Il Forno

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.

IMBB 13, My Little Cupcake: Hazelnut flavored Cinnamon Apple Muffins

Seems that across the ocean cupcakes are all the rage. I'm no big fan of cupcakes I have to admit: in my two years in the States I never really managed to come to terms with the ubiquitous butter-cream glazing everyone seems to love there. When Maki announcedthe theme for this edition of Is My Blog Burning? I long thought about having a go at being cool myself, and finally bake and eat cupcakes again. Think and plan I did, but in the end I decided to go for a naked cupcake version, the lowly muffin: not so hip maybe, yet much more to my taste.

Starting from the basic muffin recipe from Peter Rehinardt's Crust and Crumb I described before I played around a bit and came up with two recipes. The first one, a double chocolate cherry muffin (foremost in the picture above), came out OK but not as luscious as I had planned. It definitely needs more work before sharing a recipe for it. The second muffin, an Apple Cinnamon muffin with a twist, was a pleasant discovery. Much better than expected and an even better surprise considering the flavoring items where put together approximately by chance just by picking a few "left overs" in my cupboard. As we say in Italy: fare di necessità virtù, i.e. necessity is the mother of invention.

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

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

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

Castagnole

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

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

Tarte Tatin 1.0

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

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

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

Leipziger Laerche

(Leipzig's Lark). A lark is not always a lark and sometimes birds turn into cakes.

Game birds have always been considered a delicacy from European gourmets: grouse, partridge and woodcock are among the many prized ingredients of old game recipes. Yet you'll have to look hard to find similar recipes today. Hunting is today often seen as an unnecessary cruelty, we've plenty of other meats to choose from and supply is becoming scarcer and scarcer, not last because of the massive ecological "changes" (disasters might not be amiss here) Europe has gone through.

The hunting of some birds has been prohibited in the recent past to avoid the extinction of a number of endangered species. Today the fabled Ortolan, along with its somewhat gruesome eating ceremony, is a forbidden morsel few rich gourmets manage to taste, and maybe it is better that way. Even the more modest polenta e osei, polenta with birds from Veneto, has become a rare delicacy and has been adapted to become polenta e osei scampà, polenta with runaway birds, which substitutes lard wrapped meat, sausage or even liver for the birds. Keeping these facts in mind, I always thought animal preservation movements were a phenomenon of the last forty years. I was dead wrong. Leipziger Laerche, a pastry speciality from the town of Leipzig, has its roots in a law passed in 1876 to stop the hunting of the local larks.

Cioccolato Modicano and a thought

A few weeks ago, thanks to my parents spending their holiday in Sicily this year, I received a few food gifts coming directly from this beautiful island. It's a bit of a surprise to find out that one of the few places (with Mexico clearly) probably producing chocolate in the same way it was made centuries ago is the town of Modica. Even the flavorings used in the chocolate bars, cinnamon and chili above all, recall the spices added to hot chocolate both in Mexico and in Spain during the XVI century. The most famous producers today are Bonaiuto, who helped to get the products known outside the local area, and Antica Dolceria Rizza. The texture of cioccolato Modicano is unlike any of the bars you're used to put under your teeth: the outer chocolate shell (at least for Bonaiuto's bars, Rizza has no outer shell) encases a rough textured chocolate full of undissolved sugar crystals. I'm not going to talk too much about this unusual but delicious chocolate, apart maybe to tell that it's great to make hot drinking chocolate, since Katia and Roland from Via Ritiro no./ have already said all both on their blog and on this eGullet thread.

Instead I'll share a little experience that I owe to the magic of Xocoatl. The first time I had cioccolato modicano, a cinnamon flavored bar from Bonaiuto, about five years ago, I positively hated it. I was expecting some special chocolate bar, smooth and melting on my tongue, instead I found my mouth full of those weird sugar crystals and something which can't be described better than fine chocolate powder. It was unexpected. At the same time it was intriguing, it wasn't chocolate as I knew but it tasted, after the first confusing moment, good. It might seem a silly example, but that little piece of chocolate made me understand why so many creative chefs play with names in their dishes: they create an expectation and turn it upside down. In a way creative cuisine could almost be seen as a huge practical joke on the customer. With the exception that this practical joke often tastes great. Now, if I could only get a reservation at el Bulli ;-).

Turkish... pepper?

Last week Daniela, Saami and some friends took a few days off for a short vacation on the Baltic sea coast. I didn't mind staying in Jena and working since I'm saving my free days from work for September, when we'll be travelling to Italy. Nonetheless, I was happy about a little food present Daniela brought back for me. Danish liquorice candy! I know quite a lot of you loathe liquorice, but for the few that do like it let me say this is the "ultimate" liquorice experience. The candies, called for some strange reason Tuerkische Pfeffer, turkish pepper, are made as follows: a sugar liquorice flavoured candy, filled with liquorice and salmiak "liquid" (actually a powder that turns liquid in your mouth) and dusted with pure liquorice powder. Definitely for hard-core liquorice fans :-)!

Call me a fool

Getting little unexpected presents always make me happy. When our friend Juliane showed up at our door with these fantastic looking gooseberries (cleaned and ready to cook!) I felt like a little kid with a new toy. What to do with them? The obvious thing would have been to turn them into jam or jelly but we're not exactly great consumers of this stuff at home. Something I had read about before my post on British food came back to my made: a gooseberry fool! Fools (I just love the name) are a kind of English desserts dating probably back to the 15th century. Simply explained they're a mixture of tart fruit compote and whipped cream. Gooseberry, as far as I know, is pretty much the classic fruit used but, red currants and rhubarb can also be used. The recipe, see below, is very easy. I quite liked the final outcome although I find the recipe could easily serve 6 or even 8 instead of the given 4. One note: if you don't like sour tastes steer clear of fools. I find them extremely refreshing, but I also like liquorice!

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.