Il Forno

Pizzeria Da Salvo

I'd not change any place in the world with Naples (and its immediate surroundings) when it comes to pizza. Pizza, as we know it today, was born there and Naples is, not surprisingly, most likely to be the city with the highest density of Pizzerias on Earth. Admittedly, not all the pizza made in Naples is great, but there are a pretty impressive number of pizzeria who produce a great pizza. Yet, when someone who is a real experts tells you he has found the best pizza in Naples, you simply strive to make it there and see what the fuss is all about, even if you live more than 1000 km away.

If you have been reading this blog from the start you might remember Marco, also known as Pizza Napoletana on a number of food discussion forums, and the pizza pics of his I published. A few month's ago he gave out his list of favourites in Naples and was clearly quite excited for the (re-)opening of one particular pizzeria, the best of all according to his opinion: Da Salvo in San Giorgio a Cremano (just outside Naples).

Tiella Gaetana.

From time to time I get e-mails from Americans (and I mean Argentineans as well as US Americans) asking for some particular Italian recipe their grandmother used to make. I am happy to help whenever I can, I love those trips down memory lane, but occasionally I feel terribly sorry for not being able to lend my hand in their recipe search. Sometimes it is because, while I know the dish well, I have no idea of how the recipe looks like. Yet more often, I simply have no idea what dish they are talking about: the name might be familiar, but the description of the dish is not. The problem is that Italy simply does not have a national cuisine, but rather a collection of local ones that at times can change dramatically just going over the next hill. So, even for a born and raised Italian like me,m Italy remains an immense cooking school, with a promise of something new around the next road bend.

Shortly before leaving for my Italian break, I had one of these ah-ah!/I am learning something new moments. I was reading William Black's "Al Dente", a very well written and enjoyable book about Italian food and history, and stumbled upon his description of Tiella Gaetana, the stuffed "bread" typical of Gaeta . Now, I spent many of my childhood summer holidays in the area near Gaeta, so I had heard the name before, but I must admit I had no idea what the dish was. Black describes food in such a delicious way – something he definitely has a knack for – that I knew I had to get a bite of tiella as soon as I could. I also wanted to learn more about it.

Fabulous Favourites Festival (IMBB? 26 and WBW 21): Pizza and Wine?

For ages I had been reading and hearing about how it is impossible to find a real wine-food pairing that works with pizza. Not every expert agrees with that, some even coming up with extensive pizza-wine pairing lists,but could it really be true? Does my favourite food taste better without wine than with, an heresy for any food-loving Italian?  The joint WBW/IMBB Fabulous Favourites Festival was just screaming for me to pick up the chance and do some food-wine pairing experimenting.

Want to know what came out? Continue below!

Erbazzone

I love fast food... or at least what for me still is and remains fast food, though Slow Food and friends insist on you calling it "street food" nowadays. More politically correct maybe, or justa differentiation to isolate the bad guys under the "fast food" label I guess. Call it whatever you like, what I'm talking is not McDo's cardboard burgers, rather all the typical food served "to go" all over the world: tasty, even delicious at times, unique and usually a calorie bomb. Traveling through a few Italian cities, I was inevitably greeted by the familiar sight of major US Burger chains, Starbucks-like joints, presumedly Neapolitan pizza stalls -selling in truth tomato and cheese topped industrial grade cardboard- and the ubiquitous Chinese takeaways and Kebab shops. All edible, minus the cardboard, yet boring. Why eat a sweet sour pork or a compressed chicken meat breaded lump (with additives) when you're somewhere new? Go look for the local stuff, follow your nose or ask a passer-by for a tip if you need to, and discover new food, that's what I always tell myself. Sometimes I will go against my tip and better judgment, I have to admit, but that's just because I can be really lazy if I wish to.

After the salumi and dinner of the day before, I was walking around Parma, looking at the sights, doing a little (cook-)book and food shopping and just killing time before dinner. Although I had decided to skip lunch for once walking three times out of the same bakery and seeing the numbers of people coming out with the local fast food speciality proved too hard to resist. I went in and came out a few minutes later holding my own piece of Erbazzone, a savory pie filled with a rich and extremely tasty spinach and swiss chard greens mixture. Though original of Reggio Emilia, Erbazzone seemed to be on sale everywhere in nearby Parma, in its classical version or even with a few alternative fillings. Don't get fooled by the vegetable filling into thinking of this as a light snack: it probably has enough calories to fuel a family of four for a day. Alongside the greens there's plenty of Parmigiano (inevitable in these area), pancetta, spring onions, garlic, parsley, and some recipes add an egg or even ricotta. Plus do you see those tiny brown bits on top of the crust? Crunchy pancetta bits: isn't that lovely? Beats a Big Mac every day.

P.S. for those interested in a recipe there's a good one from Mario Batali here. Apart Mario getting the city of origin of Erbazzone wrong, his recipe is quite heavy on the eggs . He's not the only one around doing so, though modern recipes are somewhat lighter and often use only one egg.

Sfinciuni and the missing recipe information.

Italy is full of pizza-like flatbreads: focacce, schiacciate, pizza pianca and so on. Sfinciuini is the Sicilian member of this extended family. Or actually members: all around Sicily sfinciuni takes many local disguises. It can be made with or without cheese, with tomato sauce or 'Strattu, the fantastic sun-dried Sicilian tomato concentrate, with or without bread crumbs... the list could go on forever. In its probably original version, from the nuns of the San Vito monastery, it is even filled with sausage meat. I decided to have a go at it after reading the recipe published in Slow Food's book Ricette di Osterie e Genti di Sicilia. The result was fine but not what I expected and after some research I found out that quite a few important details had been left out, as , in my experience, too often the case is with Slow Food's recipe books. Therefore, the recipe you'll find at the end is a "to try next time" suggestion to myself more than a tried and tested method. Trying out a recipe and finding out details have been (most probably) deliberately left out really makes me mad: if you don't want to share a recipe just keep it for yourself but don't waste my time. Why play these dirty little tricks on the home cooks? Let me just quote what the great MFK Fisher wrote in With Bold Knife and Fork on chefs who behave this way:

...he is not a good cook if he cheats himself to this puny and sadistic trickery of his admirers, and no deep-fat kettle is too hot to brown him in.

Which is in this case extremely fitting, since the recipe comes form Palermo's Antica Focacceria S. Francesco famous, among other things, for its fried goods.

The long and winding road to the perfect home oven Naan

I'm not what I would call a "recipe fine-tuner". When I usually test a recipe I either am disappointed, and just avoid making the same recipe again, or I like it and put it in my mental "to be cooked again" folder (although the "cooking again" seldom happens, too many recipes to try out there). But sometimes I'm ready to make an exception. Naan is probably my favourite flatbread but I can't go to my favourite Indian every time I feel like it. So I started looking for a good recipe for home oven baked naan. Ok, making naan in a home oven is not the ideal option,but how many westerners have a tandoor?

A Fougasse quartet

As much as I would like to get involved in some time-consuming baking project, I just can't at the moment. Still I've been becoming more of a "baking-junkie" lately :-), so I just have to bake at least once a week. Handling the dough, shaping and finally seeing those breads come out from the oven has a soul-warming effect for me. It can also be terribly frustrating, if it doesn't turn out as it should. Giving my time constrains at the moment, having something that can be kneaded, shaped and baked in a few hours time is great. I was also feeling like playing a bit so I decided to make some flavoured fougasse. Fougasse is the Provencal brother/sister of the Genovese focaccia. It is often sweet, with anise seeds and orange zest as flavouring, but can also be savoury: herbs and olives versions are quite common. What I really like about fougasse is the shape, like a slashed leaf or a ladder, depending on the slash pattern. I decided to do 4 small breads each with a different flavour. Here is what I made (from left to right in the picture above): fougasse aux fromage, cheese, fougasse aux lardons, bacon, fougasse aux olives, er... olives :-) and fougasse aux Roquefort, with the famous blue cheese.

Khachapuri, cheese-filled flatbread delight.

There is one bread book I can never get tired of. I's also a book that any serious flatbred lover must have: Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Flatbreads and flavors. Apart from having a wide range of flatbread recipes (which sometimes have a minor flaw, see below), there's loads of matching recipes to go with them (salads, sauces, stews, etc.) and always some nice background story going with them too. It's a book I've read already twice from beginning to end and I have a feeling it won't end at that. Saturday my hands were itching from the need to bake something, but I didn't have so much time so after looking at the list of quick breads in the book I decided to go for emeruli khachapuri or Georgian cheese-filled bread. Flatbread, yep; quick, just what I needed; filled with delicious melted cheese... what could I ask for more?

If it's good it ain't healthy!

Every food-loving person I know has a "dark" passion they would rather not talk about. It's either something other people find disgusting (a friend loves marmalade and mustard sandwiches), totally unhealthy or something other food lovers would strongly disapprove of. One of my "dark passions" is fried bread dough, possibly on the oily side. I recently discovered, at our local Christmas market, a stand selling Hungarian langosh, potato enriched dough disks fired and topped with garlic, sour-cream and eventually cheese.... mmhhh de-licious! In Naples similar street food exists: little balls of fried dough are eaten as snacks from friggitoria stalls and are called paste cresciute (risen dough). Fried pizzas are also quite common. The original fried pizza is actually a calzone filled with ricotta, pepper and pork cracklings. It's slowly disappearing but it once was much easier to find than the baked pizzas. After all all one needs to make them is some fire, dough and a pot full of oil. Such a pizza plays a role on one of my favourite films about Naples, L'oro di Napoli. Tomato topped pizzas are also quite common and usually loved by children. In a bout of nostalgia I decided to make these pizzas at home.

Flatbreads, Sichuan style

Yesterday I decide I had to bake some flatbreads again. I actually had planned to try quite a few recipes from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Flatbreads and flavors but sort of got more interested in trying other recipes. I decided to go for scallion pancakes, or as they call them, Sichuan pepper bread. Together with them I decided to eat stir fried greens, probably not a traditional match (but I was craving them), and a chilli-peanut dip which Alford and Duguid describe as "the perfect dip for any flatbread". With such an introduction one has to try the stuff, right?