Aroma Cucina

Time for Change

Hard to believe but our season in Italy is coming to an end, and we head back to New York next week.  We’re looking forward to seeing family and friends and soaking up all the energy and vitality New York has to offer.  Not to mention eating some good food!  I’m particularly craving some dumplings from the Good Dumpling House.  In the meantime, we’re eating the last bites  of our favorite fishes from the Adriatic: caposanto or scallops with a bit of butter and a few drops of cognac, little bitty sole from the Fano area sautéed with olive oil and finished with parsley from our garden and a squeeze of lemon juice. The simple things in life!

We’re also in the process of transferring the Aroma Cucina website to a new server, so there may be some downtime and a few glitches here and there.  Don’t worry, we’ll be back up and running as quickly as possible.

In the meantime…enjoy the gorgeous fall weekend and we’ll see you when we are back in the Big Apple.

Friuli Wine Primer

OK, you’ve heard me rhapsodize about Friulian wines and you’d like to taste them too, but what can you reasonably expect to find on your wine merchant’s shelf and what should you look for?  Doesn’t it drive you crazy when you read about great wines and you can never, ever find them??

The Friuli Venezia Giulia region is known as a major white wine producer but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek out their reds, which have benefited from a concerted effort to upgrade their quality and reputation. Traditionally there are strong Austrian and French influences found in the region’s wines, and varietals such as chardonnay, Riesling, sauvignon blanc, traminer, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot are all commonly found in Friuli.

Friuli’s most commonly exported and best known wine is “Tocai Friuliana”. Don’t confuse it with sweet Hungarian wine Tokaji. There is an ongoing legal battle to disallow the Friulians from using the name Tocai, but I don’t believe that has been resolved.

Tokai Friuliana is a straightforward white wine that works well with simple fish preparations, lightly sauced pastas, and is a match made in heaven when paired with San Daniele prosciutto. The chardonnays we tasted were consistently delicious, having spent very little, if any time at all, in oak. These chardonnays have almost nothing in common with the typical buttery, oaked California style chardonnay.  The Friulian style chardonnay is leaner and crisper and far better suited to pairing with foods. There is a sort of cult following for the unfiltered chardonnays, but very little actually leaves Friuli.

You should be able to find Friulian merlots as merlot grapes account for nearly 20 percent of all the vines in Friuli.  And just so can sound cool to your wine guy, in Italy, merlot is pronounced with a prominent “t” at the end.  Of course your wine guy may not know this and you’ll just wind up sounding like you are a little bit crazy.  Keep an eye out for Friulian cabernet francs as these are also delicious.  There are some single grape wines that are worth seeking out, namely “Refosco” and “Schioppettino”.  From what I’m reading the refosco grape is getting a lot of attention these days from vintners outside of Friuli, particularly in California. A young refosco can resemble a gamay, being lively and fruity in the glass or it can actually be a big, almost Amarone type wine.  It would be fun to do a refosco tasting and compare how different vintners handle this grape.  Schioppettino is going to be harder to find because it is a difficult grape to grow and to tame. It reminds me of the Umbrian Sagrantino grape in that you have to subdue the tannins before it can be pleasurable to drink.  However it is a great wine paired with grilled meats and it was our wine of choice the other night with our huge grilled steak.

One of the best value wines we came home with is a cabernet franc from Azienda Cencig. We stumbled upon this absolute gem of a vintner by happy accident. You know your fantasy of a vineyard with a happy winemaker, him mother hanging around in the back, some chickens wandering around, the smell of lunch cooking off in the distance to tantalize the taste buds and the view of the vineyard to satisfy the soul? What, your fantasy doesn’t look like that? Well mine does and that’s what Cencig looks like. We had a blast tasting his wines, trading stories about cinghiale and loading up our car with a cab franc that literally makes my toes curl with pleasure.  I don’t believe that Cencig exports any wine, which is a real shame. We had a long conversation about how he felt he was being bullied into making wines that were more ‘international’ in taste and to his mind that was a crime.  He declared that all California wines taste alike, which I certainly don’t agree with, but I understand his resentment of Parker-ized wines.  I just went back to my notes, and to be dead honest, I loved every single one of his wines, so if anyone wants to organize a trip to Friuli and Cencig, count us in.  And while I’m feeling confessional, we’ve been hoarding the cab franc…. Only the worthy are treated to a glass.

OK, blah, blah, blah…the chances of you walking into a wine shop that has a section dedicated to Friulian wines is slim so here is a list of vintners that if you see their name…grab a bottle and tell me what you think.

Cencig
Jermann (big exporter, good wines but you’ll pay for them)

Bastianich (yeah, like Lidia)

Livio Felluga (good chance of finding these wines, they’re good, a little overpriced on the export market, but consistently good quality)

Marco Felluga (they’re feuding brothers)

Schiopetto (grand daddy of Friulian wines)

Edi Keber (he once treated us to his personal stash of unfiltered chardonnay… he lives and breathes his wine the way we would all like to)

Ronco del Gelso

Zamo

Dorigo (they produce an excellent Schioppettino)

Villa Russiz

Skerk

Petrussa (if you find their sauvignon blanc 2007….just buy me a bottle, ok)

Damijan (long shot that this producer exports but his unfiltered Banco Kaplia ’04 is probably one of the most unusual and complex whites we’ve ever tasted. It looks like cider in the glass)

Grado, Aquileia, Udine and home

Grado wasn’t our cup of tea. It’s a very chic seaside resort town that shares the same water as Venice. It sort of a cross between Miami Beach, the Hamptons and RV heaven.Beautifully restored little streets, very expensive and mediocre restaurants and a reputation for being a  spa town.
The town is known for their “Boreto” or brodetto (fish soup) and it was good but we’d had enough fish, it was Saturday and we decided to head back to Udine because we didn’t want to miss Saturday night in Udine.

Our route out of Grado took us through the ancient town of Aquileia which is famous for the Basilica that dates back to 313AD.  The floor of the basilica is covered in incredibly detailed mosaics depicting many allegorical images that are clearly pagan in their roots.  Behind the Basilica is a very moving and powerful cemetery dedicated to the victims of World War 1. The two statues pictures might be a bit difficult to see in this lower resolution but take a close look. One has gaunt soldiers being helped by a crucified Jesus and the other is an archangel lugging a fallen soldier to heaven.

Hard to believe, but we didn’t stop to eat in Aquileia!  We did stop at an unremarkable roadside trattoria, well not entirely unremarkable as I did see one of the strangest dishes go by.  It was a tomato margarita pizza heaped high with French Fries! I can honestly say that this a combination that I would never imagine in my wildest dreams, buy hey, to each his own.

This fantastic bike adventure was coming to end, but wait, there was still one more killer meal to be had and it was a complete accident that we found it.  After a louche Saturday night in Udine, we picked up the truck on Sunday morning and drove up into the Prealps.  It was fun to ride along some of the same roads that we had biked, but a car moves too fast and you miss all the little things.

We wandered far up into the hills where we saw foragers staggering out of the woods carrying huge baskets of mushrooms and by lunchtime we were very hungry and heading down into Tricesmo where there was supposed to be a good restaurant. We had our car windows open to breathe in the fresh air, when the smell of grilling meat wafted in.  Like characters in a silly cartoon, we looked at each other and without a word, careened into the parking lot of the Trattoria Friuli.

They were just gearing up for a full Sunday lunch and since we had no reservations, they put us at a little table by the door. Great seat….we got to watch the full parade of people coming in.  No menu, just a few questions: wine? If the answer was yes, they went to a refrigerator and pulled out a generic bottle of red wine. Turns out its their own wine and the vineyard is right outside. Meat? Yes, please.  Mushrooms? Yes, please. Pasta? Yes, please.
Our order being taken, Jeff heads off to use the facilities and comes back with the hugest grin, “You have to see what’s going on in there!”
I wander into the next room and there is a grill the size of a billiard table, covered in meat.  The chef is sweating and smiling and having a fine old time getting his picture taken by me. I hurry back to the table because I see our antipasto has arrived and Jeff is already sampling away at the silky prosciutto. We eat fresh tagliatelle with funghi, another huge plate of sautéed mixed funghi and finally a perfectly done dinosaur steak. It was complete heaven.  We rolled out of there and the next day we rolled home to Umbria.
Can you tell we had some fun in Friuli?  You know we are going back to Udine and it will be in time for Saturday night!

Trattoria Friuli
Torlano di Nimis
Via del, Ponte, 2
Tel: 0432-790203

Biking Friuli: Trieste

It’s been awhile since I posted on Friuli, but the gracious city of Trieste needs it’s moment of blog glory.  We were undecided about going to Trieste, it’s at the very eastern edge of Italy and it meant that we couldn’t do a loop but would have to ride the same way out there and back. Let’s put it this way, no matter how out of the way it seems: go to Trieste. 

Trieste’s history is unusually shrouded in myths and legends: Jason and the Argonauts landed in Trieste on their search for the Golden Fleece.  It was an outpost of Ancient Rome and there are significant Roman ruins still standing.  In 1382 Trieste was officially under the Austrian Hapsburg rule and it remained an Austrian city until the end of World War I when it was annexed to Italy.

We rode on the Costeria road from Monfalcone to Trieste which it turns out is a very popular bike route with the fast biking lycra crowd. The road is in good condition and hugs the water so we had to make a number of stops just to admire the view and that wild rock tunnel.  There is a beautiful seaside esplanade leading into the city, with small beaches and little showers set up so that wind surfers can clean up before they head back into town. Extremely civilized.
 Not wanting to risk missing lunch, we stopped and ate at a little sandwich café in the formal gardens surrounding Castella Miramare.  No hot food, just pannini, which was fine with us as it was so delicious to sit in the sun and smell the sea. Jeff starts to chat up the bar man and pretty soon Jeff comes back outside with an incredible glass of 2006 Skerk unfiltered chardonnay and a very large smile on his face. One of the most appealing things about this Friuli adventure was finding so many people passionate about their wine. No matter how humble the place, the wine was always stellar.

Little did we know that Trieste is also home to “Barcolana”, one of the largest regatta racing events in the world and we had come into town about two days before the main event. The most incredible sailboats just kept coming into port. I don’t know a thing about racing sailboats except that they are very lovely to look at.  By Friday, there were so many boats and masts you could barely see across the harbor.

After a long ramble exploring the city, we were hungry, it was dinnertime and someone we met had recommended Arco Riccardo ristorante. The Arco Riccardo is an intact Roman arch that is at the entrance to this lovely little retreat of a restaurant. The lights are soothing, the music is relaxing and the food is sublime. The overall experience is sensuous and satisfying. Bits of smooth pureed baccala, tiny marinated anchovies, perfectly grilled gamberoni and a knock out drop-dead bottle of Kante 2004 unfiltered chardonnay. Even though the wine was unfiltered it wasn’t cloudy and it had a gorgeous nose full of fresh cut apples that gave way to a persistent violet finish. I’ll probably never find that wine again, and I’ll have to live on the memory of it, but that’s ok because it was one of life’s great moments.

The next day we decided to ride out to the small fishing village of Muggia that is truly the last stop in Italy. I do not recommend bike riding to Muggia! It’s a lot of nasty highway and tunnels and not at all fun, but the insanely good lunch we had there made up for that rotten ride.   We wandered into the tiny Enoteca di Patriarca and when I say tiny I mean it had three tables and one of the tables was occupied by the owner/waiter/husband/sommelier.  His wife is the cook and man can she cook. We’re both fans of ‘sarde in saor’.  It’s a typical dish of the region, marinated sardines with onions.  The sardines are very lightly fried, then covered with hot onions and left to marinate for a day or two.  This lady’s sarde in saor was hands down the best we’ve ever tasted. I pestered her for the recipe and she let us know that Muggia is home to the best tasting sardines. You can find them in Grado or Venice, but they can’t compare to Muggia sardines. Who knew?
The other brings-tear-to-your-eyes dish was a simple plate of grilled ‘caposanto’ or scallops in their shells. Perfectly done, sweet, tender, yielding like a virgin on her wedding night. OK, I’m getting carried away but these were some seriously good scallops.  We floated on a happy foodie cloud all the way back to Trieste.
The next day we reluctantly headed out of town, actually we were kicked out. There wasn’t a hotel room to be had because of Barcolana, so we packed up our gear and headed to the oh so chic beach town of Grado.

Pagans, Grilled Meat and Fire

Umbria is old, people have lived here seemingly forever, certainly pre-Etruscan, obviously pre-Christian and there is still a strong pagan connection to meat and fire. It’s the defining smell at festas and gatherings: meat sizzling over a wood fired grill.

I grew up in New Jersey with back yard BBQ’s and we had a charcoal grill just like everybody else, after I was married we had our new home one of our first purchases was the gas grill. I figured that I knew a thing or two about grilling meat, but it wasn’t until we came to Umbria that the whole primal thing kicked in.  The meat cuts are rougher here, the meat is tougher, you have to actually chew it, and sometimes you actually have to gnaw at the bones to get any meat at all. It’s beyond delicious and incredibly satisfying. None of that sissy soft meat here, you need teeth and a gullet if you are going to eat meat in Umbria.  Most preparations here are simply salt and pepper and maybe a little rosemary. Stop.  Grill meat, slap on a plate with a piece of lemon, a drizzle of olive oil and eat it while it’s hot. Wash down with a slightly rough red wine.
There is a place in the nearby city of Citta di Castello that is part pizza joint and part steak joint. The meat is lined up in the refrigerator cases, and these are BIG dinosaur steaks, 3 inches thick and dinner plate sized. No dry aging, no pre-seasoning, they would split a gut laughing at the suggestion of sous vide, they think Australian lamb is for babies before they cut teeth. I think the place is called Trattoria Fez or something like that, but everyone knows it as the Steak Nazi’s place. Friends or ours have been banned for asking for their steak to be anything but blue, we didn’t get banned but he refused to give us our vegetables and we never saw our waitress again. The meat gets a little sear and comes to you blue in the middle. Now, I like rare, but this stuff is still breathing.  But when you need a steak fix, this is the place and you just hope the Steak Nazi will be in a good enough mood to actually cook the meat.  I’m pretty sure you have to finish your steak or they don’t even offer you dessert, they just show you the door.

I’ve been perfecting my own steak and last night we nailed it. Who needs to submit to Steak Nazi terror anymore!
The journey to a perfect steak requires fire. The first thing you need to do is not even think about anything but a wood fire, no little wet chips in the back of the gas grill. You need to build a fire. Burn the furniture in the living room if you must, but you need wood. Our friend Tomaso is probably the maestro of building a cooking fire; he has a complex method that involves feeding large logs in and getting a red-hot pile of embers. We’re not there yet, but we have adapted the Paul teepee method where the logs lean up against the back wall of the fireplace, it’s been working pretty well with our slightly green wood. You want a pile of red-hot embers, not a lot of flame and smoke. Last night Jeff got a perfect blazing ember fire. It takes a good hour before the fire is ready so plan ahead.

Use a big thick steak, preferably with bone, gristle and fat because these all add flavor. Generously salt and pepper the steak. I like to add some fresh thyme and rosemary on top of the meat. It burns off, but still adds flavor.

When the fire is red hot, place the steak on the hot grill. Resist the urge to turn it too many times; don’t cut into it if you can help it. I use the press method.  Before you put the meat on the grill, press the thickest part of the steak with your finger, and now remember how it felt: soft and yielding. As the meat cooks, it firms up and with practice you can tell how done the meat is just by pressing it. When you are first starting out, feel the end of your nose, that’s what a medium rare steak feels like. Unless you are a real hard nose, and then you are on your own.

When the steak is done to your liking, place on a warm plate and add a generous drizzle of good extra virgin olive oil. Guaranteed to bring out the pagan carnivore in anyone. And that’s how we tasted our precious unfiltered very virgin olive oil last night. Served with roasted potatoes and roasted cauliflower and some Schiopetto red wine from Friuli.  Later on, we howled at the moon and gave thanks to Diana and Bacchus.

An afternoon of olive picking

After days of waiting for the sun to finally return and dry out the olives, we got the phone call from our friend Bruce saying it was a good day to pick olives.  We are dilettante pickers, but it was a great reason to be outside and climb trees so off we went.  Elaine and I met Bruce at his house and then we drove high up and beyond Preggio to some place where the Nature God surely lives. It was spectacular.

We spread the net around a lovely old tree that was literally dripping with olives. It took the three of us a little over an hour but we picked nearly 25 kg of olives just from this one tree. The picking technique is sort of like milking the tree, when the branches are this full, you run your hand down and simply let the olives fall into the net.

The next tree wasn’t as generous but still worth the climb and the effort. It gets dark early here, by 4:30 all the light is gone and you can’t tell an olive from a leaf so it was time to head home. The well prepared man that Bruce is, after we packed up the car, he opened a bottle of wine and a pack of chocolate cookies and we watched the last bit of a fluorescent pink sunset.

Today we took the olives to the mill as part of the ‘exchange program’.  You give them olives, they give you oil. Now, how cool is that? We gave them about 25 kg of olives and we took home a 3kg can of oil.  If you want to press exclusively your own olives, it’s a 300kg minimum. It’s your choice to stand around and wait for your olives to be pressed or your crates get stacked up with your name on them waiting for a turn in the press.

Should you want a visual on why everyone buys extra virgin olive oil, take a look at the photo of the olive waste.  After the first cold extra virgin press, the remaining olive flesh and pits are literally dumped outside the mill. Another olive oil company will come along and do a second, heat process to extract a lower grade of oil. It looks very manure like and actually sounds rather manure like as it plops out of that tube. Certainly makes you appreciate the good stuff.

Jeff and I showed up this morning with our paltry little crate and a green bag full of our precious olives and the mill was a beehive of activity.  As usual in Italy, there is no apparent sense of organization but things do happen according to a plan. Bear in mind, this might not be the same plan that you have, but there is a cosmic plan in effect.
 A very pregnant woman is in charge of the mill and it’s sort of like olive traffic control, people are arriving with trucks of olives, others are carting out shiny silver 25kg cans of finished oil, and lots of other people just stand around and chat.  Eventually she takes our olives, weighs them, and after awhile we get our little can of oil and a stern talking to about not bringing our own can and we head home.  
We kept aside about 8kgs of olives and these wound up in traditional salt brine, and hot pepper/garlic oil brine. In a couple of weeks we get to taste our brined olives, but tonight we taste our own oil.

Beauty and Conformity in the Vegetable World

Beauty can only be in the eye of the beholder and much passion has been expended defending beauty.  With the constant onslaught of media, we’re finding our concepts of beauty are becoming homogenized, conforming to a global standard.

Seems the European Market, in an attempt to shield us from the misshapen banned all fruits and vegetables that did not meet their standards for size and shape. How cruel to ban that lumpy heirloom tomato, that twin pitted plum.  Well, in this current economic crisis where all things humble are now back in vogue, the EU came to it senses and is now allowing the odd shaped vegetable to return to the market basket.

You would think that with all the problems we face, how on earth did these legislators agree that funny shaped vegetables should wind up being banned? I’m so relieved because I wouldn’t want to think my eggplants were contraband produce.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil....mmmmmm

Clearly the woman didn’t know who she was talking to. You know when you meet someone, and they say, oh, yes, please stop by anytime.   The woman in question is an olive oil vendor and we met her at the Citta di Castello truffle fair.  Elaine and I were chatting her up as we tasted her outstanding olio novella.  That’s the new oil that’s just been pressed, and we are in the heart of olive oil season, and even better news, it’s a very good year for olives.   She gave us general directions to the mill and I’m sure she thought she’d never see us again.

Then our friend Bruce mentioned that he was pressing some olives at the same mill, so it was irresistible, we had to go to the mill yesterday.  We found it with no problem, drove up, reminded the nice lady who we were and then started asking a million questions and taking pictures.
It was a sight to see.  Stacks of plastic crates filled with multi colored olives, lots of men standing around chatting, and us.  It’s actually a pretty simple affair: the fresh picked olives with some leaves and stems attached are dumped into a big metal hopper, a tube sucks them onto a slotted conveyor belt which as it vibrates causes the leaves to fall through the slots and get sucked into a huge bag.  The cleaned olives then go into a macerator, a machine that roughly chops the fruit, and then it’s sucked into a cylindrical presser. Now the olives head into a centrifuge where the oil separates from the ‘salsa’.  After a small bit of filtering, the rough oil goes into another centrifuge and oil comes out of one spout, any remaining liquid comes out of another spout. Oil floats, remember? And that’s it. Pretty magical if you ask me.   The olive oil aroma was intoxicating.

Other little tidbits: the olive season usually continues until about Christmas time; the green olives are also ripe, they’re just another variety; 100 kilos of olives yields 15 kilos of oil; all the left over olive bits get picked up by another company and reprocessed into less than virgin olive oil.  An olive tree doesn’t die, when it gets tired and used up it sends out new roots and makes a new tree, we have trees around here that are estimated to be at least 800 years old.

Good olive oil is truly a thing of beauty. An instructor of mine used to say that olive oil is the closest thing to mother’s milk. I’m not sure that I’d go that far, but he might be right.

Truffles and Eggs

There are certain combinations that are simply magic and truffles with eggs belong in that category.  In it’s own unique way, truffle flavor is delicate, almost ethereal.  It happens move in the nose and mouth than it does on the tongue, so you need to be careful not to upstage the truffle flavor. You want a platform to elevate the flavor, not a curtain to mask it.  Truffles love butter, it’s like a warm soothing bath, where the flavors relax and mingle like old friends.
We had our two precious bits of white truffle and opted for a simple scrambled egg preparation.  First a trip to the orto for some celery that we thinly sliced and gently softened in butter over low heat. Then some very fresh eggs were blended with frothed heavy cream, a light scramble in the pan, poured into a warmed bowl and then covered with all of the truffle goodness. Complimented by a very clean white sauvignon, it was the perfect combination, and instantly devoured.
Other years, I’ve hoarded my truffles, storing them in rice, but by far the best way to have truffles is to eat them as quickly as you can and to savor the memory.
It’s a fine time of year to be in Umbria. 

Il Tartufo Bianco, Citta di Castello

Il Tartufo Bianco, XXIX Mostra Mercato Nazionale
The rains must have come in the nick of time because there were plenty of truffles to be had at the Citta di Castello truffle festival.

They’ve changed the venue this year, and instead of being set up in two very large tents in the main piazza, the festival was scattered about at different locations around town. One of the best things about the big tents was that as you entered, the scent of truffles would just be overwhelming. This year all the truffles were housed in the large, airy central area of the Plazzo Bufalini and the effect was just not the same. The whole event is now expanded have separate tasting areas for local wines (mostly the guys from Montefalco), the vino novello and the olio novello.  The cheese and salumi guys were behind the Palazzo Vitelli a Sant”Egidio.  It was a grand experiment, but I think the main events, namely the truffles, cheese and salami should go back into the main piazza. We actually needed a color-coded map to find our way around, so it wasn’t the easiest setup.  There are cooking demonstrations going on during the day, and these were called “Showcooking” events. Kind of says it all, don’t you think?

We came home carrying bottles of delicious olive oil that had been pressed last week, a fantastic caciocavallo cheese and a few small white truffles, that we fully intend to devour tonight. The sooner the better with truffles and I have some very freshly laid eggs that are destined for one of the earth’s great flavor marriages. And no, you can’t over for dinner…..we’re fully booked!