Il Forno

In the press

This week's online edition of UK's The Guardian has a nice article on food blogs written by fellow blogger Graham Holliday, aka pieman. Graham discusses about the relevance of food blogs among foodies, about the some of the most popular in our community (Clotilde, Pim, and Heidi), about blogging awards, and last but not least, about the many food blogging events around, starting from Is My Blog Burning?. I'm proud of seeing IMBB? in the press, finally, and this blog geting mentioned. What I really enjoyed in the article though is Graham's description of us food bloggers:

The food blog brigade's typical serving comes with a dash of passion, a dollop of honesty and half a pound of humour.

Well said Graham!

P.S. I'm told the article ran in the printed Lifestyle section of The Guardian, accompanied by a picture of Britain's culinary mother-figure Delia Smith and the following legend: "Move over Delia". Funny, especially since I find Delia terribly boring, but it still sounds a bit blasphemous. So yeah, right, move over, and while you're at it hand Norwich City FC down to those sport bloggers.

Southern Italian cheeses, part II: Ragusano, the king of Sicilian cheese.

There's cheese, and there's... well other cheese. Something like ricotta scanta has the beauty of inventive and food-saving consciousness. Yet cheeses can also be real masterpieces, in the sense of a craftsman's best work. Just like the best caciocavalli and provoloni out there: caiocavallo Podolico, provolone del Monaco, some of the best caciocavalli Silani, and my own favourite, Ragusano.

You don't often hear about Southern Italian cheese when the best Italian cheeses are named. It's almost always the Parmigiano Reggiano, Gorgonzola, Taleggio triad. What a lack of fantasy! It's a pity that these are the only cheeses mentioned, because Italy has more than 400 to choose from and many are at least as delicious and at times breathtaking as these three. Southern Italian cheeses suffer from another problem. They're clearly "something different", coming from a unique gastronomic background, much unlike Northern Italian cheese which often share characteristics with their alpine relatives, be they French, Swiss or Austrian. And different is good in my book, as long as it ain't weird.

Southern Italian cheeses, part I: Ricotta scanta

A few weeks ago, on the eGullet Socitey's forums, someone was arguing that French cheese is better than Italian because of their dominating the stinky cheese scene. Let's forget about the silly "who's better" question, both countries have great traditions, different, sure, but both delicious. Yet, when it comes to stinky, It's hard to meet a stinkier cheese than the Italian ricotta scanta. It can hold nicely with the more olfactory-challenging blue cheeses, Vacherin, Munster and the like.

In Italian we have a saying: del porco non si butta niente, meaning you can use any part of the pig. I often have the feeling that cheese is treated in a similar way in some parts of Italy. Take ricotta, practically a byproduct of cheese making: once cheese is made there still quite a lot of nourishing protein in the whey. Milk has two main proteins (plus many others in lesser amounts) casein and lactalbumin: while casein clots once it is exposed to rennet, taking along most of the milk's fat, lactoalbumin does not. We'll never know who came up with the idea of heating whey to 90-100°C, probably someone in ancient Greece. but whoever did had just discovered ricotta. Lactoalbumin cheeses are not exclusive to Italy, there are examples in many Mediterranean countries, yet no other country consumes as much as Italians do with ricotta. OK, so you've still got some whey left from the ricotta, does that got thrown out? Usually not, it still has some milk sugar lactose, which can have its uses. Sometimes this "second" whey is used as starter culture to acidify the curds used to make pasta filata, spun curd, cheeses like mozzarella or caciocavallo. See, nothing wasted!

IMBB 12: blood and Marmite

Preface: this edition of Is My Blog Burning? celebrates the first birthday of the original food blogging meme. I'm happy Carlo from My Latest Supper is finally hosting an IMBB? and especially this one. Carlo's turn should have come up way before, but in part because of my messy organization, things got a tad delayed. Scusa Carlo! Last year in February things kicked off with a soup dedicated event. This month, we have something different: Carlo thought up a somewhat unusual and provocative theme, food taboos. Show me yours... here's mine!

Finding a food taboo was a real hard task. I'm not someone who says no to new foods, and I'll try almost anything once. Bugs? Done that, they can be quite nice. Horse meat, snails, frogs... don't see what's shocking about that. While I never tasted snake meat, I've had crocodile (or maybe alligator) once, nothing breathtaking. Natto or mountain potato, especially after reading Tony Bourdain's description of them in "A cook's tour" seemed a good pick, but I had no luck in finding them here.

SHF 5, rushing and late! Millefoglie con panna allo zabaione.

Preface: There is one thing I learned from this SHF it is that I really need to use my calendar to keep not only my real life appointments but the virtual ones too. I planned, made my sweet two weeks before the event, wrote the post below in advance and nonetheless I forgot to post on the right day. Hope it's still in time.

Having skipped for a series of reason every Sugar High Friday event I promised myself to take part to this edition. I love baking,bread, cakes, anything, how could I not take part to such an event? After reading the theme Clement picked I was even more convinced: puff pastry is one of those ingredients I love but never use as often as I would like. Great chance to make a simple dessertwhich has been one of my favorites for years: millefoglie con panna allo zabaione, mille-feuille with zabaione whipped cream.

Castagnole

As much as I love deep fried sweets I really try to limit their appearance in my kitchen to a few occasions each year. Resisting is hard, but not having the need to gain a few kilos seems to do the trick. When carnival comes though, "resistance is futile". Every year I feel the need to go back to those unctuous, sweet taste I loved as a kid. For this reason (and just to have an excuse to eat fried sweets really) I have just decided to start a tradition on this blog. Every year, for carnival, I will post a different recipe for a typical festive sweet. Last year it was chiacchiere and I already have a list for the next three years. After that... who knows, maybe I will shut Il Forno down out of shame. Sure, extremely likely.

This time I picked castagnole, little fried dough balls traditionally flavored with the aniseed liqueur mistrà. Although castagnole are not as widespread as chiacchiere they can be found from Veneto to Roma and there's quite a few regions fighting for their paternity. According to different sources they might come from Friuli or Veneto, Marche or Romagna, or maybe even Lazio. Pellegrino Artusi author of the first pan-Italian cookbook for the masses, claims the origin of the dish is to be found in Romagna. Guess where Artusi came from.

Tarte Tatin 1.0

I'm almost ashamed: it took me almost 34 years to bake my first tarte tatin. Embarrassing? Maybe, but let me explain. Italy and France are so close, yet for most Italians French cuisine is as exotic as Chinese or Indian. If you take away the few creperie and bistros, there is hardly anything else French-food related left in Italy, and even then not a good replica of the original at that. It is easier to find an Italian who knows what sushi is than one that has tried a real blanquette de veau or a choucroute Alsacienne, unless you meet someone who spends his or her holidays across the Alps. Until I moved abroad I was not different from my fellow compatriots.

Since then my food interest have luckily widened, also thanks to the web and fellow food bloggers, especially Clotilde and Martine, and my home cooking now includes a few French dishes I really enjoy. To my own surprise I've even made duck confit from scratch, with quite pleasing results. Five years ago I didn't even know what confit was.

Tarte tatin had been on my "to try" list for quite a long time. It sounded easy, maybe even too much so. Baking some of Pierre Herme's desserts seemed more challenging and stimulating. Once I found out this great photo essay on how to make tarte tatin on eGullet I could not wait any longer.

A menu for hope

While the media are slowly turning away their eye from the Tsunami hit regions, a few bloggers have decided to do their share to help. With a simple and bright idea from Pim has brought a group of food and wine bloggers together to create a virtual menu, complete with wine pairings and recipe collection, inspired by South-East Asian cuisine to rise some more funds for the hit populations: A Menu for Hope.

If you have a little time, please go and visit the link and make even a small donation. All the money collected from this event will go to UNICEF.

Bloggies, last chance to vote.

If you wanted to vote for the Bloggies and haven't done so yet, this is your last chance. Voting will close at 10:00 PM EST on Thursday, February 3rd.

Don't forget about Is My Blog Burning? in the Best Meme Category!

When I grow up I want to become. . . a Master Crispmaker!

Marketing can be great for a laugh. Commercials have become an integrant part of our culture: they can be funny, sad, arty, pretentious, moronic, but there's no going around them. The fact that they tend to tread the thin line between product promotion and blatant lie often annoys me, especially when lying becomes less and less of a scruple. And yet I can't deny I'm fascinated by commercials, the little tricks, catch phrases, borrow-in-your-mind tunes. I only wish I could stop singing the latter.

My latest favorite smile-inspiring commercial spiel comes from the nice guys of LantChips in Sweden. Being sold by the furniture giant IKEA in their food shops, these are commonly referred to as IKEA-chips/crisps by my friends. I ran across one of their organic crisps, sold as Alstroemer Chips, recently. The name comes from Jonas Alstroemer who is considered the "father" of potatoes in Sweden; not everyone agrees on that, the people at Uppsala University have quite a different opinion. The packaging of these chips is really neat: old fashioned, yet simple. It really wants you to think potato and crisps are an old Scandinavian tradition. The "Scandinavian style" at the front, the little description of the product signed by the company's "Master Crispmaker". I just love that. What does a master crispmaker do BTW? Can you study or fo an apprenticeship to become one? Just reading the name fills my mind of pictures of a guy in an old fashioned building slowly chipping away thin slices of potato on a huge wooden block, measuring each one for constant thickness, frying every single bag separately, checking taste. Production wouldn't be that high, but the quality would be superb.