Where home cooking is always in season! Kitchens are the heart of the house. Please join me as I do some cooking and chat about life in general, usually with an Italian accent!
Poor Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian master painter. If he
only knew his lasting claim to fame would come when the famous barkeep Harry
Cipriani named a peach and Prosecco cocktail after him.Harry liked peaches, and in a moment of
inspiration (which probably meant he had a ton of peaches around and he had to
use them or lose them) he combined the peach puree with some sparkling wine and
a summer cocktail classic was born.
Bellini’s are only as good as the peach, so if you don’t
have good peaches, you may get by with some very good quality peach nectar.
I’m lucky, there’s a peach farm down the road, it’s peach
season, and I had a boatload of peaches in the kitchen. Six kilos of peaches to
be exact.Some went into a peach
cake, some went into peach ice cream and some went into a Bellini sorbet.The sorbet is a simple concoction of
pureed and strained peaches, a little bit of lemon juice and a tiny bit of
simple syrup combined with about half a bottle of Prosecco, then still-frozen.
Meaning I didn’t use an ice cream machine, I just poured the liquid into a
container and put it in the freezer.
When it’s time to indulge in a Bellini slush, cut out a
chunk of the sorbet (it’s stays firm but not ice hard due to the Prosecco’s
alcohol content), and combine in the blender with some ice cold Prosecco.
I bet Harry Cipriani would approve of my Bellini slush. As
for Giovanni Bellini, I hope he liked peaches.
Here in the land of the tomato rich, we decided to settle
the great debate, which tastes better: a beefsteak or an ox heart tomato.
Finally, we had two of the tasty orbs ripe at the same time.
The beefsteak tomato is huge, soft ball sized, round and incredibly
meat. I guess that’s how it got its name.
The oxheart is tear dropped shaped, or now that I think of it, ox heart
shaped, more pinkish than tomato red, but also very meaty.
We approached the Taste Off quite scientifically. First
tasting only the sliced tomato, then with salt, then with salt and olive oil
and finally with oregano.
And the winner on all counts, except oregano, was the
beefsteak. It was simply more flavorful. The oregano teased out the nuances of
flavor in the ox heart, but overall it lost out to it’s meaty cousin.
What an absolute luxury to be able to do a side by side
tasting, and Signor Bruski was right, we didn’t plant enough tomatoes! This has
been duly noted in the things to do better next year notebook.
Somethings should not be tampered with, and I've come to the conclusion that prosciutto and melon is one of those things. That's not to say I haven't tried: melon ice cream, powdered prosciutto, wrapping the prosciutto around little mouth size bites of melon, or wondering if a mint chiffonade would spark up the flavors, but in my heart I know none of this is better than a cut-able hunk of melon with some just sliced pieces of prosciutto.
So, I have to curb my temptation to fix what isn't broken and just not mess with the perfect flavor combination. (...but that mint idea is just calling me....)
Oh, and just between friends, ketchup is NOT an acceptable condiment on prosciutto and melon. We actually saw American tourists in Rome drown their plate of p and m in ketchup. A very stoic waiter stood nearby and I swear I saw a tear roll down his cheek.
The days are starting to blur together as the hectic summer life of Montone begins in earnest.
First, we sadly said good-bye to the last of the SADMO’s and the orto looks fantastic after all of John and Libby’s work and now its up to us to tend the garden and make us all proud of the ‘giardino americano’.
We shared a final glass of Prosecco with “the Dues” before indulging in one last full on meat fest of soctto ditto. Scotto ditto is Umbrian style grilled lamb, simple rough cuts of meat, salted, grilled with a bit of rosemary and devoured while hot. At one point I was taking care of something at the stove, and all I could hear was sounds of ‘mmmm’’’ as everyone was grabbing a piece of meat. In the morning I literally swept up a carpet of rosemary bits from our feeding frenzy.
Well, Dues…. Both sets of you….you are missed already, so come back soon!
Summer weather is here, so Saturday afternoon we headed off to the Pietralunga pool, only it wasn’t officially open yet as it opens today, but they let us in for a swim anyway. We had this whole ginormous pool all to ourselves!
Then it was off to Citta di Castello for a little date night aperitivo and as usual that town puts on a fine show at aperitivo time. We actually bar hopped from Syrah to Café Latino and here’s the report: Syrah makes a better Manhattan and Latino has better nibbles, so clearly it pays to hop.
We knew there was a party going on in Montone, so we scurried back thinking that I would make us a quick bowl of pasta to fuel ourselves for a night of dancing in the piazza, but as we walked up the block, the smell of grilled meat came wafting down and literally dragged us up the street. The Aries soccer team was throwing its annual party and there was grilled meat and dancing for everyone! But seriously do you have any idea how loud techno-disco music sounds at 1:00 in the morning bouncing off of medieval walls?
We bailed on the party at around midnight because we had to be up at dawn today to gather flowers for the Corpus Domini infioriate. That’s when the streets are covered in elaborate flower designs that we work on for hours and hours and then are destroyed not moments after completion. I’m still working on my Zen acceptance of the destruction of so much work, so quickly! It all happened so fas….the band came down Via Garibaldi, the priests followed and the populace behind them. Next thing I knew… we were cleaning up and all that was left was the scent of incense hovering in the air. It’s a marvelous morning’s work, and all in all its been a fine few days.
For the full set of photos from this morning's flower fest: clicca qui.
Its not enough to slice a cucumber in a different way, there has to be a reason for it. Here's a simple cucumber salad: sliced cucumber, bit of red onion, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper; but it's a new and improved cucumber salad because of the way it's cut. The ribbon slices of cucumber rendered the whole salad more crunchy, with more tooth and texture than chunks of cucumber.
A few weeks ago, I decided to grow my own micro greens. I got tired of looking at Studio Kitchen and Ideas in Foods photographs where each bite has a leaf or two of what I’m sure is this incredibly tasty, vibrant microgreen. I went to our Molino and got a bunch of seed packs and little brown cardboard type planter boxes and then planted: chicory, fennel, parsley, mache, arugula and something called “raperonzolo” that I have no idea what it is, except the picture on the packet looks like a white carrot. Observation #1: I thought it would take a few days; it took a few weeks to get these itsy bitsy sprouts. Observation #2: the fennel was a total dud, not even one sprout. I’m disappointed. Observation #3: Raperonzolo seeds are really, really tiny. The dot over this “i” is bigger than a raperonzolo seed. Observation #4: with the exception of the arugula, everything else just tastes vaguely ‘green’.
So, all those lovely photos of microgreens tossed on a single bite of sous vide poached salmon….are they just there to look good, or have I missed the boat entirely in my micro garden?
We are in the heart of pomodori, or tomato season. They are cheap, cheap at the market, and mighty tasty. I took a batch, sliced them and stuck them up on the roof to make sun dried tomatoes. Hell, we’ve certainly got sun and now we have tomatoes, so it seemed like a natural. I’ll report back….maybe in a few days, maybe in a few weeks. I’ve learned to scale back my expectations.
Dried pink peppercorns are a new obsession. I tasted them at , the wonderful beach restaurant in the Le Marche region, and then I tried to recreate them. I poached the peppercorns in a very strong simple syrup and then put them in a low oven to dry. I wound up making pink peppercorn brittle, too much syrup, and not enough dry time. But, if I break apart the individual peppercorns, they taste great, a burst of sweet, flowery heat, and they were a delicious surprise note in a recent batch of mountain strawberry gelato. I got the strawberries off the back of a truck up in Castellucio; tiny, sweet berries that you normally don’t see around here. I dropped the peppercorns into the gelato maker, one by one, so they wouldn’t clump up and it was certainly tedious, but worth the effort. See what I mean about obsession?
Who knows what’s next? Thanks god, I have a tolerant husband.
Enfleurage is an old method of extracting fragrance essence from flowers or other botanicals using fat, usually beef tallow. A glass plate would have a layer of fat spread on it, then flower petals pressed into it, after which the fat is left for 1-3 days, then removed and cleaned, using an evaporating solvent, like alcohol. This technique was used for making perfumes, and was the preferred technique for extracting fragrance from delicate flowers like jasmine and tuberose.
So, if it worked for jasmine, would it work on lavender and butter? I took a thin slab of unsalted butter, buried it in lavender buds, covered the butter in plastic wrap, and left it in the fridge for 24 hours. Then removed it, and over the course of another 4 hours, let it come up to room temperature, scraped most of the buds off and definitely did not use any sort of solvent!
Now what to do with my lavender butter? It is a traditional French accompaniment to grilled meat, so that seemed like a good place to start. The meat flavor still seemed to need a bridge flavor between the lavender and the meat, so I chose thyme as the bridge. Think of layering the flavors like layers of perfume…. a base note (beef), a mid-range (thyme) and the top note (lavender). The thyme flavor is infused into the meat by burning the thyme branches into ash on top of the meat. There is a brasserie in Paris that does this, and the whole room smells of burnt thyme, it’s an intoxicating smell. Getting the thyme to burn is tricky. I dry the fresh branches in the oven; light a bunch of matches and work near a good exhaust system. If you light the thyme tableside, for dramatic effect, be prepared to set off the smoke alarm.
Then I wanted to see what would happen when acid was brought into the flavor mix, and we tried white asparagus with lime and lavender butter. The asparagus was steamed in water that had a few slices of lime in it, then fresh lime juice and a knob of lavender butter was added right before serving.
The meat was good, but the lavender flavor was a bit lost, it almost seemed too close in flavor to the thyme to create that bridge. The asparagus, on the other hand, was gorgeous. The lime added a brightness and lift to the lavender and it was the perfect foil for the white asparagus.
I think this is an interesting technique, and I can’t wait to try it again, when I’m in Italy and I can go outside and just pluck some fresh lavender. What else? Basil butter, anchovy butter… the advantage of course, is that you don’t wind up with little green particles or fishie bits in your teeth.
If your idea of a good time is to get up early on a Saturday morning, take a train ride to Queens, and talk about the effects of methocel on mango juice, then I have just the place for you to go. The duo behind the Ideas in Food blog are Chefs H. Alexander Talbot and Aki Kamozawa and they are at the forefront of molecular gastronomy, or contemporary cuisine or whatever you call the movement that is the avant-garde of the cooking world. They have returned from a summer gig in Montana, and are now offering classes in their home.
In a nutshell, what they are doing is experimenting, manipulating and creating new food textures using food grade chemicals. If your first reaction is YUCK, hang on for a minute. Alex’s intro into the class touched on this problem of perception. Chemical manipulation has been done to many every day items that you eat…do you think sugar grows all nice and organically inside those little packets? Alex’s take on some of these products is to treat them as you would any other ingredient, and to think of them as ingredients. There are producers who are even working on organic grade agar or carrageenan, which is derived from red seaweed.
It was a brain stimulating class; we made eggnog knots, turning commercial eggnog into a simple, and elegant presentation. We made a very stable and airy foam out of mango juice, which was used as a filling for violet scented yoghurt skin with the assembled dish looking brain teasingly like an omelet. We made gel strips out of applesauce that tasted just like apple pie. My mind was bouncing around with all the possibilities. I’m not numbers oriented, but on the train ride home, I was wondering about the effects of combining F50 with A15 methocel and should locust bean gum be added for flexibility. I can honestly say that I think it was the first time I’d ever considered this sort of food manipulation. And cooking, adding heat, is the most basic form of manipulation, so this is just a sort of evolution.
But, at days end, its still about flavor, texture, and satisfaction. I think it is easy to get wrapped up in the possibilities, however you don’t want to lose sight of the ultimate goal: dining pleasure. So, I’m not so sure about a gel that mimics the flavor of apple pie without the decadence of a good crust to back it up; however I am sure about that celery root cube we sampled because it completely and totally rocked. It’s a fantastic world to explore and to play around with, but you must watch out that you don’t lose track of that ultimate goal.
Inspired by Shola Olunloyo’s Studio Kitchen blog where he sang the praises of retaining and using the liquid left over from cooking lentils, I gave it a whirl the other night, and he is right. Blended with a little toasted cumin, and some brown butter, this created an earthy, unctuous sauce that changed a simple, rough cut piece of pork into a satisfying, finger licking treat. Crispy shallots never hurt, either. Now, if only we can find a more ‘romantic’ name for left over lentil water……
Fish sauce is a benign way to describe garum, which historically has been made from fermented fish guts, or fish blood, or whole fish such as mackerel, mullet, tuna, anchovies or a combination of those ingredients. Garum is an ancient Roman sauce that Pliny the Elder enjoyed in 1st century AD, and in the late 4th or 5th century AD the Apicius collection of recipes relied heavily on the use of garum, using it as a salt substitute. Apparently it was all the rage to have different types of garum, made from mullet or mackerel which were perceived as top quality and commanded the highest price, or from tuna or from any fish in the net. Reminds me of all the esoteric, ‘designer’ salts that are cramming the shelves of Whole Foods. Can you imagine sending your unenlightened Significant Other into the store to pick up ‘some salt’? Good lord, they might come home with just anything!
Happily, I didn’t have to make my own garum because the process sounds extremely smelly (think of unwashed gym socks), and in ancient Roman times the production of garum was restricted to outside the city walls. Basically you salt the fish and then let them ferment until the natural enzymes have dissolved the fish and you are left with clear, oil like substance. The finished product that I found, “Colatura di alici” from the Amalfi coast, is made from anchovies and isn’t smelly at all, it’s sort of mildly fishy, and strongly salty. And before you gag thinking about barrels full of partially decomposed anchovies, fermented anchovies is an ingredient in Worstershire sauce, and who doesn’t love Worstershire sauce?
So, what to do with my garum? Last night we tried it with a basic anchovy and tomato sauce, finished with some parsley and a scrape or two of tangerine peel. There was a delicious depth of flavor, without being overly assertive. Turns out that garum is a natural flavor enhancer, rich in amino acids and vitamin A. Next up: some experiments using garum in conjunction with honey and chili, roasted fruits, vegetables, boiled potatoes…
