Il Forno

IMBB14. Pierre Herme's Orange Tuiles

Having too much choice can be a nightmare. As a kid I occasionally had a day-dream about me going to a toy shop with my grandparents and them telling me to pick a toy. I could choose whatever toy I wanted but only one of them. And I only had a few minutes to choose. Which one to pick? So many choices... and so little time! When Roselle aka Ladygoat announced the theme of this IMBB edition my feelings quickly turned from "what a cool idea!" to "shit! what should I pick?" Picking the color orange as a common thread for this edition of Is My Blog Burning? was an original idea, and a feasible one. Think if she had picked black: you can only do so many things with squid ink, licorice and charcoal. Orange is one of those colors that seems just to tell you "eat me!", warm and inviting without being associated with danger as orange's bigger brother, red, inevitably is.

In the end what made the decision easier was the choice of ingredients, or rather, the lack of it. No pumpkin available anymore, and still too cold for apricots and cantaloupes. The mangos and papayas on sale were hard as rocks and probably as tasty. Carrots would have been the obvious options, but, as much as I like them raw, I can't really say to be a big fan of the orange root cooked in any form. So in the end I grabbed a bag of organic oranges and decided this was finally the chance to try something from Desserts by Pierre Herme: orange tuiles. You might have come across standard tuiles, very thin "cookies" of sugary dough often used as decoration in desserts. These orange ones seemed on the other hand to be something different. Instead of the usual cookie-like look, the ones in the book's picture looked like extremely thin nets of sugary filigree. I just had to give them a try.

2005 Best Restaurant in the World prize: the Italian reactions.

UK's Restaurant magazine announced the winners of the 2005 Best Restaurant in the World awards three days ago. Discussions on the subject are becoming an annual tradition, a clear sign of the success, like it or not, of the awards. No big surprises in the first three places: Thomas Keller's The French Laundry looses first place, finishing third (but  gets the Best in Americas award and 7th place with Per se), after home boy Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck and Adrià's El Bulli. The final results can be seen on many websites. Let me pick a fellow blogger: if you want the complete list go over to Alder's post on Vinography.

Reporting on these awards has been minimal to say the least in Italy in the past. Not so this year: papers (like Corriere della Sera and Repubblica), blogs (like Papero Giallo and kitchenstories) and food forums and discussion groups all reacted to the news. The principal reasons are simple.

The UK beating Italy 14 to 3 is quite humiliating, but then the choice of Cecchino dal 1887, a good trattoria dedicated to offal but not more than that, as best Italian on the list turns on the verge of ridicule. I've read baffled and angry comments and attacks directed to those who made the list ranging from head shaking to plain insult. Nobody, on the other hand, really seemed to make an effort to find out how this list was really put together.

Food Aid: The Game

On April 14th, during the last International Children Book Fair in Bologna, the UN World Food Program released Food Force. This is an educational computer game simulating a food crisis situation aimed at children and young teenagers. Noal Gallagher, WFP's director of communication explains the aim of this initiative in the press release:

Communicating with children today means using the latest technology, Children in the developed world don’t know what it’s like go to bed threatened by starvation. In an exciting and dynamic form, Food Force will generate kids’ interest and understanding about hunger, which kills more people than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

For reasons of research purely, I downloaded the game yesterday and spent the two hours I should have dedicated to writing this blog to gameplay. I wouldn't want to be accused of not being a thorough researcher.

The game is simple and probably ingenuous to the eyes of an adult, but it touches all those points that kids should get to know of in regards to food aid. And although extremely basic the game is catchy. Now sorry, but I have to leave... I have an island to feed.

Food Force runs on both Macs and Windows PCs and can be downloaded for free here.

Osteria del Minestraio, Rastignano (Bologna)

A few month's back there was a discussion over on eGullet about the restaurant situation in Italy. Whenever people talk about Italian eating establishments, be they Italian or not, there always seems to be a contrast between high cuisine and trattorie there. Form there, it was a small step before noticing that the what Italian restaurant scene needs most is... customers. Italians are generally conservative food eaters and classy places often seem scary and way too expensive.  In comparison to the UK, France or even Spain, Italian are lousy restaurant goers. Ronald made a great point back then, something I've been thinking about now and again for a time now: is there a missing link bringing trattoria and restaurant? Where are the funky, relaxed places serving cool yet unpretentious (OK change that to only relatively pretentious) food? There are very few "middle class" neighborhood places to be found in Italy if you exclude Rome and Milan, and there even only shyly present. But most of all: does the concept work in a country so split in its eating out habits?

If I doubts about if such places could exist and how original they would be, as opposed to falling into the trattoria or restaurant field,these disappeared after one of the coziest evenings of my recent trip to Northern Italy eating at Osteria del Minestraio in Rastignano, just five minutes away from the city limit of Bologna. I won't hide that I cannot be impartial about this place. Piero Pompili, co-owner and taking care of the front of the house is a friend. I appreciated, though often not shared, his flamboyant opinions on Italian food discussion forums and regularly read the very nice blog  he has set up, which I mentioned before, Il Gastronomo Riluttante, titled after Ruth Reichel's reluctant gourmet. Yet seeing Piero work, together with the skillful Arnaldo Laghi at the stove, is a completely different thing. Away goes the "Paris Hilton of Italian Gastronomy" (his own words) and there comes the charming, attentive and warm host.

WBW: Sicilia Nero d'Avola 2003, Cusumano

Even if I'm swamped with things to do, I would not have missed this edition of Wine Blogging Wednesdays for anything. Ronald and Katia, this month's hosts, picked up a theme very close to my heart: Sicilian reds. Italy's South! Like a sip of home.

My original idea would have been to find something slightly more unusual than the popular Nero d'Avola wines that are becoming ubiquitous. A Cerasuolo di Vittoria, an Etna Rosso, or even better a rare quality Marsala Rubino would have made my day. Missing that I would have settled for one of the few wines that really moved me, Faro Palari (tasted on this blog some time ago. No chance. When I make these plans, I always tend to forget about the lack of well stocked wine shops around here. A casual visit to a local supermarket brought up a cheap Sicilian Nerello Mescalese wine, which disappointingly but probably not surprisingly (given the price) turned out to be fit for the sink. Therefore, it had to be Nero d'Avola.

I picked the entry level 2003 Nero d'Avola from Cusumano, a good wine, with a clear Mediterranean character and extremely drinkable (judging from the speed the bottle got emptied).  Quoting from my notes, it has a pleasant bouquet of red fruit followed by spices and nuts, and just a hint of Mediterranean herbs; a full, and only slightly unbalanced (towards alcohol) taste with very smooth tannin; and a surprisingly long finish for a wine in this price class (9 €). Definitely worth the price.

Fine Food Crisis in Germany.

A  brief interlude in the chain of  Italian themed posts, caused by recent news. Normal posting will resume tomorrow

Yesterday's edition of FT.com has an interesting article on the crisis of the gourmet food industry in Germany and in particular on the situation of Rungis Express, Germany's and Europe's  largest purveyor of fine foods to restaurants and upmarket grocery shops. A thought-provoking article. This is in a sense sad news. As many may probably know, the economic situation in Germany is not exactly positive at the moment and people seem to be loosing interest in gourmet food in favor of quantity at low prices. People curse the Euro, the lack of economic growth or the politics of the Schröder government. Whatever the reason, it is easy, even for a foreigner like me, to observe how the spending for food has decreased in the past five years. Instead of shopping in upmarket groceries, Germans head to ALDI and LIDL, discount supermarkets offering mass produced goods at bargain prices. The crisis of a gourmet institution as Rungis is depressing, yet looking behind the surface it might have a very positive effect.

Sbrisolona.

Mantua has always had a special place at my table. The local cuisine is marked by its original character and delicious dishes, yet the real reason for my liking is far more personal. My father's maternal family comes from there and at home we've always cooked Mantuan for special occasions like the Christmas Eve dinner or Christmas Day Lunch. Through my childhood and adolescence, our infrequent trip to Mantua were always highlighted by great meals cooked at home by one of my relatives and the delicious obligatory sweets.

Mantuans love their sweets, and the city's pastry shops carry impressive arrays from which to choose from but there's a core of of four special sweets that most locals consider as THE real thing. The quartet of typical Mantuan sweets is made up by the Helvetia cake, probably invented by a Swiss pastry chef (hence the name) and made of soft disks of almond based dough layered with zabaione, butter cream or even chocolate, the Greca, a thin puff pastry shell containing a rich almond filling, the Anello del Monaco, a yeasted dough sweet in the Panettone and Pandoro tradition, and last but not least the Sbrisolona.

New! Italian Food Blogs.

I had almost lost hope for Italian food blogs. For more than a year now, the number of enjoyable food blogs in Italy could be counted on the fingers of a hand... of a clumsy one eyed lumberjack. My own decision to post in English came mainly from the hope to communicate and get in touch with people around the world, yet a part of it also came from the less than encouraging situation of food blogs in Italy.  Had it not been for Ronald and Katia's Via Ritiro no.7 Diary and Carlo's My latest supper, both in English, I would have felt rally alone.

And then, low and behold! In the past few weeks Italy seems to have woken up and finally discovered food blogs; the number of new ones joining the few existing a few month's ago has dramatically increased. Suddenly the Italian blogsphere has become much more interesting for anyone interested in food. (Note, all of the blogs mentioned below are in Italian... I did warn you!)