Aroma Cucina

Tomato Swan Song with Breadcrumbs

This is my end-of-the-season swan song to the tomatoes in our orto. As the vines wither at the bottom, there are yellow blossoms still sprouting at the top, and green fruit just hanging on in the middle.  We spent the cold, wet spring together, you endured hail and high winds, while we worried and tried to protect you. You blossomed in the July heat and produced massive amounts of fruit in August. And now, you are closing down for the winter.
I’ve canned about 70 liters of sauce, with chili peppers, without peppers, oven roasted, sometimes barely cooked, sometimes reduced to a thick paste just because I was out of jars and room. But, now I have 70 liters of this summer  stored away.

I’ve had a LOT of time to think about tomatoes, and I realized I was not paying attention.     Tomatoes love bread, and bread loves them back. They were meant to be together. Take a look:

Tomato Sandwich with mayo

Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese

Pan con tomat

Pappa al Pomodoro

Panzanella

and the mac daddy of them all: Pizza

Here we are coming to the end of tomato season in the northern hemisphere, and I’m just figuring this out? Silly me. 

Here’s three delicious ways to savor your last few delicious juicy sun-ripe tomatoes. Or to our Aussie friends, three things to look forward to!

Pan con tomat

Pan con tomat is something we ran into in Barcelona.
It’s on every menu, shows up at every meal from breakfast to late night tapas, and is found in every conceivable variation. And with good reason.

The basic combo is toasted or grilled bread that has been rubbed with a fresh tomato so the juices soak in, the tomato flesh fuses with the bread, add a drizzle of olive and a sprinkle of salt to bring it all together. The bread can be anything from a lowly store bought baguette to a delicious spelt-based bread with a crackling crust. It’s completely addictive and you come to expect it at every meal as a god-given Catalan experience.
Serve it with a plate of sliced salumi, a fresh green salad, or your eggs in the morning.

Pappa al Pomodoro

Pappa al Pomodoro is a tomato and bread concoction that is neither a soup nor a side dish.  It’s a combination of cooked peeled tomatoes and bread cubes or crumbs that are blended together and served as an appetizer. Simple, homey and delicious. A fancy variation is to take a small scoop of pappa al pomodoro, wrap it in caul fat and roast it in the oven.

Basic Pappa al Pomodoro
Garlic,
Chili Pepper
Peeled tomatoes (fresh or canned)
Torn leaves of fresh basil
extra virgin olive oil
stale bread (preferably the salt less variety found in central Italy)

Add a bit of olive oil to a saucepan and gently warm it. Add the tomatoes and a bit of finely chopped garlic. Let the tomatoes come to a simmer and add a handful of bread crumbs or toasted cubes to the mixture. Mix in the torn basil leaves. You want a thick, stand up to the spoon texture, thick enough that you can mold it into a shape.
Serve with another drizzle of olive oil.

Panzanella

Panzanella is a salad made with bread. Now, that is probably the only way to put it that you won’t start an argument; there are as many variations on panzanella as there are stars in the sky.

Sometimes the bread is cut into toasted cubes and tossed with fresh tomatoes, sometimes the bread is so finely crumbled that it resembles cous cous.  In Montone, it’s frequently doused in tomato sauce so it resembles..you guessed it....cold papa al pomodoro.

Basic Panzanella
Stale bread (again, the Umbrian rock hard, salt free bread works best)
Olive oil
Salt, Pepper
Fresh Tomatoes

Enhancements (this means anything else you want to throw into the salad)
Onion, carrots, celery, zucchini, basil, parsley, chives, cucumber, pickles, olives, and if you must, canned corn or cocktail sausages

Personally, I find canned corn and chopped up cocktail sausages (or wurstel as it called in Italy) a crime against humanity, but they do turn up regularly in homemade panzanella. Then again, I won’t order pineapple or french fries to go on top of my pizza. Call me a Purist Princess.

If you are using saltless bread: soak the bread in plain water for a few minutes until it is soft and crumbly. Extract as much water as possible from the bread by pressing the bread with a wooden spoon against the side of a colander, or by placing the soggy bread in a ball on a piece of cheese cloth and twisting the cloth to force the water out.


Chop your enhancements and combine with the bread, add olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper to taste.

Happy end of the tomato season! I’m already feeling nostalgic and looking forward to next summer’s crop.

Betrayal By A Young Mother

I am a victim of betrayal! She was young, she looked fresh, vibrant, she seemed eager to get to work. She did smell a little strange, but I thought it was just youth.  Turns out she was lazy, and did a barely passable job. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and face the facts: this mother is finished, fired, history, kaput.
 I’m so hurt, I grew this natural yeast bread mother with care, attention, diligence and she betrayed me.

Like any parent, I blame myself. I should have started a week ago, maybe the kitchen wasn’t warm enough, I shouldn’t have disinfected the entire kitchen while trying to grow a natural yeast starter.  All the excuses a parent makes for a wayward young mother! I had to be stone hearted and give her the heave-ho.

Last week we were busy foraging for ingredients for an all-Umbrian feast, and baking natural yeast bread was featured on the to-do list.  I’m used to my bread behaving, used to it coming alive in my kneading hands,  but I knew something was off.  We had bread on Saturday night, and the guests were kind, but I wasn’t happy.  Stuff happens in the kitchen.  Sometimes you achieve great glory and sometimes the bread just doesn’t rise.

P.S. There was a crazy fun dinner at our house on Saturday night!  I’m under contract not to release the full details until Wednesday’s blog post, but it was a night of food, wine, song and a tiny bit of dancing.  Drop by on Wednesday, if you want a full report of the “25K Umbrian Challenge Dinner”.

NYC: Watch Your Back, We Have Competition!

   

I’m worried about my hometown. Are we New Yorkers resting on our foodie laurels instead of being at the forefront of the culinary movement? Are we becoming a faded rose'? Past our prime?

To be fair: the Great Recession hit New York really hard. The financial industry is housed here and when their bottom fell out , NYC was devastated. Restaurants and shops were empty, not quiet…empty. But things are turning around and you can feel the buzz start to build again.  But, that’s not the whole answer. Its hard to be fast and nimble in NYC: the stakes are high, the start up costs are high, so that’s why you get a lot of big name corporate type restaurants and fewer of the edgy start-ups, but something has to change or we are going to lose our creds’ as a food Mecca.   Granted there is a much longer growing season in the Pacific Northwest and that certainly has an effect on what shows up on the table, but their markets are affordable, while our require pre-approval. “Oh you would like to buy a dozen of our organic eggs? Have you been pre-approved by our bank or do you have independent financing?”  What’s going on here? I've asked this question before, the markets in Italy is where the common person shops, the markets in NYC is where rich people shop. 

 

When I tell someone to go to Philly for pizza instead of NY, that’s ominous.

 

Portland was an eye opener.  The upstart, entrepreneurial, “hey guys lets open a …food cart, or a winery, or a restaurant, coffee bar, or bread bakery” attitude that was so prevalent in Portland, is simply missing from the NY scene.  Maybe I’m jaded, maybe Portland’s food scene seems so vibrant because the city is small and its easier to be a big fish in a little pond, maybe I just sampled the best of the best because Portland wanted to showcase their finest for IACP, but something is going on there that isn’t going on here. I know I’m talking heresy and trash at the same time.

 

You want examples? Let’s start with coffee. Coffee is a freakin’ religion in Portland, the entire city smells of coffee, you realize that the scent is making you crave coffee ALL day long. It’s the home of Stumptown coffee, which has cult status in Portland and can be found in select places in NYC. They used to be at the Chelsea Market, and Jeff, who hates going grocery shopping, would come along with me just so he could get a coffee. They were given an award at IACP in part because they donated a bunch of specially tricked out cargo bikes to Rwandan coffee growers.  I can barely get the guy at Café’ Café’ to smile at me, let alone care about his coffee.

 

Then there is Joel Domreis of Courier Coffee. Joel sources his organic coffee from sustainable growers, he does the roasting and hand delivers his coffee beans on his bicycle. To say he’s obsessed doesn’t quite describe his level of coffee devotion. Joel will be opening a brand new coffee bar in early June at 923 SW Oak St.  No take out paper cups, because Joel thinks coffee is like wine, it tastes better in a cup, it deserves to be in porcelain. I agree. His coffee is already an underground secret; his coffee shop is set to become addictive.

 

It’s hard for me to describe the food cart scene in Portland.  There are random stand alone carts (my sister tries not to go to one near City Hall because she says its like crack…you eat that and that’s all you want to eat, day after day after day, his name is Pete, and its Indian food, go sniff it out for yourself).  Then there are the parking lots that are filled with row upon row of food stalls. Almost like what I’ve seen in the Far East, like in Hong Kong when the sun goes down and Cat Street converts to a food stall haven.  I know, it’s an unfortunate name for Chinese food stalls, what can I say? They also have stands where they sing Chinese opera, which can sound a whole lot like a herd of cats.

New York NEEDS these food carts! Yeah, we have Shake Shack, but I’d much rather go to Khao Man Gai’s stand at SW10th & Alder for some of Nong’s cooking. She was the unofficial winner of best food served at the fancy IACP opening reception at the Nines Hotel. Check out her webpage, she Tweets when they are sold out.

 

I love bread and NY has good bread, don’t get me wrong. I love Balthazar and Sullivan St, but Little T American Baker has the most flavorful bread that I’ve tasted in a long time.  He uses one tasty all natural mother!  Of course we also have bagels, and no other place on earth has good bagels. Only NY. Period. End of statement.

 

New York has  local vineyards, but nothing on the scale of Oregon. It’s the weather, the soil, the location, and we can’t change that. Yes, we have Long Island, but its never going to be like the West Coast.  One elegant Oregonian wine to look for is Domaine Drouhin; their pinot drank exactly like an Old World wine. It wasn’t huge smack you upside the head fruit, it was soft and elegant and refined and perfect for pairing with food.

We may not have the wine industry, but there is no excuse for the micro-brewers and the distillers to not be more prominent in NY.  There are some excellent distillers and a lot of good brewers, but again nothing like the scope of what I saw in the Pacific North West.  Philly has a great micro-brewery culture, check out the Brewer’s Fest if you want to see passion.  Hot tip: If you happen to spy Pacific Distillery’s absinthe anywhere, give it a try, it’s mellow and herbaceous and just plain delicious.

 

It’s not that I’m down on NY; I just think we are getting a little bit lazy and its time to step up our game.   And if you are in NY and want to experience some of this passion I’m ranting about, then head over to Roberta’s in Flatbush, these guys would be right at home in Portland. Wonder how their garden is growing….

The other area where New York is on top of the game is cheese. I tasted some very nice cheese in Portland, but we win for diversity and overall quality.

 

It would be fun to do an Iron Chef type competition by location…Portland v. New York making steak, or Philly v. Portland brewer comp. Foodnetwork, are you listening? 

 The big picture moral of the story is that no matter what, there is a burgeoning local food culture in every part of this country, and it is a good and wonderful thing.  Now, if everyone would just cook a little more at home with all this wondrous stuff, life would be better for everyone! Good eats indeed.

 

 

Mountain Life, Cross Pollination and a Rechargeable Battery

We’re back!!!

We’ve come down from our mountaintop and have rejoined the world at large.  I know there has been a long break in blogging, and I have the nagging emails to prove it…but my personal foodium-battery needed some recharging.

 

We’ve all heard the adage that all work and no play makes Jude a dull girl.  Along with being a firm Play Advocate, I also believe in cross-pollination, meaning that pitching myself down a mountain on skis will ultimately make me a better cook, a better skier and an all round better person. No really, don’t scoff. There may not be a clear connection, but that doesn’t mean the connection doesn’t exist, sort of like AT&T and a 3G connection in Manhattan.

 

         During my Mountain Sabbatical here’s what I learned:

           *  I LOVE my Snowbird family.  There is a group of us that ski together, eat together, hang out in the hot tub together, and most definitely watch the Olympics together (sometimes in our jammies). Some of us are there longer; some of us come and go, but its all family. I think Liz  compared it to one long Thanksgiving weekend: there is the crazy uncle, the erratic cousins, the nut jobs and the sane. I’m very lucky to be a part of this family.

       *   We eat really, really well. Cooking at altitude is a god awful bitch of an experience. Bread doesn’t bake, water boils at 180F/82C which means pasta turns to mush before it cooks, beans never get soft, making soft boiled eggs is a total crapshoot and pots boil over when the contents aren’t even hot. And if you open the Moka coffee pot too soon, it will explode. Wakes you right up!

       *  Eating local is not an option unless you like to eat snow and porcupines with a side of coyote. And just what was that huge critter that ran down the balcony by the light of the full moon?

       *  I am no longer a Wal-Mart virgin.  After seeing Food, Inc. I was willing to visit Wal-Mart with an open mind, however their produce is yucky, without even a nod to seasonality, so I wouldn’t mind if we didn’t go back. I may have been deflowered, but apparently I’m still a snob.

      * Ingredient adaptability is essential.  Hot tub dinner planning conversations would go like this, “What do we need to use up before it goes bad?”  “I’ve got a mango.  I’ve got pork chops. And just like that there is a dinner plan

         * When in doubt about flavor, throw in some guanciale (cured pig jowl, I do not leave home without it).  This rule holds no matter where you are.

      * Cocktails taste great after a day of skiing.  It’s a civilized reward after a day of battling the elements.  Not to mention having an ice machine down the hall is the ultimate extravagance.  Years of living in Italy where 3 cubes in a glass is the height of indulgence and tests the boundaries of good health, abundant ice is divine. (Italians are convinced a cold drink will send you to the hospital, I don’t know why, could be nationwide hysteria).

      *  Oysters, caviar, lots of chocolate, good cheese and truffles should replace chili and burgers as ski food. Thanks Mosks! Thanks Masons!

      *Having fresh Valentine roses in our room was a spectacular treat!

 

And that’s the Snowbird round up. Lots going on in NYC. Its good to be back in the blog world!

Breadsticks made easy

Everybody loves bread sticks or grissini, as they are called in Italy. Fun and quick to make, they add a homemade touch to a cheese plate or a rustic accent to a simple pasta dinner. Oh come on, do you really need me to tell you when it’s a good time to eat a breadstick? No, I didn’t think so.

 Here’s what you need:

250 g flour (about 1 ¾ cups)

125g water (scant 2/3 cup)

20g extra virgin olive oil (1Tablespoon + 1 teaspoon)

8g fresh cake yeast (1 Tablespoon)

5g salt (1/2 teaspoon)

12g honey (1 teaspoon)

1 or 2 baking sheet pans and some parchment paper

 

Yield: approximately 22 breadsticks about 8 inches long

Life is simpler, clean up is easier, eliminate cabinet clutter, and your recipes are more accurate if you use a scale.

 

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and knead for about 5 minutes or until you have a yielding but resilient ball of dough.  I use bread flour, but you could probably use all-purpose flour and get good results. Seek out cake yeast. It gives much more reliable results than dried, powdered yeast. Cake yeast comes as a fresh block of yeast; it’s not yeast that you use to make a cake rise. I get mine at an Italian food store, but I also saw it at Dean & Deluca’s the other day, so it’s around. Whole Foods probably carries it.

 

When your are finished kneading, wrap the dough ball tightly in plastic wrap and let it rest for about 15 minutes. An old Italian chef taught me this trick, and I’m a little fuzzy on the science, but something about the compression aids in hydration and gives you a more pliable dough that doesn’t tear or shred as easily.

While the dough is resting, choose some flavorings for your breadsticks. Today I used: chopped walnuts, black sesame seeds, dried oregano, fennel pollen. Other possibilities could be: grated cheese, grated cheese with smoked chili powder, fresh thyme, chopped olives, a smear of spicy tomato sauce. Let the contents of your kitchen be your inspiration. Less is more….use just a bit of topping, don't cover the whole thing in cracked peppercorns, ok?

Preheat oven to 400F/204C.

Unwrap the ball of dough and roll it into a long tube, about 1 ½” in diameter. Don’t be too concerned if this long tube isn’t precisely even or round. You’re going to cut off chunks to make the individual bread sticks so you can adjust the bread stick size as you cut the chunks. One thing you need to do is keep all the bread sticks a fairly even thickness so they all bake at the same speed. I have seen some very creative breadsticks being made in some of my classes and it just breaks my heart to discourage creativity, but enormous renderings of body parts cook much slower, so you wind up with either your body parts are underdone or your sticks are burnt.

 
Place a small amount of topping on your work surface and gently pat the seasoning into the round ‘coin’ of dough that you cut from the tube. Using both hands, gently roll the coin into a breadstick shape; as your hands are rolling the breadstick, extend the dough lengthwise. As you do this, the topping gets rolled and incorporated into the breadstick.  When you have enough of one flavor of breadstick, clean up the board and move on to the next flavoring, otherwise you get bits and pieces mixed in and wind up with a tomato-walnut-black sesame mess.

 Lay the little guys on a baking sheet that has been lined with a sheet of parchment paper, leaving an inch between the sticks. If you like a bit of salt, sprinkle a touch of salt over the raw breadsticks and give them a little roll to set the salt crystal into the surface. Just before going into the hot oven, I usually spritz the sticks with a bit of water, which increases the overall crunch factor.

After about 10 minutes in the oven, give the sticks a roll in the pan to expose their underbellies.

Total baking time is anywhere between 25-35 minutes, they’re done when they are golden brown. They may still feel a bit soft to the touch, but they crisp up as they cool. Every oven has hot spots, so depending on where you place the tray it will affect the cooking time so it  helps to rotate the trays while they are baking.  

  Let the grissini cool before putting them into any sort of container, otherwise you risk losing your crunch and getting condensation sog, and trust me, no one likes condensation sog.

If you are not planning to serve the grissini that day, you can freeze them in a zip lock bag. When you need some, put them into a 350F/180C oven for a few minutes until they are warm and crunchy. Arrange the grissini in a pretty glass jar, and watch them disappear.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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!

BLT in Italian = PIP

I confess that I really don’t miss too much American food, and I was never much of a sandwich eater, but I recently NEEDED to eat a BLT, but obviously it was going to have be Italian style, so we created the Pancetta Insalata Pomodori!

 

Here’s the recipe, but you’re on your own deciding if it’s worth it. We had everything around so it was no big deal, but you do have to stop and wonder and pay respect to what it took to get our sandwiches to the table.

1)    Bake the bread. That’s the easy part, I usually bake a batch once a week, freeze it and we’re all set.

2)    Find some willing chickens. You need an egg to make the mayonnaise. What? You thought I was going to buy mayonnaise? Our friend Bruce has some lovely chickens that lay great eggs, the kind with very dark orange yokes.  Yeah, that orange stuff on the bread is actually the mayo made from these eggs.

3)    Grow and harvest a good tomato.

4)    While you are out getting the tomato, pick some lettuce.

5)    Fry up the pancetta. I did not raise the pig, know the pig or have anything more to do with the pancetta other than buy it. What can I say? Maybe next year we’ll convert the guest room to a pigpen.

6)    Slice, fry, assemble, eat.

 

Snip v. Slash

Speaking in bread geek: how do you slash, people?  I’ve never been satisfied with my slash technique, so now I’m experimenting with the snip. 
Slash is what you do to the bread loaf right before it goes into the oven so that you will get those lovely exploding patterns. I don’t have a good slasher or lame, all I do is tear.  I’ve tried taping a razor blade to a flexible spatula; I bought a lousy lame, all to no avail. So, now I’m snipping with scissors.

The ongoing sourdough starter experiments continue. I’m taking some of my favorite Bertinet formulas and substituting my sourdough starter for the usual pre-ferment. Yesterday’s batch was the best ever, fully developed flavors, nice crust and soft crumb.
Now, if I can figure out how to get the ale flavor that I like into the sourdough starter that would be pretty cool.

This is only starter level bread geek speek, if you want to hang with the big boys at Sourdough Companion who talk about ash content and potassium like you and I speak about toast, then that’s where you need to go. For now, I’m happy pushing the limits of my starter and occasionally making some toast.