A year of Italian cooking

[...tm...]

These pictures of food from the Riviera are really torturing people like me with 8 weeks to go until the last frost date. That last meal looked especially Summery. I just love the full but somehow light taste of Ligurian cooking. Pasta alla Genovese is my second favorite cook dinner in the time it takes to boil water and cook pasta meal (after carbonara). I make it with the potatoes sliced rather thinly and added after the pasta and they usually break up a little bit, which I like, but I'll have to try this way next time.

Is it the cheese focaccia that doesn't have any leavening? I can't believe that I never noticed this in my many eatings of it in my poor student days hiking Cinque Terre, but it makes complete sense in retrospect. I ate a lot of that and fried fish (and pesto, of course) on my short trip there.

I just wanted to add that this is one of my favorite threads and probabaly the most interesting New Year's resolution I've heard. It reminds me of the conversation people have where one says, "but we just had Chinese food last night!" and the other says, "Chinese people have Chinese food every night." and I laugh.

[Kevin72]

These pictures of food from the Riviera are really torturing people like me with 8 weeks to go until the last frost date.  That last meal looked especially Summery.  I just love the full but somehow light taste of Ligurian cooking.  Pasta alla Genovese is my second favorite cook dinner in the time it takes to boil water and cook pasta meal (after carbonara).    I make it with the potatoes sliced rather thinly and added after the pasta and they usually break up a little bit, which I like, but I'll have to try this way next time. 

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I forgot to mention that the potatoes do indeed break up a little when cooked this way and make a second "sauce" for the pasta.

Is it the cheese focaccia that doesn't have any leavening?  I can't believe that I never noticed this in my many eatings of it in my poor student days hiking Cinque Terre, but it makes complete sense in retrospect.  I ate a lot of that and fried fish (and pesto, of course) on my short trip there.

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I was surprised at the lack of leavening to, but as Divina's post upthread shows, it must be tradition somewhere. Maybe with all that cheese it seem leavened enough!

I just wanted to add that this is one of my favorite threads and probabaly the most interesting New Year's resolution I've heard. 

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Well, I certainly wouldn't recommend the standard "lose weight" resolution with this one!

But thank you for the kind words.

[Kevin72]

Happy St. Joseph's Day!

My familiarity of this day comes largely from Sicilian and Pugliese cooking traditions, both of which use lots of almonds, sardines or anchovies, and fried fish of some sort to make a big meal. Coming (usually) at midpoint during Lent, it's often used as a break from the lean diet to have a really big feast. Doing the same for Liguria, I cooked a few items specifically noted as being used as festive dishes during "lean" times.

Started the meal with eggs in "special sauce":

Plotkin notes the translation of this item might make it sound odd, and indeed our dinner guests were perplexed by the name. The "special sauce" is a mixture of basil, parlsey, capers, chilies, olive oil, and vinegar, and is pretty addictive. Should have served the eggs with some bread to sop up the rest of the sauce.

Liguria seems to be an interesting "sauce culture", particularly with the affinity for the mortar and pestle to make much of them. I tried to explore that with a number of interesting sauces throughout the meal. There is a walnut sauce which I'm interested in but may not be able to get to.

For the primo I made another famous Ligurian food export, ravioli. I got to use for the first time a ravioli tray my mom had sent me from the dark recesses of her cookware collection. It was surprsingly easy and fun, a refreshing change from hand-cutting them and invariably ending up with wildly different sizes. Here's the tray and the ravioli cut out:

And here they are cooked and tossed with a sauce of sundried tomatoes.

I got burned out on sundried tomatoes with the "Mediterranean boom" of the '90's. In fact it seems like several of the items from this food craze were Ligurian in nature: also pesto was pretty overused back then. But of course going back to its source, in both of these cases, proves the item to be much more delicate and used with a lighter hand than its translation in the U.S. The ravioli, "Lean Ravioli", were stuffed with more of the prescinseua cheese and swiss chard.

The secondo was cappon magro. This is a feast day Ligurian dish which, Plotkin relates, unites the sea and the land in one glorious dish. It was designed to welcome the sailors home. On its base is bread, slathered with another sauce made of eggs, parlsey, olives, vinegar, capers, and basil. Then you place fish atop the bread. It would appear one essential item that I left out is a lobster. Then you pile vegetables including potatoes, artichokes, carrots, cauliflower, and green beans on top and then more seafood, and the rest of the sauce. All of these items are poached separately. It's supposed to be arranged in this artful pyramid but food presentation like that isn't something I can do well, so here's what I got:

Because all these items are just poached, there is a delicacy (that word again!) to the whole dish. It is bountiful, and yes there's bread, but you don't feel agonizingly full afterwards.

For the dessert I made sciumette, "clouds" of meringues, poached in a simmering flavored milk. Then you use the milk to make a custard which you drizzle over the top of the meringues. No pictures of this; the meringues swelled beautifully while poaching but deflated instantly when I took them out. Is that supposed to happen?

It was an ideal dessert for the big meal, once again very light in texture and feel. There was a bit of an eggy taste to the meringue, however.

[Kevin72]

Sunday night's meal, no pics:

Rosemary focaccia. Ligurians love their focaccie(?), the baked flatbread. Enormously forgiving bread; if you're at all daunted by baking this should be your first experiment. And it is one of the best smells to fill your home with as it bakes. Despite numerous cookbooks and authors saying how un-Italian it is, I can't not serve it with a little dish of olive oil and cracked pepper to swirl the bread in as you tear it off in chunks.

With the focaccia I served a not-exclusively-Ligurian dish, but a springtime rite for Italians everywhere, shelled fava beans. Unfortunately in Texas we can't get the really young favas which you can eat raw, so they had to be shelled, blanched, shocked, and then removed of their outer peel. I mixed them with shaved fennel and fennel fronds and made a little salad. Also served two wedges of pecorino with it. One of my very favorite meals, and something we have to do every spring as soon as the weather warms up. We brought it over to some friends' and had a nice grilled steak with it (oops, there goes Lent!), so it really got us in a Spring mood.

Last night I made chestnut trofie, a stubby type of pasta that you make by pinching off a piece of dough and rolling on the cutting board with your palm, or between your hands. Here they are cooked and tossed with a mushroom and thyme sauce.

Errm, yuck. They had an interesting, almost smoky flavor initially, but then that was followed by a harsh, bitter, acrid aftertaste. Also, they had a very gummy, stick-to-the-teeth quality to them, and were quite heavy. There was no egg in the recipe, I'm wondering if that contributed to the texture. I made a test batch the day before and had cooked them to Plotkin's specifications: put them in boiling water, and when they float, drain and serve immediately. I found the test batch to be undercooked and dry in the middle, so I cooked them last night a few minutes longer until you could easily bite into them, but they were still firm. Anyways, it was interesting at first but we couldn't finish a whole bowl and wound up ditching the leftovers.

I'm guessing the chestnut flour went rancid. I had only bought it this weekend so it wasn't improper storage on my part. I'm guessing it's not exactly a fast turnover item, and I bought it in bulk from a bin, so it had likely been there quite a while. At any rate, the chestnut version isn't something I'm going to revisit or try to make again. I had made these before, but I misinterpreted one cookbook saying that they were essentially elongated gnocchi, so I made them with potatoes and rolled them out that way. Actually, as incorrect to the tradition as the potato version was, they were still pretty good, and would defintely be the version I'd make again, if ever.

[Adam Balic]

Kevin - I read about the post and though 'I bet the chestnut flour was oxidised', I see you thought the same. What a bugger, as the trofie look great. Chestnut flour is very perishable (which I found out in a similar way to you) and therefore, it has a very short shelf life. One suggestion I have seen is to buy small batches of fresh flour and to keep it in the freezer.

[divina]

the traditional trofie recipe is flour and water llike orecchiete and take about 10 mintues to cook.

I usually use hard wheat flour, and have never used the low gluten chestnut flour, which I find heavy tasting on it's own..

I have not learned to love the flavor of any of all chestnut flour recipes..like Castagnaccio the sweet dessert with rosemary and pinenuts.

[Kevin72]

the traditional trofie recipe is flour and water llike orecchiete and take about 10 mintues to cook.

I usually use hard wheat flour, and have never used the low gluten chestnut flour, which I find heavy tasting on it's own..

I have not learned to love the flavor of any of all chestnut flour recipes..like Castagnaccio the sweet dessert with rosemary and pinenuts.

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Yes, the standard trofie listed are made from whole wheat, these were a chestnut variation. Plotkin calls to mix whole wheat and chestnut flours but that sounded way too heavy. There's also a chestnut gnocchi that I shudder to think about trying now.

Plotkin gives a much shorter cooking time: just until they float, which is maybe 2 minutes, I wonder if cooking them even longer as you suggest, or with egg, would have helped the texture at least.

I want to like chestnut flour stuff, I really do, but I just keep coming up blank when I try it, with the exception of some chestnut flour crepes.

[Kevin72]

Say, would making gnocchi or dumplings or even a stubby pasta work with mashed chestnuts, flour, and egg? Has anybody done this or seen a recipe?

[Kevin72]

Wrapping up Liguria.

Recent meals:

Savory Artichoke and Spinach torta

Like foccaccie, Ligurians seem really into savory tortas. Usually they involve some sort of green like spinach, chard, or borage (which I have yet to see anywhere), and ricotta or its tangier cousin, prescinseua cheese.

We were visiting family over the weekend, and on Saturday night I made my traditional Easter dinner. The dishes are from all over the map, so it wasn't strictly Ligurian, except for one item.

Appetizer was a tweaking of a standard canape since the '70's, asparagus wrapped with prosciutto and creamy cheese.

The primo was the aforementioned Ligurian-inspired item, Torta Pasqualina, another savory torta, again with prescinseua and spinach, but now including finely minced salami. Also, you make little "wells" in the filling and pour in a raw egg, then cover it with the pastry and bake. The eggs set and look like hard-boiled eggs as it cooks. Instead of making the dough as I had for the artichoke torta, I used phyllo dough.

For the main we had "porchettina", stuffed and grilled pork tenderloins. The stuffing was sausage, garlic, fennel greens, and rosemary.

You lucky, lucky bastards in Italy get to buy your pork loins with the skin and fat still on them (not to mention real, whole porchetta of course!), which would just never fly here in the U.S.

The contorni were two grilled items, artichokes and fennel. The artichokes are halved, the choke is scooped out, then slathered with olive oil, garlic, and parsley and placed on a grill, leaf-side down, and cook until the heart can be easily pierced by a fork. By now the outer layer of leaves will have blackened, you just peel those off and then go to town. The fennel was blanched first, then grilled. While they cooked I spooned a sauce of reduced orange juice, olive oil, garlic, and chilies over them, then added more right off the grill.

For dessert we had strawberry tiramisu. As always with dessert, no pictures. I seem to never get pictures of dessert. Is that because desserts usually involve a higher level of presentation that I don't feel that I can reach, or is it because by now the meal is several hours and a few bottles of wine in, and I always forget?

Last night was probably the last meal for Liguria, with leftovers and my wife taking a turn at the stove the rest of the week.

Antipasti were the region's famous stuffed mussels

More tweaking on my part from the original recipe, which calls for cooking half the mussels, then chopping them fine and mixing them with a stuffing of mortadella, breadcrumbs, garlic, and parmigiano. Then you pry open the other half of the mussels and spoon this mixture in and cook these until they opened. I just did them all and re-stuffed the empty shells, then baked them over tomato sauce until the filling set. Note the filling ingredients: here is what I was talking about when I said that Ligurian had many tell-tale ingredients separating it from Southern cuisine, which Marlena di Blasi erroneously (in my opinion, of course) tried to pair this region with. And yes, there's cheese in a seafood recipe in Italy! It's not such a steadfast law as I had been lead to believe. Frequently stuffed seafood items have cheese in them. Where the no cheese and seafood rule really seems to hold fast is in pasta dishes.

Speaking of pasta, the primo was conchiglie with octopus sauce.

For the secondo, it was calamari in zimino: squid braised with chickpeas and swiss chard.

Ha, no dessert so no pics!

So that's it for Liguria. I liked its delicacy and reliance on vegetables, it was a good counterpoint to the richer cuisines of Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Veneto from January and February, and a nice way to welcome in Spring and warmer weather. Plotkin trumpets Liguria as commonly acknowledged as being one of the three great cuisines of Italy (Emilia Romagna and Friuli Venezia Giulia are the other two) and I'm a little reluctant to agree to that extent, though please don't take that to mean I don't like Ligurian cuisine. I was surprised to notice how influential it has been on American cuisine, particularly the Mediterranean cooking boom of the late '80's and early '90's, and it is easy to see why.

Edited March 28, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)

[reesek]

i can't believe i just found this thread. kevin, you are my hero!!

the stuffed breads look absolutely incredible. i had to stifle a moan over artichoke and spinach torta. can you recommend one of your ligurian books for a relative newbie? is the (a?) plotkin book the way to go?

by the way

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.

cracked me up. this blog is fantastic. i absolutely love the picture of the conchiglie with octopus...talk about matching shapes. i can almost feel how agreeable the pasta and octopus would be on my fork and in my mouth. do you have a special technique for octopus? can you find it fresh in texas, or is it frozen?

[Kevin72]

Thanks, Reseek!

Plotkin is pretty much it for books dedicated exlcusively to Liguria, though Adam recommends upthread the book devoted to the cooking of both the Italian and French rivieras. He does a great job giving a cross-section of this area's cuisine, if a little exacting at times.

The octopus we get here is, I'm pretty sure, previously frozen. Got this batch at an Asian market, though sometimes it's at Central Market, a gourmet-type grocery store here in Dallas. I even bought a whole tentacle from a large one and tried it last summer. The cooking method is similar to what I've seen elsewhere: cook it until fork-tender in water with a little vinegar in it. I always throw in a cork and now I can't remember if Plotkin specifically called for it or not.

[hathor]

I wasn't even hungry until I checked in on you. Now I have to go rummage around for something to eat!! Where to next?? You know I'm impatient!!

[Kevin72]

>Laughs ominously<

C'mon, it's only a couple more days until April!

And, it shouldn't be TOO hard to figure out if you've seen my other posting activity here of late . . .

[albiston]

>Laughs ominously<

C'mon, it's only a couple more days until April! 

And, it shouldn't be TOO hard to figure out if you've seen my other posting activity here of late . . .

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Should we all get the semolina flour for the orecchiette out ?

[Kevin72]

Well damn, Alberto, I guess that was the more obvious choice, wasn't it? I should have given you two chances . . .

April will be the lusty, gutsy cooking of Rome. I won't even go through the pretense of saying Lazio, Rome's surrounding region. Italy's capital city is such a culinary titan in its own right that you could cook recipes from there for three months or more and not repeat yourself. It's my third favorite regional Italian cuisine and almost always influences my cooking in Spring, particularly Easter. In fact the Easter meal I listed above is much more Roman than anything--while lamb would be the secondo of choice of course, porchetta is eaten here, as it is in much of Central Italy. And fennel and artichokes, two of my favorite vegetables, are consumed with gusto in Rome, probably one of the reasons I identify with it so strongly.

As I mentioned on the Top 5 Meals on my trip to Rome and Puglia thread , Rome is a great trattoria town, serving honest, simple food. It has either originated or at least popularized a number of Italian classic dishes: fettuccini alfredo, spaghetti alla carbonara, bucatini all'Amatriciana, carciofi (artichokes) alla guidea and Romana, saltimbocca . . . the list goes on. So I've got a lot to fit in!

The main references I will be using besides my recent trip there: Mario Batali's excellent and expansive treatment of the region on Molto Mario (Rome appears to have influenced not only obviously Lupa but Babbo as well), and David Dowden's cookbook, Cooking the Roman Way. This is probably my second favorite cookbook on a specific region in Italy, I highly recommend it. I have seen but not really looked much into Rome at Home, another cookbook that unfortunately came out right around the same time as Dowden's.

And of course anyone is welcome to share their cooking, travel and eating experiences in Rome or Lazio, as well as must-have or must-cook dishes.

Edited April 1, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)

[Kevin72]

Oh and Sam (slkinsey), if you ever read this, I really, really wanted to do Rome right and order guanciale from Salumeria Biellese. But when I called they told me that they would only ship it in increments of 5 lbs or more, which probably would have brought the total bill to the $50-$60 range, which I just couldn't justify. So I'll just have to chuck authenticity in this case and "settle" for the artisinal slab bacon from a butcher in downtown Dallas.

[Adam Balic]

Kevin - I love this thread and especially the food from Liguria. Thanks for putting so much effort. This is a happy snap of my last meal in Liguria (your thread reminded me that I had some from a while ago). The dish is called an 'amphora' and is named after the vessel it is baked in. Basically, a seafood stew.

[Kevin72]

Ah, look at that Cinque Terre bottle!

What were the greens!

[Adam Balic]

The greens are pasta with a local sauce called 'pesto'. Quite unusual, but it could catch on.

[Kevin72]

The greens are pasta with a local sauce called 'pesto'. Quite unusual, but it could catch on.

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Whoah, Plotkin never even mentioned that one!

[Nathan P.]

Since you are a Batali fan why not try his dad's Guanciale? I've been contemplating ordering some but I would gladly let you be the guinea pig on this . They are selling it in .5 to 1.5 lb sizes at $11/lb. http://www.salumicuredmeats.com/

Great thread- It has been very motivating and has had me searching my local library to check out the books you have referenced.

Nathan

[hathor]

.....mmmm......carciofi...... Post away!!

Adam's Ligurian stew looks pretty good as well. Today I feasted on fish from the Adriatic....just wonderful.

Looking forward to Kevin's Roma Adventure!

[divina]

I met Armando when he was at Dario's with Faith Willinger, making Soprasatta..

I think his rolled Pancetta looks fab too as well as the Guanciale.

Interesting flavors for his Salami's too!

The DROGHE mixture used often here by butchers, includes mace, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg as well as cardomom.. a fabulous blend! Seems he was inspired and went beyond!

IACP is in Seattle next year.. so I'll be there!

[Kevin72]

Nathan and Divina:

D'oh! That would have been an excellend resource, I can't believe I didn't think of it. I was also going to check out Italian Wine Merchants, where Mario stores alot of the salumi he makes for his restaurants.

But I just lost interest and went out and bought a 2.25 lb slab of bacon from my butcher here in downtown Dallas. I blanched it to remove some of the smoky flavor as some cookbook authors have directed, and then re-rubbed it with sugar, juniper, rosemary, and black pepper and will let it sit a few days to give it an additional flavor boost. Let's see how it works out!

Hathor:

Along the lines of what Divina pointed out, I've been curious about what you do. I at first thought you were on vacation there but I realize I must not have been paying attention. I'm assuming you're in a cooking school then?

[Kevin72]

Saturday's meal was a recreation of Trattoria Cadorna, the #2 restaurant on my Top Five thread (link on previous page). The antipasto and dessert were different, though.

The antipasto was fennel glazed with sambucca, a double whammy of anise flavor from Mario Batali's Roman shows.

Blanch some fennel bulbs for 8-10 minutes, remove and shock in an ice bath. Then slice them or just halve them and sear them in a very hot pan with olive oil until they are caramelizing. Add garlic, anchovies, and chilies and cook just until fragrant, then a healthy shot of sambucca (stand back!). Cook it to a syrupy glaze and serve. Sweet, pungent from the anchovies, and spicy all at once.

The primo was the much sought-after (for me, at least) Thursday meal tradition, gnocchi, tossed with spicy tomato sauce and pecorino.

One of the great things about eating in Rome is that they are still very much attached to serving certain dishes only on specific days of the week. I got a cross look from a waiter one night when I tried ordering pasta e ceci on Wednesday, when it is offered only on Tuesdays (I got pasta e borlotti instead, no complaints!). Since my wife and I love gnocchi they will definitely make their way onto the menu a few times this month, but unfortunately my wife works late on Thursdays so we'll have to bend the rules a little.

The secondo and contorno were grilled sausage patties and spicy braised broccoli.

Dessert was tiramisu:

Culinaria: Italy relates that the regional origin of tiramisu is a topic of controversy among Italians: Piemonte, the Veneto, Rome, and Tuscany all lay claim to having invented it.

Drank Frascati which we bought in Italy with the meal, along with a Frascati bought in the U.S. Unfortunately there was little difference between the two. When I had it in Italy it had a grappa-like finish, lacking the alcohol punch of course. It was an older (2003) bottle, something I neglected to pay attention to when buying it; I hear that the more recently it was produced, the fruitier it tastes.

All photos by Besich Studios, 2005

Edited April 4, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)