Aroma Cucina

Clay Pot Chic, Questions Anyone?

Without a doubt, clay pot cooking is chic. It is THE moment for clay pots. Bloggers are banging their lids in glee. Clay pots are the new black. Cotta cooking is, like, so cool. I get my pots in Italy, where do you get yours?

OK, I've lost my mind. But it's more than a passing fancy, clay pot cooking is hot right now and if you have any little, bitty, teeny, tiny doubt about the benefits of cooking in clay, then I bear goods news. Ms. Paula Wolfert, author of Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking and other great books, teller of outrageous stories, and all around cool lady, will be answering questions today and tomorrow on Barnes & Noble's Forum Board.

Clicca qui to be taken to the board, where Ms. Wolfert will be answering questions, Oct 28 & 29, 1:30- 3:00 pm EST.

Hunting Season Conundrum

  The guns are blasting outside, so it must be hunting season in Umbria.  Mushroom hunters battle for territory, clusters of men dressed in camouflage gather on the sides of the road clutching walkie talkies in one hand and the lead of a barking dog in the other. Cinghiale is hunted ‘in battuta’ meaning the hunters and their dogs bark and whoop and flush the prey into a tight spot and then they shoot it. I have mixed feelings about battuta style hunting as it doesn’t’ seem very sporting to have 10 men with advanced weaponry, dogs and a lot of communication devices chasing after one wild boar. On the other hand, the terrain around here is seriously challenging, one misstep and you disappear into the bowels of a bottomless ravine, so maybe it’s best for everyone if they hunt in a group. That is, everyone but the cinghiale.

Dana McCauley’s recent blog post “How Bloodthirsty are you?” is a lively piece where she grapples with her own issues about hunting.

I have to support responsible hunting because I love to cook and eat game, so I can’t be wishy-washy on the subject. But, could I pull the trigger? I just don’t know.

According to my dear friend Jay Cassell, a life long hunter and big muckedy-muck editor at Field & Stream, the number of hunters and women hunters has risen in the US to around 15 million, but as a percentage of the overall population, the hunting population is shrinking and women account for less than 10% of hunters. Jay thinks I should take up hunting, and maybe I’ll go out with him when we get back to NY, if only to symbolically honor the fallen deer (Because Jay, if I go out with you, I totally expect to come back with a nice buck, none of this, oh better luck next time nonsense like you pull with fly fishing!). 

In Umbria, hunting is so woven into the fabric of life, you just accept that in the fall it sounds like you are living outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, it’s best to wear a red bicycle helmet and you always hope that sooner or later someone is going to hand you a choice piece of cinghiale. This weekend, we are serving cinghiale with black olives at the Taverna del Verziere during our Festa del Bosco and I promise to say a small prayer of thanks to the animal spirit. It’s the least I can do.

So, what about you? Do you eat game? Could you pull the trigger?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beer is everywhere, even in my bread

Beer. Birra. Ale. Porter.  Micro-brew. Home Brew. Brewer’s Festivals. My son brings me bottles of his first batch of home brew: a smoked chocolate concoction that is intriguingly flavorful. Beer is hot these days.  The only thing missing is a beer movie that can make beer drinking chic instead of synonymous with college keg parties.

 

Even though, I’m not a beer drinker, I have found a great use for beer: it goes into my bread dough. The bread comes out with a crackling crust and an incredible foamy head. OK, you got me, my bread doesn’t really have a foamy head; it’s just good bread.

 

700 g bread flour

600 g mother (starter)

50 g rye, whole wheat or spelt flour

150g ale

350g water

15g salt

 

Combine the bread & rye flour in a bowl where your mother has been resting and allowed to come to room temperature. A mother is the ferment, or natural yeast dough starter that contains the yeast you need for this bread. For me, the mother is the heart of the bread, it gives it character and attitude. Not unlike what my flesh and blood mother gave me.

Using either a bread scraper (soft flexible piece of plastic) or a knife, cut the mother up into small chunks, incorporating the dry flour. When you’ve gotten to the point where the mother isn’t one big clump, add the ale, then start adding the water until you get the bread fully hydrated. Add the ale or beer first because that is a consistent measure, whereas the final quantity of water added will be dependant on how your bread dough feels. You want it loose enough to knead, but it should be a sticky mass when you turn the dough out onto the table to knead. Yes, knead your bread. It’s good for the mind, body and soul to knead bread, skipping this step is like sex without foreplay. You get to the end result, but without the fun part.

 

Do not add flour to the bread, and do not flour the table. Just start kneading. One of the wonderful things about this bread is how quickly it will come together, which I believe is a factor of using a mother and beer; they just start having fun together right away. After about 5 minutes of kneading, the bread will come cleanly away from the table and it is time to add the salt. I slap the bread down on the table and gently spread it out, then layer the salt on and roll it up and continue kneading for another 5 minutes or so. You’ll literally feel the dough come alive in your hands, and once you can no longer feel any salt crystals and the bread is bouncy in your fingers, make it into a ball and place in a clean bowl. Cover the bowl with a cotton or linen towel, place in a warm spot in the kitchen and let it rest and rise for a good hour or so. After the hour, give it a turn in the bowl (expose the bottom side of the ball to the air), cover and let rest for about 2 hours. At this point it’s time to shape the loaf into any size that warms your heart: long baguette, round boule, or regular slicing loaf. Turn the oven on as hot as it will get, and let the bread rise again as the oven warms. I aim for about 500F, which takes about ½ hour with my oven.

 

If you bake bread often, then you probably have a stone and know what you are doing at this point. If you are a novice, place the loaves on a good cookie sheet that has been lined with oven paper (carta al forno as we say here in the old country, it’s that white paper that comes in rolls and you bake on it. I honestly forget what its called in the States….!).  I don’t have a stone here in Italy,  so I use the baking sheet method and I get good bread, so don’t get all twitchy if you don’t have a stone. But, you do need a water spritzer bottle.  Spritz the bread dough before it goes into the oven and before you slash the loaf, spritz the pan, give the bread a good dousing. This helps to create that crackling crust.  Slash the bread to give it some breathing space and quickly get it into the oven. I mean quick. Don’t keep the oven door open a second longer than you have to. Wait 3-4 minutes, crack the oven door open and spritz everything all over, avoiding the light bulb in the back of the oven.

Let the loaf bake for about 20 minutes, then rotate the pan, spritz and reduce the heat to around 400F and bake until the loaf is golden brown and sounds hollow when you knock on it. Let cool for at least an hour, then eat!  Would probably taste great with a hearty cheddar cheese and a nice glass of home brew, but, I know it tastes great with some parmigiana and a glass of red wine.

 

 

Black Celery from Trevi

 

No, black celery is not the stuff you find in the back of the fridge. 

It’s a much revered type of celery that can only be grown in Umbria in the area around the picturesque town of Trevi. The town seems to be literally spilling down a mountainside, almost in defiance of gravity.

This celery variety, Apium graveolens L. var. dulce (Mill.) has earned IGP (Indicazione Geografica Protetta) status along with Cannara onions, Lago Trasimeno beans, faro from Monteleone di Spoleto, saffron from Cascia and other products unique to Umbria.

 

Trevi loves it’s black celery so much that they’ve been holding the "Sagra del Sedano e della Salsiccia” since 1965.  This year we made it our business to get to Trevi to experience this famous black celery. The first thing you notice, aside from the fact that this is some honkin’ big celery, is that it’s not black. The leaves are a very dark green but even in the dark, they don’t look black.

There is something quaint, and slightly mad about seeing crates of celery stacked up and people lugging around big bags of celery. I’m sure it’s my US perspective, where celery is this generic crunchy stuff without much flavor, so to see true passion for celery, well, it just warmed my heart on a very cold night.

 Now that I had my two giant bunches of celery, and we were carrying around a bag just like the locals, I started to wonder what exactly was I supposed to do with this bounty? We took a walk around the vendors who were selling black celery products and most of them were a ‘crema’ de sedano with sausage or truffles.  Restaurant menus also offered mainly ‘crema’ preparations, so we staggered around with our celery bag still a bit mystified by the cult of the black celery.

 Arriving back in Montone, I was seized by inspiration! Give one of my huge bunches to Margie and let her figure out what to do with it! Ha! Half of my dilemma solved. We stood around in her kitchen munching on the flavorful (but my no means earth shatteringly tasty) celery stalks. Assessing the celery like wine we came up with: somewhat woody character with a good celery flavor. Maybe you need to cook it.

 The next morning I had to face my celery and deal with it.  I cut off the huge, dark leaves and made a vat of richly flavored celery stock. The stalks I chopped into finger length pieces, put them in a clay pot with a very small amount of water and braised them for about 2 hours. Then I pureed the braised celery into a fragrant green mush, oh, I mean puree.

 My first experiment was “sedano nero e patate puree”, or “celery mush mixed with pureed potatoes” which I used as a bed under roasted quail. Not bad at all!

 These are approximate quantities:

1 cup of braised celery puree

1 cup of potato puree (boiled, salted, potatoes put through a ricer and combined with a few tablespoons of olive oil)

 This would be a nice side dish all on its own, for those times when you are tired of just plain potatoes.

 Next, I had to try the sausage and celery combination as this seemed to be the most classic Trevi preparation.

Celery & Sausage Sauce

1 medium sliced onion

1 cup of pork sausage meat

1 cup of celery puree

½ cup white wine

¼ cup heavy cream

4-5 thinly sliced artichoke hearts (optional)

 

Put a large pot of water on to boil the pasta and begin cooking the pasta as soon as the water boils because this sauce only takes about 5 minutes to cook.  I used orchiette pasta, which made for a toothsome, hearty dish.

 

Sauté the sausage meat and the onion, when the meat is brown add the pureed celery, artichoke hearts, and white wine. Gently simmer. About 2-3 minutes before the pasta is cooked, add the cream and check the seasonings.  In Italy, it is common to buy pre-seasoned ground sausage filling, which is usually heavily salted so I’ve learned to be extra careful about not adjusting salt levels until ready to serve. If the sauce seems too thick, add a bit of the pasta water to loosen things up.

 I realize that not everyone is going to have access to ‘sedano nero’, so I think you could adjust the braised celery described above by adding a bit of parsley and the celery leaves to the braising pot.  You’d need to experiment on your own if you want to discard the parsley and leaves before pureeing. You might also consider using Chinese celery which has much thinner stalks, more leaves and is very flavorful; however it is meant to be cooked and not eaten raw as it is rather tough. And here is your celery trivia of the day: most of the nutrients in celery are in the leaves so consider using them in salads and stews.

Deborah Mele on ItalianFoodForever describes a black celery pesto that she made and that sounds yummy.

 I’ve been singing the praises of celery for ages, and it’s good to know I’m not alone!

 P.S. My trusty camera is in the hospital. It had a focus seizure and had to be rushed to the ER. I’m using a little hand held video camera thing to take stills and its like shooting with a blindfold on. So, for the next 10 days or so, my shots will be more ‘artistic’ than usual. Pray for a speedy recovery!

 

 

 

The Green Acres Syndrome

 

Remember Eva Gabor yelping, “Goodbye City Life!”  Well, I’m having my Eva Gabor moment. There was a time in my life when I wore red fingernail polish, uh, actually had finger nails, kept high heels under my desk for those special times and had more suits than pairs of jeans.  Life has changed and I’m not complaining, as we made some conscious life changes and living the way we do requires time and effort. We’ve gone through our first full orto season and as I clean the canning pot yet again, it leads me to wonder when the backlash to local, slow, seasonal eating is going to occur.

 

 It’s wonderful to plant a garden in the spring; the little plants are so full of the promise of good things to come. Then summer comes and you eat tomatoes until you burst. Then fall blows in…and by now, you are flummoxed about what to do with yet another large batch of produce.  I’ve canned tomatoes until my fingers shriveled, figs are embedded in my shoes and my rugs, and I even ground my own grape skin flour! And this morning, I’ve got liters of limoncello waiting to be bottled.

 

I’m not complaining, but I do wonder how many other people would do this. People who eat local for a year get a book deal! OK people, this is not Everyman stuff if you get a book deal.

 

I think its high time for the media to stop taking the easy way out and publish every word that falls out of Michael Pollen’s mouth, and I’m taking the easy way out here by making him the fall guy for what I perceive as an over-simplification. I’m thrilled that Michelle Obama has a garden at the White House, but not for a second do I think she’s loosing sleep over what to do with the green tomatoes that are still on the vine.

 

There has been a huge disconnect from our food source, and I’m completely in favor of acknowledging that chickens actually die to make Chicken McNuggets, but expecting people to grow their own, eat only in season or not eat any food that’s traveled more than 50 miles, is just plain nuts. It’s also not going to solve the problem of e.coli in frozen hamburger patties or spinach, because the bulk of the population uses bagged spinach and stashes frozen hamburger in the freezer. Its time to open up the discussion to reality: food will need to be mass grown to feed the masses, it will need to go through distribution centers, but that doesn’t’ mean that we shouldn’t take a good hard look at what’s going on and fix it.

 

Ask yourself some questions:

Are you willing to wash your own spinach, cut up your carrots?

Are you willing to travel to find a good, responsible butcher, pay more for your meat, and probably eat less of it?

Are you willing to eat fish that hasn’t been filleted and still looks like a fish?

Are you willing to give up coffee or olive oil, because not that many of us live close to coffee growers or olive groves?

Or what about that gorgeous Australian syrah you recently tasted. Willing to give that up?

Are you willing to give up sleeping in on a Saturday morning so that you can weed the garden?

Do you know how to make a pie crust? 

 

None of us are saints; everyone has something they don’t want to do without and I’m not advocate of paralyzing food guilt. Not all of us are cut out for the Little House on the Prairie routine and I’m absolutely certain that if a woman from the mythical Old West Prairie was to drop down into a 21^st century kitchen she would sink down on her knees in tears of gratitude.

 

So, let’s step up the discussion and stop damning all that is mass produced or shipped, stop feeling guilty for buying potato chips instead of growing the potatoes, and start getting creative in our thinking about how to fix what is wrong with our food distribution systems. We should move beyond sound bytes and media slogans to truly, honestly debate how to develop a sustainable food model.

 

Grape Skin Flour Bread

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The grapes were ripe, hanging, full, needing to be picked. Signor Bruschi let us know that it was time to pick them. We asked if he wanted any, and he laughed and said no. I knew we had to get them off the vine, but then what?? I mean, what do you do with about 20 kilos of grapes? These are ‘uva americana’, a sweet table grape very similar to the Concord grape, so wine was out of the question, we don’t really eat much jam and a cake would use up only one bunch out of the 20 kilos. I was sitting in the kitchen with my friend Deborah when we came across a recipe for grape skin flour bread in Richard Bertinet’s outstanding bread book, “Crust”.

Bertinet had one up on me because someone gifted him with the already finished grape flour and all I had was an enormous vat of grapes in need of attention. What good luck! I also had willing friends who actually agreed to help me squish grape bodies out of their grape skins. There was talk of repetitive motion disorder, but the grumbling was surprisingly muted and eventually all the grapes were separated from their skins.

 Now I had a huge pot of grape bodies and a sopping wet pile of skins. Fortunately Andrew has a mechanical mind and we came up with a sort of press motion to squeeze the excess juice out of the skins.

 The next step was too slowly dry the skins in the oven. This allowed us plenty of time to figure out what to do with the grape bodies. I bottled the first batch of juice from the grapes that had not been subjected to any squeezing. That part was easy and the juice is pale pink and very sweet. Pressing juice out of those roly-poly grape bodies was another adventure and I still don’t have an answer. I tried the hand food mill, then I tried the food processor and the grapes absolutely loved the massage in both machines. They rolled around laughing and gave up not a drop of juice. Thinking I would teach them a lesson, I froze the semi-pureed grapes, based on the technique where freezing fruit breaks the cell membranes, releasing juice and flavor. The grapes were not the least bit bothered by the freezing; they retained all of their plump roundness and juice. I finally gave up, poured the ecto-plasmic looking green slurry into a bottle. Andrew actually drank some of it, but none of us could get the past the slimy texture. I think there is a reason why you don’t hear much about home squeezed grape juice.

 I soon realized that the nagging song in the back of my head was the theme song from the Flintstones; playing over and over and over in my head, until it dawned on me that the house, with the drying grape skins, smelled exactly like the inside of a Welch’s grape jelly jar. Actually, by now, most of our street smelled like a grape jelly jar. Do they still make those little jelly jars printed with cartoon characters?

 Eventually the skins had dried to the point where I could pulverize them, and I would have given anything to have my Vita-Mix here to help me. The food processor did an ok job, but it had to be done in small batches, sifted, re-processed, and then sifted a few more times.  I had entered full obsession mode, and I’m wondering if it was a side effect of sniffing so much grape skin dust? Grape skins are said to be full of anti-oxidants, so I figure there isn’t an oxidant alive anywhere in my body. Does anyone know, is that a good or a bad thing??

Finally it was time to mix and knead the bread and I basically followed Bertinet’s formula, but wound up tweaking it a bit because it was feeling too dense. I think I may also have had to compensate for the residual sugar in the skins as Bertinet’s recipe used cabernet sauvignon grapes, which are nowhere near as sweet as the uva Americana.  I opted for a classic roll shape for the bread, nothing fancy, just an easy to eat, share and store shape.

The color of the dough was a deep, flecked brown and once baked it took on a slightly more purplish hue, but if you didn’t know better, you would have thought it was a dark rye bread from the appearance.  We sampled our rolls and it was a unanimous decision…we all loved the bread! It was chewy, flavorful, very hearty, and tasted fantastic with a hard dry salami. The salty, meaty flavor of the salami brought out the unique essence of this bread. Of course, it really made me crave some country style pate to go with the bread, but this being Umbria, it means I have to make the pate myself. It was about this time, when I announced a pate making adventure, that my willing and adventurous kitchen partners all changed the subject. Even when I promised to get the meat from a butcher and not start with raising and slaughtering, they were still content to stay with the salami. Weenies!

For those of you less inclined to grow the grapes, and make your own flour, I did find an online source for the flour, so you can skip right to the fun part.

And for a complete roundup of delicious bread from World Bread Day: Cicca Qui! 

Uva Americana Grape Skin Flour Formula

400g white bread flour, 180g grape skin flour, 50g whole wheat or rye flour, 200g ferment (mother), 5g fresh yeast, 250 g water, 100g dry red wine, 10 g salt

Combine, knead (yes, knead), let rise for about an hour, turn the dough, let it raise again for about 2 hours, form into loaves or bread, let rise for about a half an hour as the oven heats up to around 450F. Bake until done...about 20 minutes.

World Bread Day: October 16

Bake it, buy it, blog it.  This Friday, October 16, is the 4th annual World Bread Day where it doesn't matter what you do as long as you appreciate bread.   Details are on Koptchof's blog, in 5 languages, so you don't have an excuse.

  I've had a particularly active and happy bread mother this season. It must like Italian air because it's been giving me outstanding bread for months. Most of my neighbors have gotten used to hearing me knead my bread, I favor the in-the-air-slap-down-on-the-marble method; however that produces a sound not unlike two bodies, rhythmically slapping down on a bed, if you get my drift.  Life is a medieval village with very narrow streets is a very intimate way of life, especially with all of our windows open.  So either my neighbors have figured out I'm kneading  bread or else... well, who knows what they think, but it could explain the funny smiles I get now and then. 

Mark your calender. See you on Friday!

Fall in Umbria

And the days go flying by. The searing summer heat is gone, replaced by a chill wind and a few thunderstorms.  A tougher skinned, hardier tomato has replaced the sun warmed summer tomato, but no one really is thinking much about tomatoes now. The first of the fall artichokes showed up at last week’s market, along with the first ‘cachi’ or soft persimmons. We have marvelous leeks in the orto, and we’re waiting for a batch of rucola to sprout.  We need more rain if we are going to have a good truffle harvest. Most everyone's grapes are in, and it will be another few weeks before olives can be picked.

The mono diet continues. Last week we ‘processed’ a large amount of grapes, but I’ll save that story for another day.  Tomorrow I work on a crate of lemons, hand delivered by Joni and Carl, all the way from Positano.

 

It’s the fall festa season and time for the debate: Shall we go to Morra for chestnuts? Apecchio for truffles? Citerna for funghi? Trevi for black celery? We meet our cheese maker friend, Francesco, up in Apecchio, and then run into his sheep on the way home.

The light is softer now, the shadows deeper and cooler. Sunday lunch was as if we were living in a painting. After a  few weeks of much loved guests visiting us, everyone has gone home, and the house seems so quiet. But our Festa del Bosco is right around the corner, so I’m savoring the calm.

And so, it’s fall in Umbria.

Kitchen Real Estate: Clay Pot Cookery

Do you know anyone who has open, empty kitchen cabinets yearning to be filled? No, me either, so if I’m going to devote storage space to something, it better be good.  Clay pots are worth every inch of space, secondo me.

I use the deep cooking pots on my stovetop, directly on the flame. As long as you start out at a low heat and gradually warm up the pot, you have no worries about cracking the pot.  Clay pots also solve the problem of stovetops that don’t have a low enough heat setting. When making a sauce, like spaghetti Bolognese, you don’t want any more than a few little bubbles working their way up to the top, and most stoves are just too hot.  I make my Bolognese sauce in the oven, and the problem is solved. Set the oven at a low temp and you are good to go. Clay pots seem to cook more evenly, probably because the entire vessel cooks the food, while with traditional stovetop cooking, only the part closest to the heat source is cooking the food. I also think clay pots add a depth of  flavor and they look beautiful right on the table.  Which means one less plate to wash.

I don’t recommend searing or frying food in a clay pot, as that sort of intense heat needs a good metal pan. Then again exploding ceramics could be considered an art form, so that’s a decision you’ll have to make (and clean up after).

Paula Wolfert, the doyenne of slow clay pot cooking is coming out with a new cookery book, Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking, and if there is anyone that knows her way around a clay pot, it’s Ms. Wolfert. I can’t wait to read it, and find an excuse to buy one more clay pot.

Cue: Sister Sledge singing, “We are Family”.

Sometimes you need a soundtrack in your head to set the mood.

Normally I don’t blog about people that I cook for, but I was honored and privileged to be a part of a fantastic wedding celebration. Two families that came together to have fun and share the love; it was something that none of us will forget. Seriously who can forget a cooking class of barely contained chaos, with an aubergine frying marathon, or a naked guy making breadsticks, or the cries for yet more garlic? And our poor token, good-natured vegetarian took a lot of ribbing but still kept laughing. The wedding day was absolutely storybook beautiful and we were happy to be a part of the festivities.

 

Cooking for people takes a lot of heart and sometimes, I’ll be honest, it takes a lot out of me. This time, I got it back in spades.  Making and sharing food with people is absolutely primal, and to be able to do this with my own family and very close friends, made it all the more special.

Tante Auguri Sarah & Chris!!