CUCINONE

Often a picture says much more than a long text.  This video proves the point: just looking at it is enough to reproduce this easy dish in your own kitchen.  As always, make sure that you get the best ingredients (good bread and tasty tomatoes are the hardest bit) and do roast the bread in the grillpan (only the barbeque will give a better result).

If you find the English subtitles disturbing (e.g. when you want to practice your Italian), you can find an Italian-only version here.

Tags: bruschetta, fettunta, tomato

Nothing is more Italian than pasta with tomato sauce. However, this dish is not that easy: although the preparation in the kitchen is straightforward, the problem lies in finding good tomatoes.  Every cookbook refers either to sun-ripened tomatoes preferably during the month of August, or a can of San Marzano tomatoes as a replacement when delicious tomatoes are not available.  And the tomatoes that you can buy are not ment to be sun-ripened and packed with flavour.  They are bred to cope with transport and to have the right colour and form, and that’s about it.  And although the canned Italian tomatoes are not bad, they still remain, well, canned tomatoes.  If you think all tomatoes available in Italy are far superior, then you’re in for a disappointment.  Most tomatoes available in Italian supermarkets come from Dutch greenhouses.  The Italian-bred, sun-drenched tomatoes are not at all easy to find, and markedly more expensive.  So, what to do?

The solution is to find the best quality tomatoes that you can find, and give them a blast treatment to enhance their flavour: oven-roasting.  This treatment concentrates the flavour enormously, and enhances the overal taste experience.  

The resulting sauce can be used as is to dress pasta, or further enhanced by adding fresh herbs, like basil, or spiked up with some peproncini. You can also stew some scampi in it, serve it with rabbit or swordfish, and it is excellent with cooked cannellini beans, thus creating the classi fagioli all’uccelletto.

Ingredients

• 250g cherrry tomatoes on the stalk, rinsed
• 1 clove of garlic
• pinch of dried origano
• pepper and salt
• some olive oil
• white part of +/- 5 sping onions
• a bay leaf
• some branches of fresh thyme

Tags: pasta, tomato sauce

Slow Food released a new version of their Slow Food Companion. You can downlad it here.

Tags: slowfood

Arista de maiale is a real classic from Tuscany.  It is best to use a rack of pork loin, because the bones add extra flavour to the dish.

In the big old kitchens of Tuscan fattorie, the meat was usually roasted on a spit before the open fire place, using a girarrosto.  With the decline of open fire places as a cooking spot, and the introduction of ovens in households, this habit almost vanished.  The meat is nowadays usually prepared in the oven.  But lots of country folks still don’t have an oven in their kitchen, and then the dish is prepared on top of the stove.  As the meat doesn’t move as on a spit, the preparation got the name morto, dead…  ¹

Ingredients

• 500 g of pork loin
• battuto made up of celery, carrot and onion (30 g each), 2 garlic cloves and some flat-leaved parsley
• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 1 glass dry white wine
• branch of thyme and rosemary

1. La Cucina Toscana, Parenti, p. 166 [↩]

Tags: arista, arrosto morto, pork loin

Thinly sliced veal covered with a tuna sauce could be an invention of nouvelle cuisine or fusion kitchen.  This recipe however is truly Italian, and comes from Piemonte. It was already mentioned in the cookbook  ”Il cuoco senza pretese” written by Odescalchi in 1834, where the recipe still had the name “vitello tonné”

Too often the veal is being roasted and covered with a sauce made up of mayonaise mixed with  some tuna. The resulting sauce misses the finesse and freshness of the real stuff, which is made of egg yolks and olive oil, cooking juices of the veal and enhanced by capers, anchovies, lemon juice and a hint of vinegar.

The classic preparation demands some time: the veal is marinated overnight, and then simmered in the marinade.  The prepared dish should be kept for some hours in a cold place, for the taste to develop fully.

Ingredients

• 500 gr of veal loin
• 3 dl dry white wine
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 sage leaves
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• battuto: a battuto is the finely chopped mixture of herbs that flavour an Italian dish — in this case 30 gr each of carrot, celery, onion, and flat-leaved parsley. Purists (i.e. Cucinone) use a mezzaluna, a crescent-shaped knife, and a chopping board
• 4 salted anchovies, deboned and desalted
• 150 gr of best-quality tinned tuna
• 2 hard boiled egg yolks
• 20 gr salted capers, desalted
• 1/2 tablespoon tarragon vinegar
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 dl olive oil
• pepper and salt

Tags: tuna sauce, veal, vitello tonnato

Roasted (bell) peppers are a very popular and  exquisite antipasto.  Grilling the peppers in the oven or on a barbeque gives them an exquisite sweet taste, and removing the skin makes them much more digestible.  To contrast this sweetness, some saltiness is often added, here in the form of capers.  A fine alternative would be salted anchovies.  Both the capers and the anchovies should be desalted before adding them to the dish.

The peppers can also be used as a topping for crostini or bruschette.  They also pair very nice with cold cuts of meat (roasted pork loin springs to mind).

The best peppers available in Italy come from Carmagnola in Piemonte, but these are not readily available.  The Spanish have their pimiento del piquillo de Lodosa, which are widely available, roasted and skinned, and conserved in tins or jars.  These are excellent if you don’t want to roast your own peppers.  Marinate them in the same way.

Ingredients

• 2 (bell) peppers,  red or yellow or a mixture (avoid the green ones, as they do not give the same sweetiness)
• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
• 4 tablespoon extra vergine olive oil
• 5 large basil leaves, torn
• 2 tablespoons salted capers, rinsed in cold water
• black pepper

Heat the oven to maximum, and roast the peppers for 35 minutes, turning a few times, so that the skin is charred and blackened. Let them cool, and then peel of the skin.  Remove the stem and the seeds, and slice the peppers into 3 cm wide strips.  Put them on a serving dish.

Put all the other ingredients in a bowl, and mix thoroughly.  Cover the peppers with this mixture and let marinate in a cool place (not the fridge!) for at least 2 hours before serving.

Tags: capers, peppers

Ingredients

• 4 white peaches
• 1/2 bottle dry white wine
• 1 vanilla pod, split in 2
• 120 g sugar
• juice of 1 orange
• 2 egg yolks
• wild strawberries or raspberries (optional)

Tags: dolci, orange, peaches, sabayon, zabaglione

Tuscans are sometimes nicknamed mangiafagioli, for their love of beans.  And it is true that beans are served quite a lot in Tuscany: as soup, combined with pasta, or as a contorno for meat dishes.  This salad is also very popular.  You need only a few ingredients, but they should be of top quality for this dish to work out beautifully.  

The dish is usually prepared with the cannellini variety of beans - every city in Tuscany however has its own local favourite, but they’re very hard to come by outside Tuscany.  It is perfectly OK to use dried beans, but canned ones are an absolute no-no.

Not so long ago, beans were cooked in a Chianti bottle (fagioli al fiasco) whereby the straw around the bottle was used as a stopper.  Nowadays, you can buy specially designed bottles for this purpose.

The tuna should be of the very best quality, preferably ventresca preserved in olive oil.

The olive oil that is used to dress the salad should be extra vergine, from a well-known estate.  An olive oil from the Lucca countryside such as Fubbiano or Matraja would be perfect, but another Tuscan oil would do very nicely, or a Ligurian one made of the taggiasca variety.

Ingredients for the beans preparation

• 250 g dried cannellini beans
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
• 4 sage leaves
• 1 teaspoon of salt

Put the beans in a large pot, and cover with cold water.  Let stand overnight or at least 12 hours.  The beans will soak up the water and regain their shape.  Drain the beans and cover again with fresh water, and add all the other ingredients.  Slowly bring to the boil, and simmer until the beans are tender.  This can take anything from 1 to 2 hours, depending on the age of the beans.  If it takes more than 2 hours the beans were too old in the first place, and should probably be discarded.  The beans should be tender (not al dente !) but still hold their shape.  Add a teaspoon of salt 15 minutes before the end of the cooking time. Drain the beans.

Ingredients for the salad

• cooked beans (above)
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 200 gr tuna in olive oil, drained and flaked
• 1 small red onion, sliced into thin rings
• salt and pepper

Drain the cooked beans and dress with the olive oil while still warm.  The heat of the beans will release all the fragrances of the olive oil.  Add some black pepper and salt.  Add the tuna and the onion rings. Let the salad cool down to room temperature and serve with a dry, white wine (e.g. a Montecarolo).

Perfect as part of a antipasto misto or as a light lunch. 

Tags: beans, salad, tuna

On Sunday May 25th, more than 800 wineries in Italy will open up to the public for the annual Cantine Aperte day.  Last year, more than 1 million people visited.  Although the event is held on a huge scale, the traditional hospitality of the wine makers makes it well worth a visit.  Often, besides ofcourse the wine tasting, food is offered.  We were once treated to a 7-course lunch in a Piemontese winery, with all the best wines to go with the food. Apart from tasting, you can also buy wine.

If you happen to be in Italy on that day, do not miss this event.

There is not a full list available of all the cantine, but you can find the information in the local tourist office, the internet, or download a file for your GPS.

Cheers !

Tags: cantine aperte, wine

Tags: olive oil