Recipes from Cooking with Doyle Moore on Focus 580
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Cooking on Focus 580: Recipes for July 2008
July 2, 2008: Foods of Italy
Doyle has just returned from Italy, so it seems right to ask him and you about the foods of Italy: recipes, memories of good meals, whatever. Doyle was in Tuscany, outside of Florence, and he also visited Siena and Pisa. During his stay he did not have a single “red sauce” pizza or pasta or one tomato-y dish. Northern Italian cuisine is totally different from the Sicilian “a tomato in everything” cooking. The food is very open and straightforward and done with a flourish and great care. They were right in the middle of olives and grapes; Chianti was literally all around where they were staying. The wines are on one side of the hill, while the olive trees and in between and on the other side of the hill. It was right at the time when the olive trees were blooming.
What we grew up thinking of as Italian food is really Italian-American food, which is fine; but the kind of things people make in Italy is different, and it’s different depending on which regions you go to. There wasn’t a single “Italy” until the middle of the nineteenth century; it was made of regions that still have their own identities. For example, there is no salt in Tuscan bread; there are reasons cited, some depending on historical taxes. The bread really is the staff of life in Tuscany, everywhere you go someone is making bread. In Umbria, which is not very far away, the cooking is totally different.
PIZZA AND PASTA ARE DIFFERENT IN ITALY
A caller from Charleston tells how his wife and he worked in northern Italy some years ago; his wife announced beforehand that she was not going to eat spaghetti, which she gets at home all the time. But after a while they were in a restaurant where she ordered spaghetti, and it was totally different from that at home. The freshness and immediacy were fantastic. So if you go to Italy, do try the spaghetti! And the same is true about the pizza, made in wood-fired brick ovens, with any topping you can think of; when you order it, it comes to your table in about five minutes, and it’s fresh and perfect with a good thin crust. Doyle always chooses the Margherita pizza, because it’s simple and plain and straightforward, but so plain and straightforward that it was almost elaborate: the crust and cheese! While the caller’s family were in Italy, his daughter was in a preschool and after a few weeks she came home and complained about the lunch: “every day it’s pasta!” But they put different sauces on it, he told her, but she said she doesn’t eat the sauce!
The thing we’ve lost sight of about pizza is that for Italians, it’s a flat bread, it’s not so much about the toppings as it is about the bread. Similarly with pasta, the sauce is a condiment, you get a little bit of that, but mostly it’s supposed to be about the basic pasta. Every pizza Doyle had in Italy was an individual one, smaller, not to be shared with a whole table. There was also a pizza with four different cheeses.
CLASSIC TUSCAN BISCOTTI (CANTUCCINI)
The whole eating experience is carefully done. Where Doyle was staying, the owners would have a big sit-down dinner on Thursday night. You paid quite an amount for it, an eight-course meal, with all kinds of tastes. At the end of the meal after all that heavy eating, there is a biscotti – cantuccini – which Doyle fell in love with. It is dipped in a heady wine, Vin Santo. When he came home, Doyle wanted to have some Vin Santo, and he found it cost $100 a bottle in Champaign. It takes five years to make, with hand-selected grapes that are dried. But he found a nice Spanish wine made in the same manner, and then he had the biscotti recipe which he will give.
This particular recipe originated just north of Florence and uses a lot of almonds. It’s a little bit smaller than the general shape.
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¾ cup sugar
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2 cups flour
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3 eggs
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1 ½ tsps. baking powder
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½ tsp. cinnamon
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1 ½ cups whole unblanched almonds
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2 tsps. vanilla
Preheat oven to 350°. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, and cinnamon. Add the almonds (which you can toast in a pan before adding if you like). In another bowl, whisk together the eggs and the vanilla. Mix that into the flour. It will be very stiff so you’ll have to mix with your fingers. Bring it all together in one heavy glob and divide in two. Form each half into a cylinder about 2 inches wide and almost as long as your baking sheet. Place the logs on the baking sheet and flatten slightly. Make sure to leave plenty of room between them. Bake them for 25 minutes. Remove from the oven, and let cool; leave the oven on. Slice each log into ⅓-inch slices diagonally. Place (cut side down) on the baking sheet. Some cooks insist on them standing on their edges, other say lay them flat; Doyle has done it both ways and can’t tell the difference. In any case, they go back in the oven, with the temperature lowered to 300°, for another fifteen minutes. This makes them very dry and crispy, so you’ll need to dip them in your Vin Santo, or in coffee or tea. It is a necessity to dip. If you keep them in a bag, they will soften down a little bit.
SOME UNFAMILIAR FOODS
A caller on the road in Southern Indiana recalled the idea of whether to eat familiar or exotic things when travelling: when he was in Venice, he was offered pasta cooked in squid ink. He really enjoyed it; when it arrived, it was served in a black dish with no glaze, so it was a flat black, and the pasta was black, so it was hard to even find the food. It was very good. There was no sauce on it, but there was a fish sauce on the side. The other dish he really enjoyed was in a Jewish restaurant in Rome, it was just zucchini flowers deep fried with cheese. He also enjoyed the little shops where you could watch them making pasta and buy it freshly made.
ENJOYING PASTA
Doyle has made pasta himself; he has made it with red wine, and with cocoa. With cocoa, the noodles (which you want to hand cut) are brown and look more rustic. That was an Umbrian dish.
David says it’s not hard at all to make pasta, it just takes some time and work. Unless you’re going to roll it out by hand, you need a little machine, either one that you crank by hand or an electric attachment for a stand mixer or a food processor. The hand-cranked ones are not expensive. Fresh pasta is a very different thing: it takes less time to cook, done in seconds. If you want to put things in it, you can do that. Marcella Hazan has a recipe using fresh rosemary and sage which you chop up very fine and mix in with your dough. You use a light sauce on it because of all the flavor; David uses a meat sauce, veal or ground pork, with just a little tomato.
Although Doyle didn’t eat pasta with red sauce while he was in Tuscany, he did have good Alfredo sauces, and sometimes just with butter and parmesan and pecorino. The latter is a tasty sheep’s milk cheese that can be found aged and hard that you grate, to one that is soft almost like cream cheese.
A caller from Urbana has a recipe she likes on homemade ravioli, just butter and sage sauce. Use fresh sage leaves (or even, in winter, dried ones), heat butter up and cook them until they’re crispy. What you’re doing is fragrancing the butter.
SICILIAN FAMILY FOOD
A caller from Urbana is of Sicilian origins, and food is a center of conversation and sharing in his family. Around Christmas they do the whole ethnic thing. One of the hors d’oeuvres they have is an olive salad that Sicilians call “olive schiacciate.” It’s smashed olives; his mother would just smash them with a pan or something. It also has olive oil, garlic, and celery, all mixed together and eaten as a salad. [You can find a recipe at this location: http://www.bigoven.com/128912-Sicilian-Olive-Salad-(Olive-Schiacciate)-recipe.html]
Another dish they would only have at Christmas but which is apparently more of a Lenten dish (when you couldn’t eat meat) is made with wheatberries and chickpeas; you boil the wheat berries 45 minutes to an hour; after it’s cooked you add it to the chickpeas, with lots of olive oil and garlic.
Doyle says that in Italy, instead of the wheatberries we know, they would use “farro” which is an ancient kind of wheat that cooks more quickly than the “triticum vulgate” that we have here; or spelt berries would also work and cook quicker. You can probably find a source for farro online, e.g., here: http://markethallfoods.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_mh_info&products_id=92. A caller from Urbana reports that you can get farro in town at World Harvest or Art Mart. Another caller from Champaign says that spelt berries are available at the Common Ground Food Co-Op.
The [Sicilian] caller’s mother also made squid salad (calamari), boiling the squid and adding olive oil and lots of garlic. She tended to overcook the squid which makes it chewy. The main course would always be homemade raviolis. They made the dough the day before (though nowadays they do it 2-3 weeks ahead and freeze) and rolled it out so thin you can practically see through the dough. His Mom is kind of a purist, filling them with ricotta cheese, grated hard parmesan reggiano cheese, and eggs and salt. No meat or vegetables. They crimp it with a fork, dust it, and dry it out. With the leftover dough they do re-rolls (which his grandmother would never have done) which is the treat for the ravioli makers: they’ll cook that the same day.
Doyle has another recipe, the Italian form of crèpes:
CRESPELLE
A little bit thicker and heavier than the French crèpes. There is a little more flour used.
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1 ½ cups flour (Doyle uses 1 cup whole wheat and ½ cup all-purpose)
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4 eggs
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½ tsp. salt
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2 cups milk
Place the flour in a large mixing bowl. Add the eggs over the flour and stir them in. Add the salt and whisk in the milk, a little at a time, until all the milk is incorporated (or this can be done in a blender). Allow the batter to rest for 20 minutes.
Heat a 6-inch nonstick pan until hot and brush with butter. Reduce the head to medium and pour ¼ cup of batter into the pan. Cook 30 to 40 seconds, until pale golden, and then flip. Cook on the other side 20 seconds and remove to a plate. Continue the process until all the batter has been used, yielding between 17 and 19 crespelle.
Filling:
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1 cup of ricotta
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½ package of Neufchâtel cream cheese
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1 pound of grated fresh mozzarella
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1 pound of sliced mushrooms (wild mushroom mix or sliced cremini are good) sautéed in butter or oil
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½ tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
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heavy whipping cream or fat-free half-and-half: use enough to think the mixture (or use skim milk)
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pecorino Romano or parmesan Romano (to shred on top)
Combine all the filling ingredients (except for the Romano cheeses). Heat slowly to melt the cheeses. Thin with cream or milk. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Fill each crespelle with 3 tablespoons of the cheese and mushroom mixture and fold in half. Continue filling crespelle until all are full. Be sure to leave some of the cheese mixture for the topping.
Preheat the oven to 450° F.
Butter the bottom and sides of a 10 by 8-inch ceramic baking dish with 1 tablespoon of butter. Lay the filled crespelle in an overlapping layer in the baking dish. Spread the remaining cheese mixture over the top, dot with butter. Grate over the top with pecorino Romano or parmesan Romano and place in the oven for 12 to 15 minutes, until piping hot and crispy on top.
Remove and serve hot, or allow to rest and serve at room temperature.
This is a large amount. Doyle likes to make a full receipt for the crespelle and freeze leftovers, and to cut the filling amount in half and serve only 2 or 3 to each guest.
BRINGING FOOD HOME
A caller from Urbana asked whether Doyle tried to bring any herbs or other ingredients back with him; what are the customs rules? No, he didn’t. He fell in love with a green kind of cabbage and got the seeds, but you’re not allowed to bring seeds in. He did bring some olive oil, but they’re very strict about fresh foods not in cans or sealed in bottles.
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