Il Forno

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!

IMBB25: Pasta c'anciova e muddica

I love bread.

Not something hard to say, when your blog is called "the oven" and was originally started with baking in mind rather than food in general, as the focus rather turned out to be. (I never could keep my mind concentrated on one single topic, too much interesting stuff out there.)

As much as I love bread, I hate wasting it. In part it must have to do for my passion for it, but I rather believe that my maternal grandparents are to blame (or praise, depending on your point of view). Having lived through WWII and food rationing, they had a careful attitude to food waste, yet not guilt-ridden like the grandparents of a few school friends I got to know better during my childhood. If you exclude bread, that is. I cannot remember a piece of bread being thrown away: stale bread would always be used somehow, eventually as bread crumbs if no other idea popped up. I can still se the huge brad crumbs jar in my grandparents cupboard as if I had it before my eyes.

IMBB 22: of Love and Pasta

Most couples have their special song, movie or special place which bring back memories of that special time at the beginning of their relationship when every moment spent together was lived with joy, expectation and maybe a little fear. Daniela and me have our special place too –actually more than one, though a particular spot in Cambridge has a special meaning for us– but the one thing that brings bag that special feeling is a particular pasta dish that is forever bound with a particular moment in our relationship when mere flirting turned into something more serious.

SHF/IMBB Cookie Swap: Sweet Sicily, part III

It is time (Lion King anyone?).

After an almond based amuse and a meaty appetizer it is time to reveal my contribution to this month's SHF/IMBB Cookie swap event. With Sicily in my mind, I thought for a long time about baking some traditional sweet out of the region's classics and I would have had enough to choose from. Instead I opted for a little creativity; having some Sicilian ingredients at hand, I felt like playing around a bit. The result is shown above.

If you've red this blog from the beginning, those cookies might remind you of something else I had written about almost exactly two years ago (gosh, my photos were really ugly back then!). These cookies are indeed inspired by those Baci di dama I baked back then –and a few times more between then and now– yet with a twist that makes them more "Sicilian". Maybe not so much in acquiring an authentic Sicilain taste, rather inspired by the flavors and aromas of the island's pastries. I'm calling these Baci di picciotta for the time being, as a sort of pun: baci di dama means, lady's kisses, and "picciotta" is Sicilian dialect for girl. If you have a better suggestion I'm all ears.

SHF/IMBB Cookie Swap: Sweet Sicily, part II

After yesterday's little cookie-amuse start to my contribution to this month's SHF/IMBB event,  I wanted to take you today to have a look at a delicious example of culinary melting-pot recipe from Sicily: 'mpanatigghi.

'Mpanatigghi or Impanatigghi are a typical sweet from Modica, but this superficially simple fact hides a much deeper historic background. Although there is no certainty that the tale went as I'm about to tell you, it is not too risky to imagine the following ingredients were needed.  Take a few the Sicilian nuns, inventors of some of the islands most intriguing sweets. Take a couple of Spanish priests. Send them first to the Americas, where they learn about chocolate, then have them introduce the godly product to Europe, and clearly also in the Spanish domains in Southern Italy, hence in Sicily too. Take the Catholic dietary rules for Lent, forbidding meat consumption. And last, but not least, keep those Arabic influences in Sicily, especially the spices, and the Spanish Empanadas in mind. You have it all? You ready to go on then!

SHF/IMBB Cookie Swap: Sweet Sicily, part I

Though over two months have gone by since I came back from my trip to Sicily, the taste of the island have still been tickling my taste buds and mind. When looking for an idea for this joint SHF/IMBB event, I simply could not get Sicily from my mind. Also, that little stash of pastry ingredients I brought back seemed just to be calling out to be used in a special cookie recipe made up just for the event: that's exactly what I did. Yet, since this time we have three days to post our recipes, why not use the chance and present a little menu of posts on Sicilian sweets: one for each day, ending with the real recipe on Sunday. So today let's start with:

The amuse – Sicilian almond pastries

Friday night Pizza

Takeaway pizza on Friday evenings is one of the things I really miss of Naples. Even better if with a cold beer and side of pezzi fritti (fried morsels) as antipasto!

P.S. Eating pizza in a real Neapolitan pizzeria is even better, but on Fridays that usually means waiting an hour or so since everybody seems to feel like pizza on Fridays in Naples. If I think that this is the best we get in Jena (that "crazy dog pizza" deserves a front row place at the tribunal for crimes against pizza), I feel like crying: wouldn't you?

Caffé Sicilia-Noto

Living abroad I have noticed that to many Italian pastry products are not particularly exiting. People might love those antipasti and pastas, devour risotto and pizza, yet when it comes to sweets many would rather turn to classics from the northern side of the Alps. For once I have to agree. Not that Italian sweets are bad, quite the contrary, but they are too simple and straightforward, lacking that fancy and fussy side desserts thrive upon.

That would be a completely honest description of Italian sweets if it wasn't for Sicily: once you land on the island you join a world of candied fruits, baroque cakes, incredible ices and even Mexican style chocolates (more about that in a few days.) It's almost dishonest to call Sicilian patisserie "Italian", it is actually more the product of centuries of Mediterranean fusion at its best. And while there are many places serving great traditional sweets, Sicily is also one of the most exiting places pastry-wise in Italy, where it only Corrado Assenza and his Caffé Sicilia in the Baroque city of Noto.

Sword(fish) and Dolphin(fish)

Don't you just love beginnings? Is there anything nicer than the smell of the first days of spring, the way her/his eyes look at you when you've just fallen in love, the first sip of wine after a hard day? It doesn't matter that you're allergic to pollen, that you'll soon dump your new Romeo or Julia because he/she is an idiot that prefers frozen TV dinners to your gourmet dishes and that the wine will give you a gigantic hangover during that important meeting tomorrow: that second of bliss is worth it even if you might regret it later. One of my favorite "firsts" is having my first meal during my travels, especially when in a new country. The only regrets I might have are those regarding my weight back home. At least there's always diet.

Fine, Italy is not exactly "abroad" for me, still whenever I travel back the first meal has a special taste really marking the change in flavors and aromas. The first Italian meal we had on our last vacation was even more than that. Just the previous afternoon my parents had gone fishing in the Gulf of Naples with some friends who own a boat and came back with a few small tunas, a young dolphin fish and a small swordfish. If that was the start of our vacation, I was looking forward to the rest! The tunas had been frozen already but we had a delicious meal with a swordfish pasta and dolphin fish main course.

Sciurilli

The bad thing about having a fixed fried chicken idea for the last IMBB? was that I completely forgot about a little fried something I had prepared a while back and forgot to post about: fried zucchini blossoms.

In Naples fried zucchini blossoms, locally called sciurilli or fiorilli, are a very popular item, both at home, in pizzerias and in places serving street food like friggitorie specialized in fried morsels. When the season comes it is quite easy to find these blossoms on sale at your greengrocer. Here in Germany, unless you have a friend with a garden, and plenty of blossoms to spare, you have to hope for an Italian friend (or relative) to pop by at the right. Which is exactly how I lay my hand on those zucchini blossoms pictured above.

There are plenty of recipes for fried zucchini blossoms, stuffed or not, and using a variety of batters. While all can be pretty tasty when done properly I prefer mine as simple as possible: stamen removed, coated in a batter of flour and beer (pilsner) and fried, possibly in olive oil, till crisp. I simply find that the anything else covers the delicate taste of the blossoms too much. What is really important to get them crisp and dry is, as always when frying, to get the oil temperature right, otherwise you'll end up with soggy, heavy digestible oil filled batter sponges, and that is as disgusting as it sounds. 175°C (345°F) works just fine. Below you can see the finished fried zucchini blossoms together with a sliced Sorrento pink tomato I posted about last time.

Pomodori Rosa di Sorrento

Sorrento's Pink tomatoes
If I had to describe Italian gastronomy I could use many labels, regional -or better deeply local-, anarchic, prideful, tied to history, religion and terroir, but probably the most fitting definition would be that it is an almost bottomless treasure-chest full of recipes, wines and most of all fantastic ingredients. It's no wonder so many foreign food writers look to Italy as a source of inspiration for their books: they'll be challenged NOT to find something original to write about. The real problem with many of these gastronomic treasures though is that they're produced in such tiny amounts and for such an overly local market that your only chance to taste them is to travel directly to the source... another reason to finally make that Italy trip you've been delaying for all that time, isn't it?

Meme 1.1- Ten (food related) things to do before you die: the Italy for foreigners list.

A while back I was tagged by the Italian blog Peperosso for a meme inspired by the Observer's list of 50 things foddies should do: make a list of ten things you think every food lover should not miss. This 10 things meme was intriguing. I gave this some thought straightaway... then I took my little job-related pause from blogging, and so I got a chance to think some more. I got tagged for another few memes following that and so in the next few weeks I'll try to catch up with the backlog of writing my dear friends have lovingly dumped on me. Just kidding, deep inside I enjoy this... sure do.

After all this time I ended up with two lists. One is inspired by the way I feel about Italians and their food loves, prejudices and unfamiliarity with what goes on outside our borders. The other puts together ten Italian foods that you just have to have tried, especially if you are a foreigner traveling to Italy, but don't feel excluded if you happen to be an Italian. I'll start today with the latter. The former will be up in a few days.

Crostata

Simple can be so complicated at times. Especially when it comes to recipes, and extremely so for recipes just like crostata.

The basic crostata is one of the simplest Italian sweets, nothing more than a shortcut pastry tart filled with jam. Sounds simple doesn't it? Yet there are enough recipes out there to give you a headache if you try to pick one. All are guaranteed to give you a good result, yet not a perfect one. Why would anyone settle for a less than excellent and keep using a recipe that you just know could be better? Why not improve that recipe if it is so straightforward? Simply because the real secret with this sweet is that it is so easy that everyone can play with it till they find their favorite.

For exactly this reason, giving a recipe does not make too much sense. I am adding one at the end nonetheless, close to what my "ideal" crostata is, but take it more as a guideline than the "winner" recipe. You'll need to find your own ideal recipe to fit your own taste buds lazy-boy! Fear not, it is not an impossible task -quite the contrary in fact- as long as you keep in mind the following considerations about crust, jam and their balance.

Rosamarina, delicious and controversial

Let me give you a little quiz. If someone showed you an unlabeled jar containing a relish of tiny fishes fermented in salt and chilies and asked you to guess where it came from, what would you say?

Thailand...
... Mexico maybe?

IMBB15, Has my blog Jelled: sugolo, or better, grape glue

For the complete roundup of this IMBB edition, please go to Elise's summary.

...or "Never trust a recipe only because it comes from a three starred Michelin chef".

Sooner or later it had to happen. Having had a successful run of recipe tried and tested for IMBB up to now it was inevitable that a dud would show up.

Soon after reading what theme Elise had picked up for this edition, I decided to make a traditional sweet of the Italian Lombardy region, sugolo or suc. Sugolo is a pudding typical of vintage time, one of the many ways to use of any grapes left over from wine-making: a custrad-jelly relying on the gelling power of pectin, from the grapes, and starch, added in the form of flour.

It is one of the sweets my father grew up with, and he would occasionally prepare it for us, though me and my brothers were never huge fans. I thought that after so many years this would have been a great chance to renew acquaintances with this dish. So I decided to use the recipe appearing in dal Pescatore's cookbook: if I was going to do sugolo I would do one with a pedigree.

Staging (and dining) at Locanda della Tamerice

If you take some vacation from work and, instead of spending those days with your family, decide to use them to do a stage in a restaurant kitchen, would you say your food obsession has gone too far? I would probably say yes (but feel free to leave your comments about this below), though saying so I'm only hurting myself... because that is exactly what I did two months ago.

I travelled the about 1000 km I need to get to Italy not to dine at Dal Pescatore or to taste the culatelli at Al Vedel, but to spend a week working split shifts in the kitchen of Locanda della Tamerice in Ostellato, near Ferrara. I had gotten in touch with Tamerice's chef, Igles Corelli, through a chat I organized on the eGullet Society's Italy forum with him as a guest. I wasn't really looking for a stage at the time. Chatting about cuisine with Igles and his fantastic wife Pia I just mentioned my curiosity about seeing how a restaurant kitchen works from the inside. Well just drop by, was the answer. How could I miss a chance like this? Bags packed I made my way to Italy as soon as I could.

The old fashioned pasta cutter.

I confess: I'm an absolute softie when it comes to old-fashioned kitchen tools. I'm no big fan of stereotyped images of Italian cuisine such as "mamma's cooking", but I admit that whenever I see an old chitarra pasta maker or a garganelli comb I give in and start musing about the old times gone, when the whole family would make pasta at home instead of buying it. Not that I ever lived in a family that made pasta every week, but it's still nice to be a sentimental sucker from time to time.

Nonetheless, since most of my family comes from Northern Italy, making fresh stuffed pasta has remained a tradition we follow on special occasions. Be our guest for Christmas and you'll be strongly encouraged to help shape hundreds of tortelli, tortelloni and anolini. It's that or washing up, you see. Having practiced for years, I can say I'm getting quite good at this. Or better at everything except cutting the pasta dough into the regularly shaped squares needed to have a batch of tortelli where each one looks identical to the next. To do this free hand you really need  special skills. There are those who could cut series of equally spaced parallel lines without breaking sweat, ending up with perfect tortelli every time. I've always been in awe of these people. I, on the other hand, am one of those who would probably finish with a bunch of psychedelic curved patterns guaranteed to give you visions if you only took a moderate dose of hallucinogenic substances. And definitely crappy looking tortelli. A good reason to be on the lookout for new pasta cutting tricks and tools.

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.

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.

Salame Strolghino

Shopping habits sometimes play strange tricks. Whenever I think about seasonal food there's always that underlying idea that fruit and vegetables are the "food" everyone's referring to. After all you see rhubarb appear and disappear in the range of a few weeks, new potatoes, still dusted with dirt, tickle your eyes and taste buds for a while in the market stalls, or at least you should. In today's transcontinental freight air transport age, you can actually get anything that tickles your fantasy at any time from anywhere around the globe at just the right stage of unripeness. But that's another story.

And yet, for similar reasons, it is easy to forget how many of our cheeses and meats were, and sometimes still are, seasonal. In some parts of Italy the killing of the pig, a ritual and social event, described so well in its Portuguese version by Anthony Bourdain in "A Cook's Tour", was and still is associated to the cold seasons. Some of the slaughtered pig would then be eaten fresh, often simply grilled, while the largest part of the meat would be transformed into an array of cured meats and preserved as such, the cold weather suppplying a sort of natural refrigeration.

Dal Pescatore

As Italian I have progressively developed a suspicious attitude towards the Michelin Italy red guide, with its inconsistency, at times inexplicable evaluation parameters and their striking undervaluation of Italy’s best. After all it is French (OK British now, even worse!). Yet, it was not without some sensation of awe that I made my way towards what very probably is Italy’s longest standing Michelin three star restaurants: dal Pescatore in Runate, a tiny location on the river Oglio, still in the Mantua province, but only just. Once a simple countryside trattoria serving fried fish and Lambrusco wine, it has evolved through the years, without compromising its character, to become one of the recognized centers of finest Italian cuisine and hospitality. Critics from all over the world have praised the work of Antonio and Nadia Santini, owners and respectively maitre and chef of this Relais and Chateaux restaurant. Still, occasionally, I would read less than enthusiastic opinions on dal Pescatore’s cuisine. Insignificant, brainy and heartless, old fashioned would be some of the criticisms, followed by lamentations at the little changes in the menu over the years and finishing with accusations of the food being French (as opposed to Italian), by now the stereotyped and often extremely superficial attack used to dismiss Italian fine dining establishments. A question was hanging in the air: would dal Pescatore be a treat, “the best restaurant in the world” as US critic John Mariani called it back in ’99, or THE disappointment of my relatively limited carreer as starred restaurant customer?

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.

Al Vedel, Part I: The Culatello Files.

After a stop in Munich to see some friends and a few hours drive to Parma I was ready to start my little tour of Emilia Romagna in the best of ways: seeing how the king of Italian salumi, Culatello di Zibello D.O.P., is made. For this I would rely on the fantastic help of Ore Dagan. For those who don't know him, let me spend a few words on a great guy: Ore is a CIA Culinary Arts B.P.S. who, following his love for Italian food, moved to Italy to successfully complete Slow Food's Master of Italian Cooking, writing a great blog about it on the eGullet forums in the process. He's now staging at Al Vedel, both a restaurant and a salumi producer, learning the Italian art of transforming pigs into delicious cured meats. (If you want to read more about Ore's Italian adventures do not miss his nice blog, Potential Gold.)

But back to Culatello di Zibello. Why does it deserve the title of king among Italian salumi? The simplest way to explain this is to take a slice of Culatello on a buttered slice of bread: the taste alone should be enough to convince you. Thanks to the choice of meat, its preparation and its aging, first in dry then moist rooms, Culatello is a deliciously mellow, sweet yet aromatic cured meat. It's usually aged 12 to 14 months minimum but older Culatelli are for my taste even more seducing. Add to this the fact that to make a Culatello you have to waste a Prosciutto, and you'll have a further economic reason to name this salume as "the king".

Ossobuco alla Milanese

The last two weeks have been terribly boring here in Jena, at least from the weather side: snow, snow and... guess what? More snow! I like snow, don't get me wrong. It awakens the child in me. It's just that after you've gone through the standard snowball fight, snowman building and sleigh riding it starts to get a bit on my nerves. Streets and sidewalks constantly covered with either sludge or smooth ice anyone?

At least cold wintery weather has a good side. It gives me the perfect excuse to stay at home cooking some nice hearty dish on the week-end and to open a nice bottle of full bodied red wine to go with that. Polenta is always nice when it snows, either served simply with cheeses or with a few different braised meats. Some nice rich German dish like Sauerbraten can also be a good warm-me-up. The best thing is to wrap yourself in enough clothing -till you look like the Michelin man possibly- and roll downhill to the market, see what's on sale and pick a dish. The pick of last week was a nice ossobuco, to be used for the classic ossobuco alla Milanese served with saffron risotto.

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.

Cotechino

This past New Year's Eve was the chance to have a few friends over and have an almost entirely Italian dinner. The "almost only" refers to the sweet, delicious Czech milk rolls filled with plum compote, called Buchteln in German (and probably in Czech too) served with warm vanilla custard. Let's go back to the start though. We began with a platter with assorted salumi, a winter risotto with endive, Gorgonzola, walnuts and pear and the Italian New Year's Eve classic: Cotechino.

Festive dishes in Italy are often as varied as the different cuisines are and yet there are a few specialties which are common throughout the nation: Panettone for Christmas and Colomba for Easter for example. And Cotechino (and Zampone) as the main course of the New Year's eve dinner, to be served almost inevitably with lentils. Lentils are traditionally seen as a symbol for coins and therefore money; eating these pulses during New Year's Eve is supposed to be auspicious for an economically successful year. I hope so, I've eaten my fair share this time.

Chin8

In this progressively more standardised and globalised world I can’t help feeling a glimmer of happiness whenever I ran across typical local products. I’m not talking about the artisan cheese, peculiar bread or history laden sweet. No, what I’m talking about here is the supermarket product that immediately makes you understand you’re in another country. In particular about a particular Italian soft drink: chinotto.

Chinotto, apart being a soft drink, is a particular citrus fruit, found mainly in Sicily, with a slightly bitter taste and unique aroma. The bitterness makes it one of my favourite fruit to eat candied: the sweet of the sugar and the bitter chinotto form a great contrast. But let’s go back to the drink. Chinotto was born in post-WWII Italy as an autochthonous answer to Cola. Although it shares a very similar colour its slightly bitter taste has always made chinotto the drink to choose to distinguish yourself from the boring, unadventurous cola drinkers.

Peperonata

It's pepper time. Sweet bell peppers are finally on sale everywhere. Even the cheap discount supermarkets seem unable to sell bad ones at the moment. It would be a waste to miss on them as long as the moment lasts. I already have a couple of recipes I've been wanting to test for a while but as start I had to pick a pepper classic: peperonata. This is one of the not many dishes which might really be considered Italian cooking and not, for once, regional fare. Peperonata can be used as a vegetable side dish but I prefer to use it as starter, together with some fresh cheese. Or even better use both together for a delicious panino.

Pasta e Zucchine

The name "Napoletana" or "Neapolitana", pops up quite often in the menus of Italian restaurants abroad, usually associated with dishes based on tomato sauce. Now, it is certainly true that Neapolitans love their spaghetti con la pummarola, but reducing everything to that is a bit depressing. Before pasta became so popular in Naples, the locals were famous for their vegetable eating habits. The consumption of salad, cabbages and similar was so high that Neapolitans were called mangia foglie, leaf-eaters. The love for vegetables remains. If you open any well researched Neapolitan cookbook you'll find many ingenious ways to prepare vegetable dishes. A whole bunch of them are devoted to pasta and vegetables. Recipes vary a lot, from incredibly simple, pasta with onions and not much else, to longer preparations. One of my favourite recipes is the relatively simple pasta with zucchini.

Roast tomato sauce

It's summer. It should be the time of ripe delicious fruit and vegetables. Right. Than why can't I find a decent tomato on sale around here? The only thing you can buy, be it at a supermarket or local produce market, is inevitably those water-logged greenhouse tomatoes from Holland. Summer has always been the time to make the best and simplest pastas. Take a few garden tomatoes, peeled and seeded, if you feel fussy or posh, chopped and heated, briefly, with only olive oil and basil and you'll have the best pummarola spaghetti money can't buy. Not a chance for me. Feeling deprived of such simple tastes in this tomato-underprivileged land I live in, I decided to take another approach. I used a classic recipe from Puglia to make sauce with roast tomatoes.

Castagnaccio

Reading this post from Jeremy at Frost Street, I felt the urge to do some cupboard “cleaning”. As usual I threw off way less than I could have, but found a long forgotten bag of chestnut flour I had brought back from Italy last winter. Chestnuts, like acorns, are one food item that used to be associated with poverty. They were used as a source of carbohydrates from those who could not buy flour or who lived in remote valleys, especially in the winter months. In some parts of Italy the importance of chestnut woods as food source went beyond mere subsistence: it was such that it influenced the cuisine of these areas. Although a few examples exist throughout Italy, where this is most evident is certainly the northern mountainous part of Tuscany bordering Liguria. Here bread, polenta and sweets were, and in part still are, made using chestnut flour. The most famous of these dishes is certainly castagnaccio a chestnut flour cake enriched by nuts and, in its richer versions, a few other ingredients. I hadn't had castagniaccio for ages, so the recipe for my, let's call it, cupboard-archaeology treasure was decided.

La Genovese

It is no mystery for anyone: Neapolitans are big on pasta. They love pasta so much they've been called mangia maccheroni, maccheroni eaters, at least since the beginning of the XIX century. It's funny how this half statement-half insult has often become a way to refer in a defamatory way to Italians. Apart it being erroneous historically and socially -most Northern Italians ate very little durum pasta before WWII- it's kind of weird that a preference for a certain food should be used as an insult. I've been called this a few times here in Germany, mostly as a joke, a few times with the intention to insult me, but either way it always makes me smile. Me? Maccheroni eater? Sure, why not? Pass the pasta.

In my years in Naples I've learned you can make pasta with anything: vegetables, meat, fish, butter or oil alone or with cheese, and even sweet. The first pasta was probably cooked in milk and eaten with sugar and cinnamon. You just need to chose the right pasta type (and yes, you need all those shapes) and the proper cooking method and you'll have a tasty filling dish in the worst case and a delicious, happiness-tears-in-your-eyes one in the best. Even with so many dishes to chose from Neapolitans have their "holy trinity" of pasta sauces: pummarola, ragu' and genovese. Pummarola, simple tomato sauce, with no garlic or onion, just flavoured by basil, is the hardest of the three since it only tastes the way it should if made with the proper ripe tomatoes. Forget it otherwise. Ragu', from the French ragout, is actually a tomato based stew: the meat is eaten on the side and the cooking fond as pasta sauce. There are as many recipes for this as Neapolitan families. But my favourite is the third one: Genovese.

Catch of the day: stuffed squids, Neapolitan style

I never really noticed how much I miss fish till Wena came up with the theme for this Is My Blog Burning? edition. As I started getting ideas for my contribution, dishes I love and I know taste great, I noticed every single one of them needed some fish, crustacean or mollusc I would have no problem finding in Naples but never seen on sale fresh around here. The offer around here is definitely poor and I seriously miss having a decent fish market around. Therefore the choice became restricted to using local fresh-water fish or frozen one.

I really wanted to try something new with fresh-water fish, but my thought-train had started going down the Neapolitan-theme line and it was too late to stop it. So I spent the next few days examining the the frozen fish section of all local supermarkets, catching a flu in the process... just kidding. I didn't catch any flu, instead I went home with my own "catch of the day": a bag of good looking squids.

Risi e bisi

Fresh peas from the pod are one of the great gifts of late Spring, even raw, fresh out of the pod, their taste is a promise of Summer. Eating peas at their best seems quite a hard task if you don't have a garden, at least according to Bruce Cole of Sautee Wednesday (or should I say MFK Fisher?). I'm not so lucky, very much so, as it happens to be. I have no garden and I hardly ever manage to find any fresh peas in the pod on sale around here. Everyone seems to be buying frozen so there's no market, according to one of the greengrocers I usually shop from. I have to admit that's quite understandable: frozen peas are, compared to other frozen veggies, those who lose less in the process. The Independent had an interesting article on the subject last year. For some cosmic coincidence or maybe as a gift from the cooking gods (there must be some, right?) I managed to find some organic pod-peas on sale at a somewhat exaggerated price. I ignored the price and Daniela's comments and bought a kilo. What to do with them? Had I had any chance of finding baby cuttlefish I would have gone for seppioline e piselli. Not likely. Instead I opted for a recipe that radiates pea-ness, risi e bisi.

Nancy Silverton's rustic bread and breaking my head on ciabatta

A few weeks ago I baked for the first time bread from Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery. I chose probably the least time consuming and easiest of the lot two start, the rustic bread, her own version of the Italian ciabatta (slipper in Italian, because of its shape). I intended to write about this bread at the time but my blog posting backlog (still growing) delayed at least in part this entry. What played an even further role was trying to understand what a ciabatta is and where it really comes from. The bread I baked, although delicious, had nothing to do with the ciabattas you get in Italy and this is not the first time I notice this. Recipes from other US, UK and German baking books I tried before gave varying results, some to die for other to kill (the book's author) for, but never anything like what I was used to. So why is this bread so popular (there's even a nice German blog called Chili und Ciabatta) if we're actually talking about completely different breads?

In the news

Italy has put together a series of rules to define what makes a true Neapolitan pizza. Two comments to article and rules. Given the article title ("Italy mulls pizza protection law") you'd be excuse to think these rules concern pizza making in general. They are instead intended to protect the classic Neapolitan pizza production style. While I'm all for protecting typical local products like wine or cheese I'm not really sure the same applies to recipes. I'm quite sure that even between the pizza makers who put together the rules a certain degree of recipe freedom exists. The Neapolitan style sure exists and some guidelines on how to achieve such a result are welcome, but rules? Not being very familiar with laws and the like, I haven't managed to understand if these rules are intended as something intended to certify "real Neapolitan pizza" or as a tool to prevent others from calling their pizza Neapolitan. I see no problem with the former but can't really imagine the latter.

La pasta di Montalbano: i perciati ch'abbrusciano

Ever noticed the narrative power food has in stories? Imagine a hero (or heroin) of a book or movie. There he is, almost too perfect to be true: is anyone of us even remotely like him? Now imagine him eating in a down-trodden bar, making coffee on a campfire or sitting in his own kitchen. Immediately the atmosphere becomes warmer, more human and homely. The food eaten or served itself can have a meaning by itself. A special sweet might indicate a need for affection, an excessive dinner the exuberance or self-indulgence of a character and so on. A book with no mention whatever about food still feels weird, I must admit (but then, I write a food blog), as if it lacked contact to real life. Probably that's the reason why enjoy so much books mixing crime and food. This might sound like an improbable combination, and has a somewhat sick side to itself, but it's full of examples out there. I have to admit that the crime writers that really rock my boat are those who bring the topic to an almost obsessive level: George Simenon and his Inspector Maigret, and his frequent bistro visits, and Manuel Vasquez Montalban and his character Pepe Carvalho, immersed in the aroma of Cataln cooking and preserved :-) in plenty of alcohol, are two favourites.

Apart these two, there's one Italian writer who I probably like even better and writes great crime stories laden of delicious Sicilian food references: Andrea Camilleri. Most of his books are centred on the figure of commissario Montalbano (chief inspector Montalbano) and the collection of amusing characters that make up his police district.

IMBB around the world in a bowl of... oranges: arancine

As soon as Pim decided the theme for this new edition of Is My Blog Burning I knew what I wanted to make. I had a rice dish I'd been wanting to try out for months and I only needed an excuse. The last few days have been so busy (as you might have noticed from the lack of posts) that I almost didn't get a chance to make what I wanted, but in the end I managed to. I did finish 10 minutes ago though.

The dish I made is a Sicilian speciality: arancine al sugo. Arancine, or arancini, to put it simply, are stuffed rice balls, covered in bread crumbs and deep fried. The name means little oranges and they're meant to remind of the fruit for their size, shape (in most cases and colour. Today arancine are made with a number of fillings but the original ones are the ones "al sugo". There are probably as many recipes for this dish as there are Sicilian families. The shape can vary: round or conic. The rice can be cooked with the absorption method or like a risotto, with or without saffron. The stuffing can also vary a lot: a special tomato sauce, ragu, is a constant, but small peas, bechamel sauce, cheese can be added or not. Looking at a few recipes and following my own taste I put together my own recipe. I decided to stay true to the "little oranges" idea and made mine round and with saffron.

Melanzane a scarpone: stuffed aubergines, Neapolitan style.

Some vegetables are just made for stuffing: split a pepper down the middle and, pronto, you have two perfect, ready to be filled, "cups". Artichokes, zucchini, onions and even squash work great in this "stuff it" game. And clearly aubergines. If you happen to read this pages every now and then you might have noticed I'm quite fond of this berry (yep that's what it is, from a botanical perspective) and I've posted a few recipes before (one here, another one, a third here and a last one). Stuffed aubergines are quite common around the Mediterranean basin and, as far as I know, in that part of Asia between the Mediterranean sea and India too. So there's plenty of ideas and every now and then I try a new recipe. I'm never disappointed, all these different dishes taste great. But sometimes, when I feel like having a simpler version of stuffed aubergine I go back to my recipe for melanzane a scarpone, literarily shoe-like aubergines, or Neapolitan style stuffed aubergines.

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.

Darling, did you dig up the cheese? or the tale of Formaggio di Fossa.

I had intended to post a bit more about the contents of the package I got from Italy, but too much got eaten before I even had a chance to take a picture. Sometimes it's quite hard to resist a fridge full of delicious food, only waiting for you to bite into it. Something did survive the slaughter, though: half a Formaggio di Fossa di Sogliano cheese. Given my fascination with fermented foods, formaggio di fossa is one of my favourites: it's twice fermented!

Parmigiana di melanzane: on an aubergine high

If Italian cooking is one of your food interests, you'll probably now that Italian cuisine is a very regionalised one. Dishes and food products can vary greatly even from one small town to the next. That's why in most Italian trattorias you'll hardly find those dishes that are so common in Italian restaurants abroad. There are a few exceptions to this rule of thumb. On of these is a recipe that has spread throughout Italy: parmigiana di Melanzane aka eggplant or aubergine parmesan/parmegiana/parmigiana. The recipe is probably original of the Neapolitan areas form where it spread first to southern Italy and then the whole peninsula. For me parmigiana is THE aubergine recipe. Every time I get cravings for aubergines the first idea that comes to mind is this one. I usually resist the temptation mainly because of the amount of calories the recipe has and because of the lengthy preparation. But sometimes I just give in. It's worth the weight I put on :-).

Il panino

Recently I've been getting the impression that the simple sandwich has been progressively more under the media spotlight. Just a few days ago I read this interesting article about how the French are embracing the good old sarnie (sandwich for the non British) to come to terms with today's shorter lunch breaks. The next day, to remain in topic, I received an Italian gastronomic magazine with a panino on the front page. Inside a couple of interesting articles on what panini are today in Italy, how (again) the changing lifestyle has helped making them more popular than ever and the best addresses around the peninsula. It would seem that even in Italy people are noticing how popular panini have become abroad and finally taking pride in that. Stimulated by these articles I decided to write a post on Italian panini. After all, loving bread so much I couldn't ignore what comes between those delicious slices.

The return of the artichoke, part II: pappardelle sauce

I was actually considering calling this post The Vampire Slayer, for reasons which are evident in the above pic, but decided to leave that title to Buffy :-). Anyway, having still two artichokes left after preparing the ravioli I started looking for a recipe that could be done with this limited quantity. I found my solution in Slow Food: Recipes from the Osterias of Italy (in the already published Italian version). Slow food recipe books are, in my experience, quite inconsistent when it comes to recipes: some work great and some just don't. The one I tried was luckily well written and delicious: pappardelle all'agnello e carciofi, a southern Tuscan recipe for pappardelle with a lamb and artichoke sauce.

The return of the artichoke, part I: the ravioli

As you might have hinted before I do like artichokes. Actually, they've become one of my favourite vegetables. My dearest parents :-P, having read my previous post decided to include a few globes of the mammola Romana variety in a delicacies laden package they sent, about which contents I've at least in part already posted about. Aren't they beautiful? Almost a shame to cook them, but only almost. Having enough for either a really big serving for two or two different dishes in a smaller amount I decided for the latter. The more recipes I can try the happier I am. The first dish tried was ravioli di carciofi or artichoke ravioli.

Salame felino

One of the musts for Easter lunch in many parts of Italy, and certainly in my family, is the antipasto of boiled eggs, salami, oil preserves, especially artichokes and often one or more savoury Easter breads. Excluding the bread, what I like the most is the salami. A few different kinds can be served at the same time and everyone tries and decides for a favourite. Here in Germany there are quite a few nice salamis but none that can compete with Italian ones, at least according to the opinion of my patriotic taste buds :-). The risk of spending a sad salami free Easter was swept away by the arrival, some days ago, of a packet from Italy, containing, along a few other delicacies, three different salami. I didn't really manage to resist till Sunday and had to open at least one: the Salame Felino.

Of war rations and pasta: spaghetti alla carbonara

You probably have tasted some in one form or another. I'm talking about one of the most famous Italian pasta recipe: spaghetti alla carbonara. At the same time this dish is also one of the most "bastardised" ones. Some of the recipes you can find for this dish on the web have absolutely nothing in common with the original: herbs, garlic or onion just don't belong there. And let's not even talk about those finished "carbonara" sauces one can buy ready-made, or even worst as powder... blasphemy! So I planned to write a post with an authentic recipe and some historic background. Then, this morning, as I opened my mailbox after the weekend I read the latest newsletter from Leite's culinaria and found there a very nice article, with recipe, about carbonara. If you haven't heard of Leite's culinaria, which I doubt, you should check the website out. Great articles and mouthwatering tried and tested recipes contribute to make one of the best food sites on the net. So I decided to point you to the article, rather then writing one myself (it's Monday and I'm a bit lazy), and just add one or two things to what David Leite wrote... if I may be so bold :-)

As simple as it gets: spaghetti aglio e olio

Looking back at what I posted recently I noticed there's very little of what is, in our home, the almost daily staple. Since I'm Italian, but even more Southern Italian, this couldn't be anything but pasta. Almost too easy to guess, isn't it? I like pasta in practically any form, so I can only be happy that there's so many ways to eat it!

On the web, in magazines and in cookbooks there are loads of recipes for pasta. If you just think of one ingredient for your "sugo" (pasta sauce) and search for a recipe you'll probably find much more than you actually need. After all pasta is one of the perfect ingredient to play around and experiment with creativity. It's part of what makes it such a loved dish I guess. On the other hand I thought that maybe it wouldn't be bad to write about a few typical and simple ways pasta is prepared in Italy. I'll start today with an incredibly quick to make but tasty classic: spaghetti aglio e olio or as the Neapolitan say "aglio e uoglio", i.e. spaghetti oil and garlic.

Pasta con melanzane a funghetto, with a Turkish twist

I'm having a little bout of food nostalgia at the moment so I've been preparing more Italian/Neapolitan dishes then usual for dinner, and clearly more pasta. Last night it was pasta con melanzane a funghetto, that is, pasta with "mushroom style" aubergines. There is some discussion on what the "mushroom style" part means. According to most Italian sources the name comes from the way the aubergines are cut into small chunks which once fried look more like mushrooms than aubergines. I'm not totally convinced but having no better explanation I'll stick with it. I slightly modified the recipe to make it lighter and to include a nice (medium) hot Turkish pepper sauce I found in a new shop selling Middle Eastern goods.

A Neapolitan pickle: papaccelle

Southern Italians are not usually great fans of pickles, at least compared to Northern Europeans. In Naples for example you'll find loads of olive oil preserved vegetables, fish, cheese, even salami but hardly any pickles on sale. There is one exception to this. In winter, before and after Christmas, olive shops display big piles of mixed pickles and papacelle on sale. Papacelle are a kind of round pepper which is sometimes used fresh (great for stuffing) or pickled to be used for typical winter recipes. I mentioned them before. I intended to tell you about this pickled peppers and their uses

Carnevale!

A nice Carnevale, Mardi-gras, Fasching to everyone. I'm not that big on celebrating this holiday, but I loved it as a kid. The costumes, silly jokes and most of all the typical sweets. And an Italian Carnevale would not be complete without chiacchiere. And since tomorrow is Saami's going to his first Carnevale party I decided to make some for him. These simple fried sweets go under a loads of different names according to where you come from in Italy:cenci, lattughe, stracci, frappe are just some of the used names. Apart from these differences the recipe doesn't change significantly. Chiacchiere are fundamentally sweetened fresh pasta dough, fried and dusted with sugar. They have a simple taste children love and are addictive. If you try them the first time you might think they don't taste of much but soon you'll find yourself munching on a new one.

A winter salad: Sicilian Fennel and Orange Salad

Even in the deepest coldest winter, I sometimes feel like having something fresh and raw to eat. Something to clean my taste buds and make me feel fit again for some hearty and rich winter food. This quick salad is ideal for the purpose. Crunchy fennel and fresh oranges combined together in a nice colourful salad.

The ingredients are:
- fennel, 1 bulb per person (at least) quartered and sliced thin
- oranges, ideally Sicilian blood oranges, peeled and either filleted (my choice) or sliced thinly in rounds
- optional: black olives, nuts (never tried pistachios but I think they would be great and better Sicilian!)
- a vinaigrette made with EVOO, salt, black pepper and one of vinegar, lemon juice or orange juice (I used the latter)

combine all solid ingredients together and dress with the vinaigrette. That's it, it doesn't get much easier. I added a bit of chopped fennel greens around the plate for colour and presentation.

Ode to the artichoke

La alcachofa de tierno corazon se vistio' de guerrero, erecta, construyo' una pequena cupula,

So starts Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the artichoke" (for the full poem: in Spanish here, or in English, losing a bit through the translation, here). Not many vegetables have had the honour of a poem from a Nobel laureate. Love it, loathe it or just find it weird. It's hard to remain indifferent to this edible flower bud. I could hardly stand it as a kid. I found its sweetish taste disturbing. But since my mom comes from Rome, where the things are an object of love, artichokes often popped up on our table. Now I love them. Maybe it's an acquired taste or maybe my taste buds have grown up with me: still now I could never get enough. So I was really happy to find some on sale last Sturday and use them, in a classic combo, with lamb.

Italian 80's retro-chic: pasta gamberi e rucola

Every decade is marked by a few, often infamous, food-fads. In Italy the late '80s were the rucola or rocket (as the salad) years. Rucola seemed to move from its natural role as salad (where IMO tastes great) and to appear on top of almost any dish: rucola with steaks, pasta, pizza, rucola pesto and so on. I'm not talking here about the top of the range restaurants but of the many middle of the league eateries. Rucola started to appear more often on our table at home too. Nowadays those "golden days" ;-) are gone but a few rucola dishes remain. One, that my dad still prepares every now and then, is pasta con rucola e gamberetti, rocket and shrimp pasta. The combination works very well, the peppery rucola balancing the sweet shrimps. I felt like some last week, but instead of preparing it the original way I decided to modify it to get a less rustic dish.

Bread Panini for the masses: pane e salsiccia

In the last years Italy has seen a flourishing of Sagre, village fairs, with gastronomic theme. Every village that has a claim to fame through a special gastronomic product organises one, and often even those who don't. Inevitably, whatever the theme of the fair might be, you can always find a stand selling pane e salsiccia, sausage hot from the grill served between two slices of bread or a roll. The sausage can vary, depending on where you are in Italy, but is usually redolent with garlic. Most of the times there's no other addition to this basic match, but eventually mushrooms, grilled aubergines or peppers, sauteed leaf broccoli (the great friarielli from Napoli for example) and even cheese can be added.

Street food from Napoli: taralli

Looking again at the pictures I took in Italy I noticed I had "lost" a few somewhere on my HD. Even worst looking at them I noticed I completely forgot to post about taralli, one of my favourite street snacks. Taralli are little dough rings, fairly widespread in southern Italy in their many variations. Quite common are the so-called taralli bolliti (boiled taralli), that is taralli which, a bit like bagels, have been dipped in boiling water to make their outside shiny. These can be plain, sweet (sugar frosted), or flavoured (fennel seeds, pepper and so on). They're mostly dry and crunchy, great as a snack with a glass of wine. The taralli I'm talking about are a bit different. They are the typical Neapolitan ones: Taralli sugna e pepe (lard and pepper taralli).

Dough stretching

This post is the first of four on the dishes I prepared for our New Year's Eve dinner. I decided to have a bit of fun and, for the occasion, try to put together a nice menu for us and our friends. So I took the chance to try a few recipes that were waiting in my "to try when you feel fit for them" list and also to try and develop my plating a bit inspired by Blue's tips. Following the order in which the dishes were served I will start with our appetiser: grissini stirati con prosciutto e tuiles di Parmigiano Reggiano, i.e. "stretched" bread sticks with dry cured ham and Parmesan chips.

Traditional Food from Irpinia

The day after we arrived in Italy we made a little day-trip to go eat at Minicuccio, in Valleseccarda, a small town (or large village, depending on your definition) on the road between Naples and Bari. It was a due visit since we had planned to come here on our previous visit in March but for a series of reasons didn't manage to. Valleseccarda is in Irpinia the mountainous area around Avellino (about 1 1/2 hours drive from Naples). For such a relatively remote town, away from tourist routes, and considering its size, Valleseccarda has a high concentration of fine eateries. The Italian Slow food guide recommends both Minicuccio and the close by Oasis. Both serve local food: Minicuccio has a special Saturday evening menu revisiting old almost lost dishes of the Irpinian tradition (highly recommended).

A happy, sweet, new year to everyone.

First of all may your wishes , hopes and dreams become real in 2004. I know it never happens... I still try every year. Have a nice evening tonight. Before I disappear in my kitchen to prepare tonight's dinner (it will take some time) I wanted to post my first Neapolitan entry. I wanted to post it yesterday but the time somehow seemed to escape me. So here it is, my post on Christmas sweets in Naples. Sweets play a big role in the Neapolitan Christmas Eve dinner. There are almost as many sweets as there are savoury courses. Most of these sweets are not prepared at home. They used to be made and sold by nuns, each monastery had a speciality. Naples used to have many monasteries and abbeys inside the city walls, some of which still exist as such, others sold to the city/university/etc . Nowadays most pastry shops make the whole range although few manage to produce everyone of these sweet in high quality. Therefore many Neapolitan families buy around, waiting, no sorry :-), fighting to be served. Below you'll find a few (quite a few more exist!).

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.

I can't believe they're not meatballs: pitticelle.

Yesterday night we had one of my co-workers over at dinner. Having guests is always nice, OK almost always, especially when they're people you can spend a nice evening talking openly with no worries on your mind. Also it gives me the chance to play Chef a bit. Don't we all love to impress guests with our culinary skills :-)? Since our guest tonight is an ovo-lacto vegetarian meat was out of question. Not a big problem: I like cooking vegetables, although the choice in winter is quite reduced here in Germany.
Southern Italian cooking comes always to help in these cases. Since people there were too poor to afford meat, on a daily basis, they came up with really cool ideas for vegetables. One of those is aubergine... meatballs... uhm... let's say aubergine dumpling. These come from Calabria (the point of the boot if you look at Italy) and are locally called pitticelle di murignani.

Risotto, re-interpreted.

Risotto is probably the best known Italian rice dish at abroad, although other deserving preparations exist throughout the peninsula. Risotto actually comes from the Northern part of Italy: Lombardia, Piemonte and Veneto are the regions were risotti are part of the local tradition, although purist would often refuse to call risotto many recipes from Venteo. You can find sound basic risotto recipes everywhere today, and many chefs use risotto as a starch to go with fish or meat and not in the classical way, i.e. as a course on it's own. The basic procedure has five steps. First finely cut onions are cooked over a low flame, in butter usually. Then the heat is turned up, the rice is added and the rice grains are toasted (step 2). Afterwards liquid is added, first wine in most cases, then stock (step 3), while constantly stirring the rice. When the rice is almost cooked it is taken of the fire and allowed to rest for a few minutes (step 4) and then the remaining fat and cheese (not always) is vigourously stirred (the so called mantecatura, step 5). Ingredients enriching the risotto are usually added during the rice toasting or with the liquids. I would like to share a modernised, and possibly improved method, for making risotto with you. The method eliminates some of the classical problems of risotto and IMO makes the preparation less stressful.

Cold at last: Soup time!

I wanted to write this post on a Neapolitan soup, zuppa di scarole e spollichini or escarole and white bean soup, on the weekend but due to lack of time, writers block and a family celebration I did not manage to. As I was doing my usual morning "blog round" I noticed that Deb, blue and on my plate all have recently posted on soup too. It is either a case of mass thought transmission or winter is finally descending on both sides of the Atlantic. Not that I enjoy freezing my ass, but December in Germany with no snow and temperatures around 13C/55F feels really weird. So, since on Friday the temperature went below freezing for the first time since last winter I decided to do some warming soup. It seems that now all supermarkets carry suddenly escarole and so I decided to make zuppa di scarole e spollichini, a Neapolitan classic.

Old fashioned tastes

As promised I'm posting about some traditional Neapolitan cooking, baking actually. The first recipe I made from Jeanne C. Francesconi's book is Pizza di Scarole, or escarole pizza. The name pizza is in this case confusing as this is more a savoury cake. Still the term pizza is used in Naples both for the flat classic pizza and for several savoury cakes. The "modern" version of the recipe calls for escarole flavoured with olives, capers and anchovies as stuffing. I opted for a more old fashioned filling using a mix of pinoli (pine nuts), capers, raisins, black olives (all in the same amount, about a fistful) and a 1 clove of garlic, one anchovy and some hot pepper to flavour the greens. This is an old (probably XVII century or older) and traditional mixture used for a few vegetables (great on pan fried peppers) and for linguini di scammaro, the traditional lent pasta in Naples, in which case green olives and bred crumbs are also added, with or without tomato sauce (in which case no bread crumbs). This mixture probably came from Sicily. It might have arrived there with the Arabs, but since I'm not really strong in middle eastern cooking I could not say.

Stuffing but no turkey

I recently managed to buy a book I wanted to have for a quite long time, "la cucina Napoletana" (Neapolitan cuisine) written by Jeanne Carola Francesconi. This is sort of a "bible" in regards to classical Neapolitan cooking, full of classic, curiosities and information. This means you'll probably find a bit more Neapolitan cooking on this pages in the future :-). Francesconi, as her first name hints, comes from a family with French roots. This should not surprise there is a strong connection between Naples and France since (maybe even before) the Anjou dynasty ruled in southern Italy. Neapolitan cuisine was also dramatically influenced. Famous chefs were called Monzu (from Monsieur) and many French classics were adapted to the Neapolitan taste. I took inspiration from the book to prepare one of these "French" dishes, stuffed brioches, also called Danubio in Naples (Danube, as the river, no clue why). There are a few stuffed brioche recipes in the book (salami and cheese, vegetables, financiere). They might look like modern inventions: all are actually adapted from an early XIX century book, "Cucina Teorico Pratica", written by Ippolito Cavalcanti. It would be interesting to know if something similar is also baked in France. I went for the salami and cheese ones, because I like them and because I didn't have the ingredients for the other recipes.

The Pasta of the Opera

No I'm not talking about some cheap B-horror movie but instead about "pasta alla Norma". This is one of many opera inspired or created by opera singers and composers between the XIX and XX century. The list is quite long: think of Peach Melba (invented by Escoffier for the singer Nellie Melba), Spaghetti Caruso and Turnedos Rossini (created respectively by the great tenor and the composer themselves) and so on. The story of Pasta alla Norma tells of a Sicilian chef who wanted to cheer up the composer Bellini (also Sicilian) after the opening night fiasco of his newest opera Norma. The chef tried to create an image of the Sicilian volcano Etna by serving pasta with tomato sauce (symbolising flowing lava) mixed with fried aubergines (their black skin for the volcanic rock) and sprinkled with ricotta salata (sorry but the only decent page I found is a commercial one) sprinkled all around as the snow on the volcano.

Pizza!

Last Saturday I started preparing a new sourdough batch. It is almost becoming a tradition. But then all of a sudden I found myself thinking about pizza. After all don't some of the best pizzerias in Naples still use sourdough? Then why not give it a try?
I've been trying quite a few pizza crust recipes in the last year or so and I'm still not completely satisfied. Maybe I should first explain what I'm looking for. Having lived quite a few years in Naples I have become partial to the kind of crust that's typical of the city pizzerias; thin, bubbly and soft. You could easily take a pizza and fold two times, actually the traditional way to eat pizza on the go. I don't like what I would call Roman style crust, i.e. thin and cracker crisp. I'm OK with pan pizza although my Italian pride still has to come to terms with calling that pizza :-))). Baking Neapolitan crust at home is actually impossible if you don't have a wood burning brick oven. You need the high temperatures for proper baking and the wood for the wonderful smoky flavour. Still a pale copy would be enough for me.

Panmarino

There are quite a few breads (and sweets) that catched my eye while reading Carol Field's The Italian Baker. The one that intrigued me most was panmarino, a white bread loaf flavoured with olive oil and rosemary. I have to admit I never heard of this bread before. This is not so strange; after all talking about Italian breads is like talking about Italian cuisine, there is none. There are many regional cuisine families and a few nation wide dishes. Similarly for bread there are a few widespread breads (focaccia, rosette, pane pugliese) and hundreds of local specialities. Field says this bread is the (re-)creation of a baker from Ferrara (if I'm not mistaken, I don't have the book at hand now), which is quite some distance away from Napoli (where I come from). This possibly explains my ignorance.

Piadina: the chapati of Romagna

Yesterday evening I felt like having something with an intrinsic "snackyness" for dinner. Pizza would have been the first choice, but it was either waiting for the dough to rise till 10 PM or get some delivered, a sad option considering the quality of the local pizzerias. (Which is not to say I never order some in those occasions when my laziness wins). After some thought I remembered the (long) list of piadina recipes I had saved from the times when I used to visit the newsgroup it.hobby.cucina more often.

My tiny culinary institute: gnocchi

You'll probably ask yourself where the baking ended. Isn't this a baking blog after all? There are a few posts coming up: biscuits, a new try with sourdough and maybe some other flatbreads too. They're either partially finished or in conceptual stage still. So to fill the time-gap I'm posting my take on how to make gnocchi.

A taste of childhood

Quince are in season. I had been looking for them for a while and finally I managed to find some in a local supermarket. Strangely the greengrocers of the city market did not have any, seems there's not enough request. I was looking for them because I wanted to make cotognata, or quince preserve for my son, Saami, who's 16 month's old and to give some as a present to friends I know would appreciate. I used to eat cotognata every now and then as a kid in Italy, although mainly the industrial version. Their flavour is in my memory closely associated to winter afternoons, homework just finished, the few hours before dinner filled with buildings, ships, castles made of LEGO blocks.

Mozzarella: so famos yet so overlooked

Mozzarella: The cheese that everyone believes to know. When you think about mozzarella what comes to your mind? The pre-grated stuff  to put on pizza or those pale gummy cheese balls sold in little bags stored in whey maybe? But how many have tasted the real DOC (controlled denomination) Mozzarella di Bufala Campana? Many things are called Mozzarella out there, but the original is a different thing altogether. Maybe I should cool down a bit and start all over. It's only that mozzarella, even for a half-Neapolitan as me, is a subject of love, pride, and because the misuse of the name, anger.