas that use lots of wild fowl.  One dish I wish I'd had the time to make was peverada, a roasted partridge or pheasant or guinea fowl with a sauce made from its mashed up gizzards, lots of black pepper, and oranges.  Likewise I didn't get to cook pastisadda from Verona (see the horsemeat thread for details--but I'd use beef instead!).  Or grilled steak topped with mushrooms and radicchio, or duck valle sale, or risotto alla Chioggia, or . . . 

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Hey, you can always repeat this exercise with different dishes! Actually, the sensation you're feeling is just like the way I usually think about vacations: You can always come back and see the things you were interested in but missed the first (or second, or third...) time.

[Kevin72]

Cooking from this past week:

Clam and bean soup

I love dishes that create a mediation between the land and the sea and Venetian cooking seems to do it quite well. The briny clams deepen the mellow beans. In the Veneto there's a bean called the lamon which is supposed to be even creamier than the borlotti. Saw it a few times when we were there but alas didn't try it or bring any back with us.

Risi e bisi

Halfway between a soup and a risotto. I liked the faint touch of cinnamon that is called for in the da Fiore recipe. In their writeup on this dish they say that this is Venice itself, and the cinnamon is an ode to its status as a spice trade capital.

Friday's meal was a tribute to another restaurant in Venice that we went to: Osteria ale do' Marie, in the easter portion of the city. This was the same night I mentioned earlier when we walked along the miserchordia canal. It had started out as a "cicheti" crawl earlier that afternoon, with us just going from one bar to the next, ordering a few cicheti and then moving on. But we had been walking for an hour now and hadn't had anything to eat in even longer, and actually were pretty hungry. So here we were in a pretty empty part of the city, and we walked down an alley and this was the only open doorway. Encouraged that there was no barker out front to lure us in (never a good sign in Venice), we went in. We were the only ones there, and we were actually at peak Italian dining hours (nine), and in fact only two older gentlemen came in after we arrived. It was good, honest Venetian food, certainly not the best of our trip but remembered fondly. What we do not remember so fondly is that afterwards we got hopelessly lost. This was a completely empty, very nearly abandoned looking part of the city. Streets had no lights on them. We saw no one. We kept coming back to the same spot again and again: a bar that was playing Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil inside to a smattering of patrons. I just can't describe how eerie the experience was.

Anyways, onto the meal itself:

Seared scallops with mushrooms and arugula

Another "land and sea" dish. Of course at do'Marie they used porcini. In this case I ground dried porcini to a powder and crusted the scallops with it, and used trumpet mushrooms in the salad itself. Do they sell porcini canned in oil in Italy? We had a few dishes with mushrooms that were supple and rich but didn't have that firm bite of fresh mushrooms, and we did have one porcini dish where we could tell it was a fresh, porcini mushroom. Not that it's a complaint, in fact I'd snap it up in a second if they had them that way here.

The main dish was spaghetti with clams.

Even more frustrating than seeing the variety of produce available in Italy vs. the U.S. is the variety of seafood. I'm sure it's better in places like New York or Boston and on the West Coast, but here in the Dallas area you get one kind of shrimp in different sizes, one kind of clam, mussels, and 3-4 varieties of fish. In Venice . . . well, you know. It's one thing to talk about the canocche, the flat, centipede-looking shrimp which are only found in the Adriatic, but the multitudes of different bivalves . . .

And the taste! So sweet, and yet with the clams there's this peppery backbite. And the shells are so delicate and nearly translucent, and they make a tinkling glass-like sound as they fall to the plate.

So this is the best I can do here, littleneck clams. Not bad, but just not as subtle as Italy can do. At do'Marie, rather than chili peppers, they used ample black pepper to go with the clams' own peppery flavor.

Last meal in the Veneto is tomorrow night.

[Adam Balic]

No pictures, brown pasta with a brown sauce isn't very photogenic.  And Adam's fantastic compositions in his Tuscan thread are intimidating me. 

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Kevin - Adam is lucky enough to be a market whore for ten days or so. When the produce is so excellent, most pictures look good.

Your food looks really great. Strangely enough you Venato meals are similar to some I was cooking about a year ago (another trip) and yours have turned out a hell of a lot better.

You are right about the lack of produce thing. Scotland produces some of the best seafood on the planet, yet it is surprisingly difficult to find good quality fish there.

[Kevin72]

Kevin - Adam is lucky enough to be a market whore for ten days or so.

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You definitely did it right to be near a kitchen. Much as I loved eating in Italian restaurants, it was painful to walk through the markets and see all that stuff and not be able to buy and cook it myself.

[Kevin72]

Final meal in the Veneto region:

"Straw and hay" with radicchio and a lemon-cream sauce.

Another recipe from the Paradiso Perduto episode of Molto Mario.

As opposed to the gnocchi recipe, the radicchio here is sauteed with the aromatics at the start and then cooked in the cream, so its bitterness is tempered somewhat. Also, lemon zest and juice are used in the cream, which really liven up the dish.

Main course was the pesce in saor alla da Fiore as I discussed with Hathor upthread.

In a similar vein as the Risi e bisi with cinnamon, the saor recipe from the da Fiore cookbook harkens back to the height of Venice's trading power. Rather than vinegar, this recipe uses lemon and orange juices to get its sweet and sour flavor. Also, there's a touch of ginger in the recipe, giving it a nearly Asian flavor. Much more subtle than the more common version; if you like saor I encourage you to try this variation.

This is my final entry for the next few weeks before my trip to Rome and Puglia. But that's another thread!

[hathor]

Buon viaggio!! Have a wonderful, wonderful time!!

Needless to say I'm craving that pesce right about now.

ciao!!

[Kevin72]

The region for what's left of March will be the delicate, herb-laden cooking of Liguria, which comprises the Cinque Terre and Genoa.

If anyone got sick of me referencing Fred Plotkin ad nauseum for Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, it will be even worse this month as his book Recipes from Paradise is, curiously, virtually the only cookbook reference I know of on this region. Molto Mario was cancelled before he could cover Liguria, most of my regional cookbooks reference it only to give a recipe for pesto, and Marlena de Blasi dismisses it as "too Southern" in her book Regional Foods of Northern Italy. (And then her book on Southern Italy leaves it out with no mention). From what I do know I disagree with de Blasi's assessment of the region, which while it does have an abundance of olives, olive oil, and capers like much Southern Italian cooking, it also uses butter, virtually no chilies, and a number of tell-tale ingredients from neighboring Emilia-Romagna and Piemonte, not to mention France. Plotkin insists on this point that anything appearing "French" in Liguria originated in Liguria and was then taken by the French, and not the other way around.

So, with so little to go on for reference I thought it best to use it on an abbreviated month for me as I was in Italy for the past couple weeks.

As always, travel, dining, and cooking experiences others have had in Liguria, as well as suggestions for must-cook dishes, are welcome.

[Kevin72]

Saturday night's inaugural meal for Liguria:

Corzetti with pine nut and oregano sauce:

Corzetti are a pasta unique to Liguria. They are "stamped" using a special mold, the pattern usually of familial or religious significance. Lacking this tool I used a pizelle press, and so they were a bit larger than normal. Didn't need to roll them very thin, though: I only went to the second setting of six on my pasta roller. Anything thinner and the pizelle press didn't make any pattern at all. As it was it was still hard to make the impression on the outer edges and in fact I had to repress them all right before I boiled them.

They were sauced with a pine-nut oregano (Plotkin calls for marjoram but my oregano is out of control) "pesto" using butter instead of olive oil. No cheese either.

The secondo was zucchini stuffed with shrimp:

Another deviation from the book, which called for veal, but we're back in doing a meatless Lent. When I was cooking from the Veneto I said one of the problems I had with doing Lent that month was that there were many great meat dishes from the Veneto I had to leave out. Liguria is much more Lent-friendly as they rely overwhelmingly on vegetables, then seafood for sustenance.

[hathor]

Welcome home and welcome back to the kitchen! A little culture shock??

A little market frustration??

[Kevin72]

Welcome home and welcome back to the kitchen! A little culture shock?? 

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Absolutely. I even went into work the day after we got home!

Spent all day Saturday scouring Dallas for Ligurian olive oil and wine and no luck.

Definitely not in Italy anymore!

A little market frustration?? 

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Arrgh don't get me started! Although that's one of the things I still have to add to my trip thread . . .

[Kevin72]

Sunday's Meal

Cheese Focaccia, what Plotkin calls "the most addictive food on the planet".

After that buildup I was a little let down. Granted I cut way back on his recipe requirements: he calls for four and a half pounds of cheese! Anything with that much cheese on it would have to be pretty addictive I'd imagine. At any rate it's stuffed with prescinseua cheese mixed with taleggio. Prescinseua is a tangy ricotta like cheese that is found only in Liguria at the moment. Plotkin recommends mixing ricotta with a high-quality yogurt, which is what I did.

Also, I baked it on a stone, as the "classic" method calls for in a very hot oven. The crust got too crisp and browned: good for a pizza but with this focaccia I'd want it a little more gooey and soft to match the cheese. He gives an alternate recipe with a lower temp and baked in a pan, which I'd do next time.

Contorno was braised portabellos finished with pinenuts.

Monday night we did a "fritter sampler".

Left to right, they are: bean, lemon, and cucumber. Had some friends over and opinions varied on which was the best. I preferred the bean. Even though I only used one recipe and divided it into three parts as the base for the fritters, it was still entirely too much food, even for four.

Followed with chickpea-flour crepes topped with more prescinseua and scallions.

WARNING!!!! Not really and authentic dish! In Liguria they make focaccia and bread from chickpea flour, not crepes. But it seemed rather labor-intensive, with equipment I didn't have, and Plotkin advises eating it just-made as it gets more unappealing in texture when it cools. I had had a similar experience when I made a chestnut bread which was great right out of the oven but then sat in the fridge until it was thrown out. So I opted for crepes. All apologies to Liguria.

Ligurian wines are pretty near impossible to come by, even by Plotkin's admission: they don't travel well and are best enjoyed at their source. I did find a Vermentino, a Ligurian varietal, from Sardegna which we had Saturday night. Had a little alcohol punch to it but it was enjoyable.

[Adam Balic]

Very nice Kevin, I really like the food of Liguria and the Riviera in general (Colman Andrews has published a good book on the food from this area BTW).

Actually the in Liguria they do have a chickpea flour pancake. It is called 'farinata' and very similar (if not the same) as 'socca' from Nice and also a similar pancake from Sicily.

[Pan]

How do they pronounce "prescinseua"? Exactly as it comes (pre-shin-se-oo-a[h])?

[divina]

Actually your foccaccia di Recco looks fabulous. It is cooked until golden not doughy at all.

I haven't seen Plotkisn recipe, but it is a flour and water dough.. brusehd with oil and salt.. very thin, with tiny holes pulled in the top..

The CREPES aren't quite golden enough.

I made the Florentine version Cecina in a woodburing oven this week.. I was trying one out before building.

I will be following the instructions ( that are available for free) on www.fornobravo.com I am doing some recipe testing for them and my recipes will also be available online. the foccaccia di Recco is going to be one of them and the Cecina is already online with foto's

[Kevin72]

How do they pronounce "prescinseua"? Exactly as it comes (pre-shin-se-oo-a[h])?

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I've literally sat in a room by myself reading that name off out loud to figure out the pronunciation and I can't. I'm guessing also there's some dialectical twist to it.

[Kevin72]

Actually your foccaccia di Recco looks fabulous. It is cooked until golden not doughy at all.

I haven't seen Plotkisn recipe, but it is a flour and water dough.. brusehd with oil and salt.. very thin, with tiny holes pulled in the top..

The CREPES aren't quite golden enough.

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Crepes are my kryptonite. I get through half the batter before I can get the first one to come out right. With these the first few were these big, thick, pancake looking monsters that made for tedious eating. I noticed the color issue too but they just didn't seem to pick it up well . . . went from pallid to burnt very quickly.

The recipe you list is pretty much Plotkin's. No leavening, which threw me for a loop.

[Kevin72]

Very nice Kevin, I really like the food of Liguria and the Riviera in general (Colman Andrews has published a good book on the food from this area BTW).

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Thanks for that resource. I just looked it up and will probably get it soon. Plotkin would get into a frenzy seeing that book though (not that I'd agree with him). He's a pretty passionate guy, if that hasn't been made clear. He gets huffy when the French and Italian riverias are thrown together. He also clearly has a bone to pick with Venice, first comparing it (unfavorably) to Genoa and then in Terra Fortunata he dismisses it when compared to Trieste.

[Kevin72]

Oh, and I'm going to have to give a next day thumbs down to my preparation of Plotkin's recipe for the fritters. They discharged an alarming amount of oil when warming up the leftovers. There was egg in the batter, and Alton Brown has said that egg or any fat in a frying batter will attract oil. Can anyone verify this? I usually avoid eggs in the batter, and thought about doing it this time but tried it regardless. I'd be interested in seeing how it turns out without the egg, since the batter is further leavened with yeast.

[Adam Balic]

Very nice Kevin, I really like the food of Liguria and the Riviera in general (Colman Andrews has published a good book on the food from this area BTW).

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Thanks for that resource. I just looked it up and will probably get it soon. Plotkin would get into a frenzy seeing that book though (not that I'd agree with him). He's a pretty passionate guy, if that hasn't been made clear. He gets huffy when the French and Italian riverias are thrown together. He also clearly has a bone to pick with Venice, first comparing it (unfavorably) to Genoa and then in Terra Fortunata he dismisses it when compared to Trieste.

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Garibaldi was from around Nice and didn't speak very good Italian (spoke a Ligurian dilect apparently). Different, by related. The is also a good book on the cooking of Nice, written by the Major who moved to Brazil for legal reasons.

[Kevin72]

I made pesto last weekend, so this week a few dishes to try it on.

As always, Plotkin approaches Liguria's most famous food product with a fetishistic frenzy, offering 16 variations (including one mixed with ricotta that I prepared long ago and really liked), and devotes a 5 page introduction to the subject. And naturally he asserts that the pesto should be ground in a mortar and pestle and not that modern abomination, the blender. Here's what he says about the method:

"A mortar and pestle mashes while a food processor or blender grinds . . . The whole process of making pesto by hand takes about twenty minutes . . . the pestle must be made of wood, in Liguria it is traditional that it be made of olive wood, but--" The rest of his discourse is unfortuntately drowned out by the sound of my blender whizzing the ingredients together in 20 seconds as opposed to me pounding and grinding the ingredients in my 6-inch diameter mortar and pestle for 20 minutes.

So, apologies to Plotkin, and to avoid any impending lawsuits or restraining orders on his behalf, let me say that I use my old tried and true recipe and didn't really use his specified ratios and ingredients (inlcuding the hard-to-find Genovese basil).

First up was trenette alla Genovese. Trenette are a flat dried pasta similar to linguine (an "acceptable substitute" Plotkin sniffs at me from the recipe), which I used. This is a neat recipe to make because it's all done in one pot. You quarter some small boiler potatoes and put them in boiling salted water, cook them a few minutes, then add the pasta and cook it a couple minutes, then add green beans. Take a few ladles of the cooking water and thin out some pesto, then toss with the pasta and vegetables.

For a secondo it was calamari en tegame: squid braised with olives, capers, and lemon.

For lunches this week I made a big pot of minestrone. Normally I make minestrone in high summer and use only summer vegetables, but Plotkin's recipe uses a seasonally-appropriate mix of winter and spring vegetables: cauliflower, spinach, artichokes (which dissolved into the broth), and peas. Finished with a generous dollop of pesto.