Il Forno

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

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

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

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).

A sunny empanada fights those grey winter days away...

I like winter. OK, I like winter when it snows or when it's cold and sunny. What I can't stand is those rainy, grey, sad days when all I'd like to do is lay on my couch, reading a good book drinking hot chocolate (with amaretto for me, thanks). The last few days have been exactly like that here and since my boss doesn't approve of me doing the couch potato while I should be working I had to resort to other means to cheer me up. A happy vacation memory gave me a good hint. I was, for no reason at all as often happens, thinking about a trip me and Daniela made about 2 years ago to Andalucia. Apart from many other delicious things we ate there, we had a sort of staple snack/lunch to bring to the beach: empanadas de atun or tuna empanadas, bought from small but nice grocery store. And that's what I tried to make yesterday evening.

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.

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.

Snack scones

At work we have twice a month a Friday "discussion round". Usually one of us explains his work/results while someone else brings something to eat, snacks and similar. In a certain sense one supplies food for the brain while another food for the body and that was me last week. I decided to prepare, among a couple of other things, some tiny spicy cheese and onion scones I had been wanting to try for ages. The recipe comes from The Ballymaloe Bread Book. This is a great reference book for Irish bakery. Soda bread, scones and sweet buns recipes are especially good. I'm not really happy with the recipes I've tried from the ethnic and flavoured breads sections, but those were not the chapters that pushed me to buy the book anyway.

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.