Tag: Italy

Categories
Fruit Desserts The Book

197. Balsamic-Roasted Pears with Pepper and Honey p.809


The recipe

This is how dessert should be, simple, elegant, and not too heavy. I’m rarely in the mood for a slice of cake right after dinner, and the yen for creamy or frozen treats is even more infrequent. However, a cheese plate is always a welcome addition to a meal. I associate this kind of dessert with Italy, almost every menu has some combination of pear and cheese, and honey is a common touch. One handwritten menu I saw there advertised the Cheese and Fear plate, I was hoping for a high concept dessert, but it was just a typo. 

The dish is simple to prepare. You roast pears in a buttered dish for 20 minutes, then pour balsamic over-top and roast for 5 minutes more. Plate the pears, drizzle them with the juices in the pan, and serve with slices of Manchego. Drizzle the plate with honey, and a few grinds of pepper, then serve. 

The Good: With hardly any effort you can create a satisfying end to a big meal. It can pretty well all be done ahead, just pop the pears in the oven while you’re clearing the dishes, and they’ll be ready once everyone’s finished up their glass of wine. The presentation is really simple, but it looks great. Pears have a great affinity for cheeses, and the balsamic glaze makes the whole interaction more appealing. The few grinds of pepper emphasize the sweet-savoury interplay of the dish. 

The Bad: For my money, this dish could have moved a little more to the savoury side. I found the total effect of the roasted pears + balsamic + honey to be pushing the balance too far to the sweet. A more assertively flavoured cheese, or a more acidic balsamic might have brought things into balance. Also, some nuts would have been a very nice addition to the plate. Roasting pears is a delicate affair. I like them roasted so that they loose their gritty-grainy texture, but I don’t want them to turn to mush. Mine ended up a little too firm, half an hour in the oven might have served them better.

The Verdict: Overall I was quite happy with this dish, and I’ll certainly make variations on it again. I think disliking sweet desserts is largely my own personal issue, so it may not turn others off this dish at all. Even with a little more sugar than I would have liked it was an excellent way to finish our dinner.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

163. Grilled Tuna with Warm White Bean Salad p.299

The recipe in the book is similar to this one on Epicurious, except that the book calls for larger (6 oz) tuna steaks.

This dish was a triumph. As I’ve mentioned before my dining companion isn’t a fan of fish, and the book has 95 Fish and Shellfish recipes for us to get through. While she’s open to trying new things, and always tells me she’ll try whatever I make, I want to make her happy, so I’ve been staying away from fish when she’s around for supper. I decided that barely seared tuna would probably be an easy way for her to dip a toe into fishy waters without being overwhelmed. We’ll work our way up to mackerel and cod, but this was a successful baby step.

The dish has two components, grilled tuna steaks seasoned with lemon juice, olive oil, crushed fennel seeds, salt, and pepper, and a bean salad. The salad is made with soaked great northern beans, which are simmered with garlic for an hour. Some of the beans are mashed and combined with the beans’ cooking liquid to hold the salad together, fresh garlic is added in, along with chopped arugula, onion, parsley, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. The tuna is served on top of the beans, and some of the remaining arugula.

I was really happy with this dish, it was simple, clean, and very tasty. Mostly I was happy that my dining companion was happy though. Our grill heats quite unevenly, so some parts of the tuna steaks were more done than I would have liked. My dining companion liked the barely cooked parts of the tuna, but found the overdone bits too fishy for her taste. I thought the fennel worked exceptionally well with the tuna, and I’d absolutely grill steaks like this again. I’d probably try to sear the steaks over an extremely hot flame for just a couple of minutes though, if you’re using high quality tuna, and paying high quality tuna prices, getting a seared exterior, and a barely warm interior is important. The bean salad wasn’t as successful, but not bad at all. The beans needed more garlic, and more salt or lemon juice, they were a little on the bland side. The texture was nice, with just barely firm beans, in a thick sauce. The decision to put chopped arugula into a warm dish is mystifying though. Arugula’s claim to fame is it’s peppery crisp flavour, and that completely disappears the second you heat it. A few of the Epicurious comments suggest that the dish would be better with spinach, and I’m inclined to agree.

I thought this was a really nice dish, it came together easily, tasted good, and managed to do it without dousing everything in cream and butter. It’s the kind of dish that begs to be eaten outside on a beautiful spring day with people you really like. I’ll always remember this dish as the first time my dining companion ate and enjoyed fish for dinner.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

157. Sicilian Meatballs p.222


I can’t find a recipe for these meatballs online, but I can’t stand to think that the internet will go without it for another day.

3/4 cup fine fresh bread crumbs from Italian bread (crusts discarded)
1/4 cup whole milk
1/2 cup (2 3/4 oz) whole almonds with skin, toasted
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 pound ground beef chuck
1/2 cup finely grated pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano
1/4 cup dried currants
1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 large egg

Stir together bread crumbs and milk in a medium bowl.
Pulse almonds with sugar in a food processor until finely ground. Add to bread crumb mixture, along with remaining ingredients, and mix with your hands until just combined.
Roll mixture into 1-inch meatballs and transfer to a plate. Refrigerate if not cooking immediately.

These meatballs are a component of the Perciatelli with Sausage Ragù and Meatballs recipe I’ll be writing up next. In that preparation they’re browned in a pan, and then slowly simmered with a tomato sauce. I’m sure they would be excellent baked on their own, or as a component of any other recipe calling for meatballs. They are without a doubt the best meatballs I’ve ever had.

Everything about the recipe is spot on. The flavour was just perfect, there was something ethereal about the combination of the sweet cinnamon and currents with the beef and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The ground almonds grounded the flavour with an earthy body. They had a lovely fine grained texture, interspersed with chunks of pine nut and currant. They were delicate, but managed to hold together.

I’m going to Toronto with the boys this weekend, and I’m going head to head with one of them in a Sicilian meatball battle. He’ll be using the recipe from The Bon Appétit Cookbook, and I’ll go with this one. Whose cuisine will reign supreme? I like my chances, his recipe doesn’t call for almonds or cinnamon, which really made the dish for me.

I’ve you’ve ever loved a meatball, you owe it to yourself to try these. I barely noticed the rest of my dinner with these on the plate.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

130. Pasta with Tomato and Basil p.206


Unfortunately there’s no recipe for this one.

This is a recipe for September. It has only a few ingredients, and they’re available year round, but the rest of the year it’ll be a pale imitation of itself. This incredibly simple pasta sauce starts with browning garlic slices in olive oil, then adding chopped tomatoes and basil branches and simmering for 20 minutes. You then stir in basil leaves, season with salt and pepper, and toss it with fettuccine.

It could not possibly be simpler, so it comes down to the quality of your ingredients. I’m sure making this with canned tomatoes, Chinese garlic, and greenhouse basil would taste pretty good, but you’ll miss the whole point. My favourite part about this recipe is its sense of time and place. In late August and September the tomatoes are abundant and deliriously flavourful, basil is growing like a weed, and freshly dug garlic is just turning up at the markets. During this perishable moment all the ingredients for this recipe are at their peak, and they’re practically being given away. I feel it’s my duty to try to use up as many of them as I can, and ideally to do as little to them as possible.

I thought this dish was just wonderful. It managed to capture the essence of late summer on a plate. The tomatoes broke down, but kept their just-picked flavour. My garlic was so fresh it was next to impossible to peel, and the pungent basil left me reeling. The fettuccini drank up the sauce, and took on its flavours. Finished with a bit of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a grind of pepper I just couldn’t have asked for a better meal.

My dining companion thought it was good, but nowhere near as earth-shattering as I did. Whether it was the recipe, or my state of mind that day, it struck me as a near perfect dinner. It might deserve a full five mushrooms, but I’m going to deduct a half-a-mushroom for instructing me to peel the tomatoes, which seems like a total waste of time for a rustic casual pasta dish like this. Also, since it didn’t move my dining companion, I can’t in good conscience give it full marks.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

113. Rosemary Focaccia p.606


The recipe is the same as this one, but linked recipe forgets to list the water and salt for the dough in the ingredient list (they are in the recipe description).

I should start off by saying that this was absolutely delicious. It didn’t rely on rare ingredients or novel taste experiences to get there. It went with the straightforward combination of fresh baked bread, so much olive oil that drizzling is not an option, and enough salt to make it crunchy. This is the same tried and true combination that keeps the deep-dish pizza places of the world in business. You know that this is a Gourmet recipe and not a special from Pizza Hut because the focaccia doesn’t have a ring of cheese baked into the crust.

The recipe starts with a simple yeast dough, with some olive oil added in. It’s mostly kneaded in a stand mixer, then finished kneading by hand. Once the dough is coated in more oil and it’s been left to rise for 1 1/2 hours, it’s pressed into a baking sheet, covered with plastic wrap, and allowed a second rise. Obviously this second rise requires the addition of more oil, but this time it’s used to lubricate the baking sheet and plastic wrap. After the second rise it’s time for, you guessed it, more oil. This time the oil is mixed with chopped rosemary, and poured over the bread. There is so much oil at this point that the recipe directs you to make indentations in the bread for the oil to pool. Then the bread is sprinkled with sea salt, and baked at 425 ’till it’s golden. When it’s ready the bread needs to be inverted to get it out of the baking sheet. I’d do this over some paper towel because even the absorbent power of bread is overwhelmed by the amount of oil in this dish.

The focaccia was excellent, the bread was moist, with some chewiness, but a nice crumb and texture. The crust, both top and bottom, were wonderfully golden. The rosemary was fantastic, and really allowed to shine as the sole aromatic. If you serve this to friends they’ll beg you for the recipe, don’t give it to them. It would be like telling a kid about Santa. The bread doesn’t hold up well overnight. It’s not great cold, microwaving killed everything good about it, and rewarming in the oven didn’t to it justice. It’s best to get a crowd together and polish the whole thing off in one go.

The recipe uses a truly unconscionable amount of olive oil. The ingredient list calls for just under 1/2 a cup (7 tablespoons) of oil, to 5 cups of flour. But that doesn’t count the “generous” lubrication of the dough ball during the fist rise, or the baking sheet and plastic wrap during the second. I suspect the total is closer to 3/4 of a cup. That’s 1400 calories at 120 cal/tablespoon. We had the focaccia along with yesterday’s kale and chroizo soup for dinner, and certainly didn’t feel like we’d eaten lightly.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

2. Saltimbocca p. 456

The version in The Book is very similar to this one with a slightly different ingredient list. I’ll give it to you here

8 thin veal cutlets
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 garlic cloves
1/4 teaspoon salt
16-24 fresh sage leaves (each about 2 1/2 to 3 inches long)
8 thin slices prosciutto (about 1/4 pound total)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/3 cup dry white wine
1/3 cup chicken stock or store-bought low sodium broth
2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Essentially The Book adds pepper, deglazes with both stock and wine, and finishes the sauce with butter. I haven’t made both versions, but the pan sauce The Book’s version produced was out of this world. I think the sauce benefited from the stock because the saltimbocca only sauté for a few seconds (about 30), and there really wasn’t a lot of time to produce flavorful meaty browned bits for the pan. As we will soon see, The Book is fearless when it comes to finishing things with butter.

The Book tells us to “secure prosciutto and sage with wooden picks threaded through sage leaves and meat” whereas the linked recipe recommends we use three picks per cutlet. I only used one skewer each, and I found they were prone to spinning around like little meaty pinwheels: use at least two skewers.

At the time I made this I wasn’t too familiar with sage, and this dish was a solid introduction. It is upfront and centre in the meat, and most of the browned bits scraped up into the sauce were sage. The prosciutto takes on a wonderfully crispy texture, and I imagine the thinner your slices are the crispier they’ll end up. The veal is only 1/8 inch thick, so overcooking is easy to do, and easy to miss. Next time I would be more careful about making sure the cutlets were of an even thickness, but even the overdone ones tasted pretty great.

Overall this was quick, easy, pretty, and packed with flavor.