stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
Flour. Water. Yeast. Salt. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? In fact, when you're talking bread, it doesn't get any simpler (unless you're in Tuscany, of course).
But ingredient lists can be deceiving.
So it was with not fear, but a healthy dose of respect that I approached my seventh Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge bread: ciabatta. This is one of the wettest doughs out there - it has to be because that's where the beautiful, big shiny holes come from. I know from experience that working with a rustic dough like this is a challenge. I'm not saying it isn't fun - sticky, wet, messy fun - but it takes a certain amount of patience and an understanding of what you're getting yourself into. Even then, I'd never worked with a dough quite this wet. I came in with high hopes yet a full understanding that I probably wouldn't end up with cookbook-worthy holes the first time I tangoed with ciabatta.
In this recipe we're given the option to use either a biga or a poolish as a starter. The poolish seemed lower maintenance since it's essentially a dough the consistency of pancake batter so I mixed up my poolish two nights before. I hadn't realized that it would take 3 or 4 hours to ferment at room temperature so I got started a little later than I would have liked. After a couple of hours, nothing had happened in the dough so I heated up the oven and put the poolish on top, hoping that the heat coming off the oven would help the starter along. I checked it on a regular basis, hoping to catch it right as it was foaming and bubbling so I could put it in the fridge in time. Unfortunately, I think it went from totally asleep to POOLISHZILLA in the span of about thirty seconds because the final time I checked it it was trying to push the lid off its bowl. But even worse, I thought I detected some boozy off-aromas. However it was too late to fix it and I had wanted to be in bed for the last two and a half hours so it went into the fridge until I was ready to use it.
Now, the day of: the instructions call for mixing the dough without using your hands (i.e. a spoon or stand mixer). However, as I've said, I have experience handling these kinds of doughs and I was eager to try the technique out again. I figured that if stuff starting going to hell in a handbasket I could always dump it into the mixer. I'll admit it: my mixer and I are on the rocks. More on that later. I just wanted to say that yes, there are reasons beside my foolish pride that are spurring me on down the hand-kneading path. So I pulled out and measured the flour, water, salt, and yeast, poured in my bubbly intoxicated poolish, and mixed for a couple of minutes, adding several more tablespoons of water as I went. After it was fairly well incorporated into a ball, I let it sit for a 20 minute autolyze (pronounced ow-toe-lease) and then started to knead it in the gravity-assisted method that's so well suited for very wet, sticky doughs.
I think that the biggest secret of hand-kneading these slack rustic doughs is acceptance. There are other important things like learning that flick of the wrist as you fold the dough or grabbing your dough with quick confidence off the countertop so that it comes off cleanly, but none of these things will be learned if you haven't just accepted that this is going to be a sticky mess, that there will be dough all over the place, including your hands, and that this is ok, it is the way it is supposed to be. Just work with the dough and before long the dough will be working with you too.
After working for the dough for about 25 minutes the dough had lost its shaggy disorganized appearance and looked quite smooth (I really wanted pictures of all of this but I was flying solo while The Hubs was at work and my hands were completely sticky - it just wasn't gonna happen). When I picked it up to let gravity stretch it out the aligned gluten strands were easy to see in the dough. It was still very sticky so I decided to let it rest for about half an hour before doing the first stretching and folding step prescribed in the Bread Baker's Apprentice. The dough ended up not stretching out quite as prettily as shown in handling artisan bread dough article I've already linked a couple of times, but I was still able to get some good stretches and folds in. So I let it rise for the full time suggested in the book, preparing my stiff baker's linen (a couche, pronounced koosh with a the oo sounding more like boo than wood) towards the end of the fermentation period.
Now that the dough was fermented, it was much smoother. It helped that my hands and the countertop were now clean of sticky, sticky dough that had been marring the surface of the dough when I was kneading it.
I had decided to make two loaves because frankly the idea of moving just one proofed ciabatta to a baking peel was causing my blood pressure to spike - why would I want to do it three times??? So, using a bench scraper and the least-aggravating touch possible, I divided the dough and rolled it around in the flour a little bit before shaping it and putting it on the couche to proof, arranging the stiff fabric walls around the dough to act as walls to prevent it from spreading during this pre-baking stage.
Forty-five minutes later when I peeked under the towel cover I was so excited to see that the dough had swelled beautifully and, after a nail-biting session of transferring the dough to the peel while attempting to leave every precious air bubble intact, was ready to go in the oven. (I really tried to get pictures of this but I was racing the clock at this point and the camera wasn't cooperating, even though The Hubs was home by then. To transfer the dough, slide the bench scraper under the dough and tilt it up. Slide the baking peel in under the bench scraper and then pull/nudge the dough onto the prepared peel.)
This time I remembered to prep my oven ahead of time, so my implements of Steam Making were ready to go. Good thing, too - it's so important with breads like ciabatta because if the crust stiffens while the yeast is still alive it will impede the rise and you won't get the holes in the crumb that we are all so desperately striving for. This day the baking stone did its job of slamming a lot of hot hot heat into the bottom of the dough and the boiling water that I poured into the lava rock-filled cast iron skillet (preheated with the oven) produced so much steam that the bread rose like crazy during its oven spring! That combined with the intoxicating smell had me jumping up and down around the kitchen, so excited, happy, and grateful to have gotten my ciabatta so far on my first attempt.
I kept the bread in the oven perhaps a bit longer than suggested in the book, but I was holding out for the rich dark golden red-brown that is so appetizing on a good artisan bread. Thanks to Mr. Reinhart, I had learned that you really don't have to worry about the bread drying out in the oven, so when you're working with a lean rustic dough that relies entirely on the starch in the flour for caramelization (instead of any sugars or fats that are added to the dough), just leave it in the oven until it's the color you desire.
Once it got to the point I pulled it out of oven and began one of the most impatient 90-minute periods of my life. I wanted that bread to cool down now so I could slice into it! To distract myself, I took about a million pictures of the bread while I waited for it to become totally cool to the touch. I also ruminated on my loaves: I decided one looked like a slipper, the bread's namesake (pictured on the left in the couche and above once baked) while the other looked more homey (pictures on the right in the couche and below once baked). I also had plenty of time to think about what the interior of the bread looked like. After all, that's the whole point of the ciabatta: getting fantastic flavor is easy (thanks to the poolish), but getting big shiny pretty holes is much less so. I had great hopes for the interior of my bread because it had swelled so nicely on the countertop and it had risen so spectacularly in the oven, but again, I was trying to temper the enthusiasm by remembering that this was my first attempt, it probably wouldn't be perfect, and that I would have lots of fun perfecting my technique down the road.
Finally the moment arrived: my slipper-shaped loaf was cool! Without wasting even a moment I sliced into it and was only very slightly disappointed with the state of the holes. But whatever the crumb looked like, the bread was delicious. It had all the tangy complexity that a good artisan bread should have and was fantastically complemented by a good fruity olive oil (try Lucini, my favorite supermarket EVOO) or an almost room temperature eggplant caponata (recipe coming soon!). As The Hubs and I ate our way into the loaf I was happy to see that, even though they weren't completely consistent, there were bubbles scattered throughout the loaf, bearing at least a few those trademark ciabatta holes.
So imagine my excitement when I sliced into the second, more homey loaf last night and saw honest-to-god big holes!!! It goes without saying that they weren't as spectacular as the ones pictured in the Bread Baker's Apprentice, but they were there!!!
I was so excited that I grabbed the slice, ran into the other room where The Hubs was, and started jumping up and down, brandishing the bread, and squeeing about how this bread was a totally success! It was a good moment. I took several of those slices and put them away (going so far as to literally save one of them from The Hubs' jaws) to save for photographing today when there was some natural light to do the bread justice. As we sliced our way through the second loaf, we again found that the bubbling was a bit inconsistent, but I was very encouraged by what I had accomplished so far on my first try.
But Stacey, you might be asking, what about the drunken poolish? It's true, I was worried when after its initial fermentation I smelled boozy aromas - aromas that strongly intensified during its 36-hour nap in the fridge - but I detected no trace of off-flavors in the finished bread, even when it had aged one or three days. I'm not sure why I got off scott-free, flavor-wise, but I'll take it. I will be more careful in the future with my pre-ferments though.
So, now the moment of truth: will I make this again? Absolutely. There's something great about a slack rustic dough like this: it feels very elemental because you're working with a stripped-down ingredient list and it's all about you and the flour, doing a dance with time to extract every last bit of flavor out of the grain. These types of bread are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful. I love the rich color of a caramelized crust and the contrast it makes with the flour that's clinging to it. Let's not forget that it's also super-fun to have an excuse to get sticky and dirty like you do when you're kneading this dough. And it's so exciting to see how much oven spring you can get out of a super-hydrated dough like this! Plus, if you're a bread nerd like me, you get to really use your toys to full effect in a recipe like this. Finally, practice makes perfect: I can't wait to see how much air I can trap in the crumb of this bread after I have a couple more batches under my belt!
See also: Heather's ciabatta.
Up next: cinnamon rolls, a holiday treat.
It doesn't matter how long you've been cooking. It doesn't matter what your favorite cuisine is or whether or not you actually know that you're looking for something: there is a recipe out there for each of us that we have been yearning to make.
In this dish, I found mine: whether I knew it or not, zuppa di farro is the type of Italian food I've been trying to make since I learned how to cook.
No, it's not smothered in tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. It isn't pasta and there is neither a meatball nor a wine-soaked pan-fried chicken cutlet to be found. But this, folks, is the real deal - it's not Italian-American, it's apologetically Tuscan.
Not that the Tuscans have a single thing to apologize for in their cuisine. The days I spent in Florence and Siena were non-stop food bliss. And though I never tried this soup while I was over there, as soon as I tasted it I knew that zuppa di farro was unmistakably at home there.
Cesare Casella, the author of this recipe's cookbook, said that this soup is like the Italian equivalent of chicken soup - it cures all ills. It screams comfort food, and the moment it hit my lips I wished that the temperature would drop a good forty degrees and that the rain would start falling in sheets from the sky. So the next time a day like that rolls around, take my advice: put on a cozy chunky sweater and lounge around the house with a good book in your hand and a somnolent hound at your feet while a pot of this simmers away on the stove.
I have been meaning to post this for a loooooonnnggg time. In fact, if the word "long" was as long as the length of time I've waited to post this recipe, it would be approximately sixty-three syllables long. But I digress.
I've long had a soft spot for minestrone. It's such great comfort food, and super-healthy to boot. I suppose that soup is normally a fall or winter endeavor, but here I'm going to give a Tucson summer (the fact that it's late September is irrelevant - it's in the upper nineties today) the finger and make this soup anyway. That'll show the bloody weather!
There I go with my digressions again.
I've been through a lot of phases with this soup. I first got hooked on it at an Italian restaurant when I was a teenager, so when I started cooking a lot of vegetable soups after I moved to Alaska I decided to try this one out. To be honest, I hated my first attempt. I hadn't yet started making my own chicken stock, and this was when I learned the hard way that using commercial chicken broth as the base for a soup is Officially a Bad Idea because it is Utterly Repugnant. However, at the time, I didn't know that was the cause, so I just thought the recipe was a dud.
Many months later, something strange came over me and I decided to try it again - on unsuspecting dinner guests, no less. This time I was using homemade stock, and when I put the stuff in my mouth I had a foodgasm. It was that good. But because I am crazy, I am hardly ever 100 percent satisfied with a recipe, no matter how good it is. I decided that what this soup needed was an improvement in the bean department. Since then, I've tried all manner of beans: pinto, cannellini, kidney, great Northern whites, and heavenly borlottis. But all of these were canned and none of them were quite right.
Enter Rancho Gordo beans! These heavenly heirloom beans are as fresh as dried beans can get, especially when compared with lowly supermarket beans that are more than likely about five years old, which explains why those inferior beans cook slowly, unevenly, and blandly. This company carries many little-known and rare varieties of beans, including - look out for the squeeing - borlottis! I tried them for the first time when I was throwing together this soup, and finally, I have found my 100 percent satisfaction. These creamy, velvety, supremely flavorful beans add an entirely new level of flavor that ties minestrone together perfectly. It is definitely worth the time to find and cook the beans. And considering that I only just discovered the key to bean bliss, it was also worth the wait in posting this recipe!
In an effort to get back into the swing of this blogging thing, I'm going to make a post today devoid of any real substance (i.e. recipes) because I have no new substance to report. Rather, this I'll be posting gratuitous shots of some of the food I cooked today, all of which has been seen here before.
First up are the beloved pumpkin spice cookies. Last week whist in the grocery store I was literally flabbergasted to find Halloween candy for sale. My brain was seriously thinking it was still July or something and was wondering why they were hawking old candy. I was happier when I realized that the appearance of the sickly sweet stuff on the shelves means one thing: it's time to start baking these jewels again. I particularly enjoy the third photo when blown up to take over the entire screen and viewed with the benefit of a few feet of distance. It almost made Cory start drooling in his tracks.
Cory and I have been loving the grill recently. It doesn't get much more simple than slicing up some veggies, crumbling some dried Greek oregano over them, and throwing them over the fire to blacken and soak up that flavor. We usually also grill fish, especially right now while the Alaskan seafood is so good (but admittedly not quite as fresh as I'm used to). Tonight we feasted on King salmon - a true indulgence - prepared in the usual manner, also pictured here - along with grilled zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, and julienned onion (alas, the light was gone by the time it was prepared, so no photos tonight) and - another special treat - caprese salad.
(Hold on, I think I hear a riot forming in the back. What's that, you say? I've never actually posted a recipe for caprese salad? Ah, that's right, I've just posted a photo. Don't fret. It couldn't get any easier. It's a pity because it's certainly a favorite but I don't know that it justifies its own entry. Anyway, here goes: take a large very ripe (preferably local because it's really hard to find truly ripe tomatoes that aren't local. Take a half-pound of fresh mozzarella cheese. Slice both into 1/4-inch thick slices and arrange on a plate. You can put the tomatoes flat and place mozzarella on top of them or you can place them vertically - it's up to you and how fancy-pants you're feeling. Made a chiffonade out of some basil and sprinkle it over the arrangement. Finish with a drizzle of high-quality extra-virgin olive oil and some fresh cracked pepper. Proceed to dazzle your tastebuds with one of the most simple and delicious foods out there. If you're into, y'know, kicking it up a notch (oh god, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth), use buffalo mozzarella - mozzarella di bufala. It's spendy but the flavor and texture are beyond compare. In further kicking-it-up action, spring for an heirloom tomato. My favorites are the Marvel Stripes. Oh, and do yourself a favor - save those seeds and plant them next year! Another variation - great for parties - select some good cherry or grape tomatoes and find mozarella sold in similar-sized balls. Get a bunch of basil. Take a wooden or bamboo skewer and put a tomato, a basil leaf, and a mozzarella ball onto it. Repeat until your ingredients are exhausted. Arrange on a tray and drizzle with olive oil and pepper.)
Whew. That was quite an aside for an entry that's supposed to be all pretty pictures. But I digress.
But this was no mere caprese salad! This was, indeed, the fancy-pants variation described above! Marvel Stripe! Buffalo Mozz! Basil from the garden! And the clouds parted and Lo, the angels did sing, and it was good. And then it was in my tummy.
Ain't life grand when you have the luxury of throwing a pizza in the oven on a Friday night? And isn't it even better when that pizza is homemade? We definitely hold by that line in our house.
I've always eschewed the line "Even when it's bad, it's still pizza" (quit rolling your eyes, I know that comes as no surprise whatsoever if you've even spent two minutes reading this blog) and I take great joy in making every component for my pizza that I can. Really, it's the only way you know you're going to get a good one.
I love to use pesto as a base for pizza, especially in the summer. Few things give me more pleasure than shearing my basil plants (Fred has recovered from his confined-to-a-pot days and is loving all the room he has to stretch his roots, for those of you who had met him when he wasn't looking so hot), bringing the green stuff inside, and pulling the leaves off the stems. It fills the kitchen with a wonderful aroma!
The only problem with fresh pesto is that it's really easy to overdo it on the garlic, especially if you're like me and habitually triple - at a minimum - the amount of the tasty stuff called for in a recipe. Luckily, I ran across a technique with which you toast the unpeeled garlic cloves on the stove to mellow out that bite it's known for. It works like a charm and I no longer have to work about whether or not I'm going to OD on garlic. You just have to make sure to toast up enough so that you have extra to put on top of the pizza!
The only thing left to do is to load it up with other high-quality ingredients. Once you've done all of this, you'll have created a pizza night to remember!
Lasagna - there is so much to love about it. It's cheesy, it's gooey, it's a meal in itself, it's comfort food. It's easy to make to boot. This was something I could make in my dorm kitchen, following the recipe on the back of the Barilla box. What that recipe lacked in finesse it made up for in cheese. Not that we minded - we were college students starved for a homemade meal, and so we always had fun popping this into the ovens in the dorm kitchens, opening a bottle of wine, and making a meal such that we were the envy of most dorm residents.
Now that I'm out of college though, that cheese-laden flavor-lacking thoroughly Americanized version isn't going to cut it anymore. And that Souffer stuff? Forgetaboutit. Why oh why would you buy something like that when lasagna is like the easiest thing to make ever??? Anyway, I'd been looking for a good recipe for a several years until this winter when we had a dinner party at my swim coach's house and my friend Ginger brought a tray of the most fantastic lasagna. It had just the right amount of cheese and wasn't greasy and had some substantial herbs to it, which is really something that most recipes lack. So what did I do? I asked her for the recipe, of course.
"Oooh, I don't know, I'll have to ask my mom about it!" Apparently the lasagna recipe is akin to a state secret - Ginger's mom worked really hard to develop the recipe (it shows!) and only gave it to her daughters under the condition that they would keep it as proprietary information. Lucky for me though, Carol agreed that it was ok for Ginger to give me the recipe because I had shared my family's pumpkin cookie with her. Totally a great swap, if you ask me. And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have permission to share this recipe on this blog! I've modified it only a little bit, because the core premise of the recipe is so solid. It uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, which I think is a really great idea because it's really tough to find good ricottas in the States. I absolutely love the sauce that you make for the recipe, and it's fantastic with both either and turkey Italian sausages. I did substitute dried Italian herbs for dried basil because basil's flavor is so volatile in the presence of heat and the dried version retains so little of the fresh's flavor - but I just added in the fresh basil later in the recipe. The overall effect of the recipe is a way-less heavy version of the typical lasagna, but still retains all of the flavor that you want.
Thank you so much, Carol, for sharing this recipe with me! You did an awesome job creating this lasagna and I really appreciate being let in on the secret!
"Ugh! I hate Italian pizza! It's so gross! It's not even Italian, it was invented in New York! Let me eat the pizza at Boston's, it's so good!"
Wait for it....
KA-BLAMMO!
Yep. That was my head exploding.
It exploded not for just one, but three very good reasons.
1. Hating Italian pizza is impossible. The ingredients are so fresh and the results so simple that it's quite simply easier to divide by zero than to hate it.
2. I'm not a food anthropologist, but I'm gonna call shenanigans on pizza originating in New York. The research I've done shows that it in fact came from Naples. It's funny how a place can do such great things (invent pizza) and such monumentally stupid things (like stop collecting all the garbage so it piles up to third story windows). But I digress.
3. Boston's pizza (god, I feel dirty typing in that URL for that link) is disgusting. You all know that I get pissed about paying good money for bad food, and not much makes me angrier than having to go there and pay the bill. In fact, the first time I ever went there (my bosses love it so we go there all the time for working lunches, much to my chagrin) I was sitting across from someone who had just read a few of my thoughts on restaurants and he could tell on the look on my face that I was livid about paying seventeen bucks for a shitty meal that I could have made one hundred and twenty times better by just lifting a finger and giving a shit about the food I was preparing. Anyway, their pizza is even worse than that first meal - a salmon caesar salad - that I had: the cheese was laid on way too thick and rubbery as only really bad American-made mozzarella can be, the crust suffered from being stuffed with ten times as much yeast as it needed to rise which made it utterly bland and sour, and the basil - this was supposedly pizza Margherita - was DRIED. DRIED, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???
*steps aside to breathe for a moment.... long deep breaths....*
Ok, I apologize for that "Oh FUDGE!" moment there. I just get sent into spasms of anger when I think about that place. Let's get back to my happy place, and for me right now, that happy place is homemade pizza, even if, no matter how hard you try, it's not quite like the Italians make it.
For some reason I don't make pizza as much as I should. There's really no reason not to - I have a wealth of dough recipes whose prep times vary from 24 hours to 90 minutes. My pantry is always stocked with the requisite ingredients for the crust and toppings. I even have two 8-inch pizza stones, perfect for a cozy binge-free pizza night. But for some reason, I just... don't.
Well, I had been craving good pizza for a couple of weeks and last Friday it because wholly apparent that that night was the night. The stars were aligned - the grocery stores were hemorrhaging fresh (FRESH! Not DRIED!) basil, I had plenty of fresh mozzarella in my fridge, and I had made a batch of marinara the night before. All I had to do was find a dough recipe.
So I called up my Mom. When I talk to him on the weekends, it's not uncommon for my Dad to give me a rundown of the pizza my Mom made the previous Friday and for him to gush about how her pizza gets better every single week. No dice on the recipe from the Mom front though - she was really busy with some elderly relatives, no big deal, it's not like she's the sole source of pizza dough ever (though I still want her recipe!). So at one point, needing to get my current events fix, I brought up NPR and lo and behold, on their rotating blurbs about featured stories, was a Kitchen Window ad, whose topic just so happened to be pizza. It was like the skies had parted and I was sitting in my own little personal ray of sunlight. I was fated to make pizza that night. The gods had willed it to be so.
So when I got home, I got to work on my pizza. After the dough was done rising, I attempted to get the dough nice and thin, but the thing about kneading is that it make dough very elastic. Every time I stretched out the dough it just shrank right back up. I eventually adopted the mannerisms of a, well, special Italian, trying to toss this tiny disc of dough up into the air, catch it on one finger, and let gravity do the work. It certainly worked better than countertop stretching, but clearly, my method needs work if I am to continue to aspire to Italian-standard thinness.
Thicker-crust-than-desired aside, this pizza was marvelous! I loved the warm, garlicky, basily sweetness of the sauce, topped with just a bit of mozzarella a plenty of fresh torn basil, all atop a crispy, grain-flavored crust. That pizza was not long for this world, and though I expect that it would have made a mean cold pizza breakfast, it never got the opportunity to prove itself. But even though I loved the process, the experience, and the taste so much, I think the best thing that came out of it was the inspiration to try again with a myriad of toppings. That's one of the best things about pizza - almost anything is a choice candidate to grace your pie, so you're only limited by your imagination.
And if you still think the pizza from Boston's is better than this, well, do us both a favor and don't ever talk to me about food. Unless, of course, you like watching my head explode.
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita, take due" »
Every cook needs a good marinara recipe in her or his repertoire. Why not? It's simple to prepare, goes with tons of things, and is easily modified into a multitude of other sauces. It's infinitely superior to what attempts to pass for jarred spaghetti sauces, and again, it's so easily made and even more easily customized that it's really not worth buying it off the shelf.
I recently made a batch from a recipe recommended by raving reviews from my Mom and I fell in love. It's sweet but not overly so with plenty of warm garlic flavor without any of the raw garlic punishment. I used it for three separate applications: saucing ravioli served with fresh mozzarella and torn basil (pictured below), pizza Margherita, take due, and spaghetti with calimari (utterly divine, but so modified on the fly due to utterly poor recipe testing that I wasn't keeping track of things like quantities and time, so I'll have to re-make it in order to post the recipe). Needless to say, the sauce is all gone. Well, that is, until I make another batch...
Espresso. Brandy. Ladyfingers. Chocolate. Marscapone.
When you look at that list you may find yourself wondering, "What possibly could go wrong?"
And if you answered an enthusiastic "Nothing!" you would be so, so wrong. I sure as hell hope you didn't bet the farm on that one.
Tiramisu, at its best, is light yet rich, warm-tasting with brandy notes, with espresso to offset the sweetness, and because everything is better with chocolate, a liberal dusting of some Scharffen Berger. However, when executed improperly, it's flat tasting, bitter, and soggy. Trust me, you don't want soggy tiramisu.
It's one of those dishes where everything has to go right. Because of that, I won't order it in restaurants anymore, not even the one that Cory took me to for dessert on my birthday, because they screw it up and frankly, mine is a hell of a lot better (sorry Cory, I know you meant well!).
Luckily, if you have a good recipe, like the one I'm about to share with you, you can't go wrong. Too many recipes for tiramisu are too vague and include verbiage like "stir a couple of times" or "heat until lukewarm" and that sort of imprecision, while maybe appearing a little less intimidating to the novice cook, is a recipe for disaster. For soggy, flaccid, bitter disaster. And you know I would never do that to you.
I've been waiting to post this recipe for quite some time.
You see, you might call this dish Highly Significant.
It's so significant that I often find myself asking if Cory and I would have gotten married if it were not for this recipe.
It's one of the first things we ever cooked together, and from the point that we starting smooshing up those tomatoes with our hands, it was painfully apparent that we were meant to be.
We still cook up a batch of chicken cacciatore every time we're together. I thought it was criminal that he didn't have a copy of the recipe or The Joy of Cooking, so when he moved into his current apartment I bought him a copy the newly released 75th anniversary edition as a housewarming gift. Before I bought it for him I made sure that the recipe hadn't gotten the axe and was included in that version, but when we brought it home and we inspected it more closely we found that it calls for diced canned tomatoes, not whole tomatoes that you crush with your hands. On that alone, I've basically panned the whole edition. It's not worth buying! Find the 1997 edition! That older recipe helped Cory and I find love, and I who am I to deny anyone else that opportunity by recommending an inferior tome?
I'm going to admit upfront: my version of the classic Italian chicken is so not traditional. Every recipe I've ever seen and everyone else who's ever served it to me - including places in Italy - call for chicken parts, not chicken breasts, but when I was first learning to cook I had no clue what the heck a chicken part was. Even if I had been savvy enough, I simply didn't have the equipment to cut up a chicken and then cook it. So maybe it's for the best that I've bastardized it. I still think it's delicious, and it has the health benefits of being all-white meat.
Not everything about this recipe is 100% positive though. There is something about chicken cacciatore that makes living alone an especially bitter pill to swallow. This dish is so obviously meant to be cooked with people and then shared with people. That alone explains two of my behaviors: I always call Cory when I'm starting to crush up those tomatoes with my hands and tell him that I wish he was there with me, and whenever I'm cooking for a group people for the first time, this is the recipe I pull out. It's just too good to not share with others. It's not just the end result that's important, it's the whole process - from the first time you throw the onions and herbs in the pan and the fragrance makes everyone exclaim with delight to the times when the pan is in a long simmer and you can just sit around and enjoy the company of your companions to the first bite of that warm, earthy, wine-herbs-and-tomato chickeny goodness. Nothing says "I care" like chicken cacciatore.
When Cory and I arrived in Florence, one of the first things I noticed on menus at local restaurants was tomato and bread soup. I had never heard of it and honestly was thinking, well, something close to "ew."
But then there was Il Latini, the renowned restaurant that hasn't lost its local charm despite its fame (which I have already described in my Panna Cotta entry). Since it was our last night in Tuscany and we had finally found the Florence restaurant of our dreams -- the restaurant that we had literally stumbled across, having gotten lost in the streets in our quest for food -- I decided to branch out and try some of the truly local cuisine. Even though we were offered many, many delicious options for our primi, I ordered the pappa al pomodoro.
As soon as the waiter set the bowl down in front of me all of my previous expectations evaporated. I had been imagining something much like American tomato soup, thin and watery with an assertive salt flavor. Instead I was served a hearty, thick, delicious soup with deep tomato and bright basil flavor. Its texture on the tongue is like no other soup I've ever had. Cory, with his singularly amazing gnocchi, was something akin to jealous.
So, unsurprisingly, Cory and I started looking for a way to duplicate this soup experience when we got back to the States. The William-Sonoma Florence cookbook had disappointing results (which is a cautionary tale to American cooks that what we consider to be aromatics like celery and carrots will never ever stand a chance against plenty of fresh basil), and I was almost beginning to despair until I remembered that in the front window of Il Latini a TV was playing a tape of the international media coverage the restaurant had gotten -- and they had played a clip of Rachel Ray's $40 a Day. Feeling slightly dirty (to put it delicately, I'm not the world's biggest fan of Ms. Ray), I hunted down the episode online, and lo and behold, she had their recipe!!! Cory and I cooked it together, and it was everything we remembered and brought back wonderful memories of that night in Florence.
So if you can't make it to Florence yourself, at least do yourself this favor and make this soup. It's so representative of how Italians can take something most Americans would throw away (stale bread), add it to a couple of fresh, simple ingredients, and create something warm, delicious, and satisfying.
Click here for the recipe for "Pappa al Pomodoro - Tuscan tomato and bread soup" »
My love affair with pizza margherita can be traced back to my absolute smittenness with caprese salad. It's really not all that surprising -- you start with basic, fresh, delicious ingredients, then you put it on a pizza. What could go wrong????
I had made this pizza before about two years ago. The first time, Cory was my dining companion and instead of a tomato sauce base we used freshly made pesto and topped the pizza with tomato slices. Delicious, but I would recommend custom-making the sauce for the pizza and using a lighter hand with the oil, as it will mix with the fat in the mozzarella. While I loved it, it certainly wasn't truly authentic.
So, of course, when Cory and I went to Italy, one of the things I had to eat over there was the pizza margherita. We wasted no time on that count -- our first lunch in Florence was in a trattoria outside of the city's famous Mercato Centrale. Cory had a pizza topped with prosciutto and I, of course, indulged my tricolore tastebuds.
The pizza was unlike any I had ever had before. The crust was very, very thin but not cracker-crunchy and the sauce was, for lack of a better description, true tomato red. I thought it was pure, simple, and delicious, and Cory was known to say "the sauce is so fresh it still had seeds in it!" The pizzas we were served were probably a good 12 inches, but they were nowhere near as heavy as their American counterparts. Since we had had a typically light Italian breakfast and had been walking all day and climbed to the very very top of the duomo (the Santa Maria del Fiore) Cory polished his off easily. I packed my leftovers out and devoured them later that day.
Of course, upon returning to the States, I wanted to make it, but the whole-grain fiend in me wanted a whole wheat crust. I finally found a recipe for it, and of course wasted no time making it. Next time I make it I will probably try to lengthen the rising time (true Stacey fashion) and I will make my crust much much thinner, even if I have to discard some dough. And I will buy a pizza peel. Save yourself the anguish -- buy one too!
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita with a Whole Wheat Crust" »
Until I made this dessert at home, I had never had panna cotta in the United States.
I hadn't even heard of this indulgent dish until a couple of months ago, when I met someone in Korea who had actually taught at the Culinary Institute of America. I haven't met many people who are bigger foodies than me, but he definitely qualified. A few of us were looking for a restaurant in Seoul for dinner and we decided to pop into an Italian place, and my chef comrade ordered it for dessert, served with a perfect raspberry sauce on top. "Not too shabby," I thought, but didn't think too much of it again until Cory and I's honeymoon.
After our day trip into Siena, we returned to Florence intent on finding a classic Tuscan dinner. We looked through our guidebooks and found a place or two that looked promising on paper but were totally uninspiring when viewed in person. So we started to wander the streets, looking for those wonderful Italian hole-in-the-walls that you hear about from all your friends who were lucky enough to go to Italy when they were still in college.
All of a sudden we passed by a Il Latini, a restaurant that looked very cozy and the menu was actually entirely in Italian, which I took to be a good sign that this place was authentic. It was about 7:05 and the place didn't open until 7:30, so we decided to wait, queuing up like, well, normal civilized people would. About ten minutes later a man walked up and asked if anyone there spoke English, and almost all of us answered that we did. "This is the third time this week that my wife and I have been here, and trust me, the wait is worth it." Cory and I grinned at each other at this, and the man continued, "I know you all think that you're lined up like rational, courteous people, but trust me, when it gets closer to opening all the locals are going to start massing around the door. Lines will mean nothing!"
Well, you know what they say, when in Rome....
So we gaggle up, and before long the man is proven correct when these people start amassing around us, trying to get in ahead of us even though we've been waiting twenty-five minutes. 'Oh hell no!' I thought to myself. "If anyone tries to get around you, throw 'em an elbow!" was Cory's husbandly advice. And throw an elbow I did!
We managed to get in at the first seating and were seated at a table with another couple. The huge bottle of house wine was already on the table, and the food starting coming almost immediately. We never saw a menu, but everything they brought was superb: insalata caprese, pate on crostini, and tabbouleh made with barley for antipasti, Tuscan tomato and bread soup for me and gnocchi with pesto and sun-dried tomatoes for Cory for primi, roast beef for me and roasted lamb for him for secondi, and then a delicious dessert wine, biscotti, espresso, (something delicious that I can't remember), and, of course, panna cotta with a velvety chocolate sauce for dolci. It was an amazing meal (quoth Cory: "my brain pretty much shut down so that the only thing working was the taste buds") and an unforgettable dining experience in my favorite city.
It was also, of course, a wonderful reminder of a dessert that is fast becoming a favorite.
The first time I had gnocchi, I was pretty doubtful. Cory and I were living in San Angleo and he happened to find a package of gnocchi on the grocery store shelf. He used to make it with his family and he loved the stuff, so he bought it and cooked it for me one night. I was not impressed -- they seemed like heavy, tastless lumps in the no-man's-land between pasta and tortellini.
But then, we went to Italy.
We had gnocchi there.
And I have seen the light!
Yes, light is what they are, light and flavorful! Those potato dumplings have won a place in my heart.
I came back from Italy all culinarily inspired, even more firmly convinced than ever that when it comes to food, Americans just don't get it. To help shed some light in those dark corners, I resolved to serve a proper Italian meal to some friends -- with complete with antipasti, primi and secondi piatti, and dolci. I wanted to try something new, something delicious that I had never made before and that my guests would probably have never eaten before, so after a bit of searching, it came to me: gnocchi was the obvious choice for primi.
When I found the recipes, I realized I had a new dilemma: I don't have a potato ricer, and I have this thing about taking up limited storage space with single-use gadgets. So the stubborn, yet forsightful, bit of me decided to instead buy the Pasta Maker with Food Grinder attachment for my stand mixer, figuring that I could also use it for tomato sauces, apple sauce, sausages, and, of course, pasta.
Last week I made a test batch of gnocchi for the dinner I'll be having at the end of the month. Let me tell you, even though I'm not really sure what the authentic shape is for these dumplings, they are delicious -- especially when tossed with a pesto sauce you've just ground up yourself.
