Fresh pasta five ways
Posted: May 14, 2011 Filed under: Pasta, Photos 1 Comment »With pasta expert Angelo Troiani we spent the day making some of his favorite pastas.
We started with a standard mix – 700 gr all purpose flour (tipo 0) and added 300 gr of semolina flour (farina di semola). Into that went 10 eggs (roughly 600 gr) for a ratio of 5:3 flour to eggs (1000 gr to 600 gr)
Next came a mixture of just egg whites – 500 gr of all purpose flour, 500 gr of semolina flour, 400 gr of eggs whites (about ten eggs worth)and two tablespoons of olive oil.
The heaviest was just egg yolks – 800 gr all purpose flour, 200 gr semolina flour, 500 gr egg yolks (about 25 eggs worth), 100 gr water.
Then a green spinach pasta – dried out spinach, 600 gr all purpose flour, 400 gr semolina flour, 8 eggs.
And last a black pasta with squid ink – 700 gr all purpose flour, 300 gr semolina flour, 9 eggs and 50 gr squid ink.
Chef Angelo Troiani explaining his pastas
Rolling out egg-white pasta by hand - 
Spinach ravioli stuffed with ricotta -
Pasta maltagliata al nero di seppia (‘badly cut’ pasta with cuttlefish ink) -
Our group was responsible for the all egg yolk pasta, which we prepared with butter, sage and sprinkling of parmigiano.
Eggs
Posted: May 14, 2011 Filed under: Ingredients Leave a comment »Sunny-side-up sounds a little fancier in Italian – occhio di bue (ox eye)
Poached egg and a slightly over crisped omelette. It’s become a game of Chef Mazza’s to stop everything and pick four of us randomly to make an omelette – mine are coming along.
Some of the more unappealing scrambled eggs I’ve ever seen, we cooked them just enough so they’d congeal and not actually firm up, really odd consistency.
After a morning of breakfast fare we got into more complicated things – making meringues below with the assistance of Chef Fabrizio Leggiero. He did the perfectly formed ones on the right – the rest of ours to follow we not quite so evenly shaped.
Beans, beans they’re good for your heart…
Posted: May 9, 2011 Filed under: Photos Leave a comment »Chef Paolo Trippini, from my favorite region of Italy, took us through risotto in the morning and then legumes in the afternoon. Here’s the chef himself, a large man -
And he prepared some hearty dishes. First pasta e ceci – broken spaghetti with chickpeas on a bed of pureed chickpeas seasoned with lard and rosemary.
After that came pasta e fagioli - pasta with kidney beans, on a bed of pureed kidney beans, again, seasoned with lard and rosemary -
and after he was done the vultures descended -
Hot Sauces w. Chef Mazza
Posted: May 9, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Roux three ways – white, blond, and brown.
Chef Mazza diligently garnishing a sea bass with a reduced shrimp sauce.
…and the finished product, seared sea bass stuffed with more sea bass and drizzled with shrimp sauce.
And we finished up the day with a little experiment – frying with regular butter and clarified butter. Clarifying butter – removing the water and milk solids and leaving just the butterfat – gives in a much higher smoking point so you can use it to fry things. The zucchini in the top pan are happily frying away in clarified butter, while the ones in the bottom are burning in the un-clarified butter.
Fruit based desserts
Posted: May 9, 2011 Filed under: Photos 1 Comment »First attempts at crepes, doing pretty well despite the face -
Intense concentration getting individual orange-mint aspics with wildberries ready.
A delicious (and very pretty) apple crumble.
Vegetables
Posted: April 29, 2011 Filed under: Ingredients, Kitchen Experiments | Tags: Chef Mazza, Ingredients, kitchen science, radicchio, vegetables 1 Comment »Yesterday we learned about vegetables -
and more vegetables…
Our main instructor, and head chef of the Gambero Rosso school, Davide Mazza, walked us through the various types of vegetables – green, yellow, red, white – and the families they belong to – bulbs, roots, fruits, leaves, stalks, tubers and flowers – and the different cooking methods – steamed, pressured, stewed, braised, fried.
But what I found most interesting was the brief chemistry lesson we got.
Enocianina is the chemical that gives a radicchio leaf it’s bright purple color. A color that unfortunately fades when exposed to high heat. Unless it’s heated in an acidic environment, which seals in the vibrant color.
In class Chef Mazza did an experiment in front of us. He heated two equal pot of water to a boil, added a healthy splash of white wine vinegar to one, and left the other alone. After the alcohol evaporated he dropped two radicchio leaves into each pot.
After about a minute in the pot with no vinegar the water began to turn slightly green. That was the chlorophyl leeching out of the radicchio (apparently even bright purple radicchio has a certain percentage of green chlorophyl beneath the surface). At the same time the water with the vinegar in it remained crystal clear.
After two minutes chef took out all the leaves and put them on a plate next to each other. The radicchio that was cooked with the vinegar looked as if it was still raw, while the other was an unfortunate brownish grey. A nice trick to add some color to a plate, and the vinegar is used in such small quantities that you don’t taste it at all.
Chef Mazza (in black) with the class’s rapt attention.
Sicilian’s and their eggplants – pasta alla norma
Posted: April 29, 2011 Filed under: Cheese | Tags: cheese, pasta, Recipes, ricotta, sicily 1 Comment »I’ve made pasta alla norma on at least a dozen occasions over the past few years living in Italy, but now that my closest friend here is half Sicilian (and has been apprenticing in a Sicilian restaurant) he’s upped the bar on a dish I thought I had pretty well under control.
Ingredients (serves 4)
1 eggplant
1 cup tomato sauce – ideally homemade
2 cups olive oil
20 basil leaves
1.5 cups ricotta salata
1 box pasta – rigatoni, penne, mezze maniche all work well
salt and pepper to taste
Preparation
1) Cut eggplant into thin slices, lay slices out on a paper towel, salt for 20 minutes, clean and pat dry. Cut slices into thin slivers.
2) Put on pasta water in a large pot.
3)) In a large saute pan pour enough olive oil that it sits about 1/4 inch deep. Heat it over a medium-high flame until hot enough to fry with (once a drop of water sizzles on it) and add the slices of eggplant. Cook until lightly browned. Set aside to dry.
4) Pour off oil leaving just enough to coat the pan. Once pasta is about half cooked, combing tomato sauce, eggplant, 15 basil leaves, and 1 cup of ricotta primo sale in pan over medium-low heat.
5) Once pasta is done add it directly into pan with sauce (saving pasta water). Stir everything together for 2-3 minutes, add salt and pepper to taste, garnish with remaining basil and ricotta. Serve immediately.
We got extra lucky in this version because Gabe had just returned from Sicily with a wheel of ricotta infornata, a salted, slow-baked ricotta that I had never even seen and am not sure you can get in Rome, and is worlds apart from the ricotta al formo that you do find in Rome. Much better in my opinion.
Essence of Cheese
Posted: April 29, 2011 Filed under: Cheese | Tags: cheese, cheese making Leave a comment »Cheese is one of the four primal foods (along with bread, wine and beer) that early man discovered – likely by accident.
The earliest water proof containers were made from the stomach linings of small ruminant animals: calves, goats and sheep. These animals’ stomachs (their fourth stomach for the most part) contains rennet, a natural enzyme that causes coagulation. If the stomach wasn’t perfectly cleaned some of that rennet remained.
When milk was put in the sac and mixed well, perhaps from bouncing off someone’s hip while walking, over the course of a few hours the rennet would cause a solid to form, separating the curd from the whey.
You can imagine this early man’s surprise when he went for a swig of milk and found a clumpy solid. Once he got up the nerve to try this mysteriously formed, gloppy substance you can also imagine his delight when it tasted good, or at least that it didn’t kill him. What he was eating was essentially ricotta.
But what exactly is cheese? To answer that we need to step back in figure out what milk is.
Milk comes from these ruminant animals I mentioned above. The basic idea is that these animals eat grass, or other highly fibrous plants, chew it once, pass it to the first chamber of their stomach where it is softened, pass it back to their mouth and then they start chewing again. This second chewing phase is the “chud”. That second chewing, combined with the forces at work in their following three stomach compartments, breaks down the fibrous materials enough the nutrients end up in their milk.
So milk, the essential part of milk, that which gives it flavor, is nutrients from the earth, combined with energy from the sun, broken down by a cow or a sheep or a goat.
These rich, flavor giving nutrients make up a small part of milk however. 90% of milk is water. 3.8-4.5% (of whole milk) is fat. The remaining 5.5-6.2% is a combination of proteins, vitamins, mineral salts, calcium and sugars (lactose). Cheese making eliminates water (depending on how aged it is) and concentrates these other elements. Parmiggiano reggiano for example, needs 550 liters of milk to produce one wheel which ways about 100 lbs. Raw milk weighs a bit more than water, so those 550 liters of milk would be around 1,300 lbs (550 x 2.2 x 1.1). So a wheel of Parmiggiano is milk reduced to less than one tenth of it’s original weight (and aged for 1-3 years).
Now to the different steps in the cheese making process.
First is heating. There are three processes here. Milk heated to 98.6 F is considered raw, this rise in temperature helps speed up the coagulating process. This cheese is considered raw and some, particularly the FDA, view it is dangerous and require it to be aged at least 60 days to kill any pathogens that might be in the milk. Semi-cooked milk is heated to 108 F before the coagulating agent is added, and cooked cheese is heated to 131 F.
After the cooking process there are 2 other major factors in the cheese making process.
First is the type of coagulating agent used. This can be either animal rennet (which can chemical produced), vegetable rennet (which comes from thistles, nettles or fig tree bark) and lastly, acid – either citric acid or vinegar.
After that comes the period of aging. This can range from nothing (a truly fresh ricotta or mozzarella di bufala) to a weeks, to months and to years.
Already we can begin to see the multitude of possibilities in the cheese world. We have 3 different levels of heating, 3 different types of coagulation, and let’s say 4 basic aging periods (none, fresh, semi-aged, aged). Put those factors on top of the different animals that produce milk the majority of milk in the western world – cows, sheep, goats and water buffalo. We’ve already got 112 different types of cheese (3 x 3 x 4 x 4).
Add onto that where the cheese is aged – in a cave, a well, buried in hay – what it is washed with – saltwater, black pepper, truffles – mold that is added to it (stinky blue cheeses) – and the possibilities quickly become endless.
Each one of these different steps comes from a tradition in a particular region where at some point that certain type of preservation or aging or washing was the best, and tastiest, way to make cheese.
No wonder Charles de Gaulle said “How can I govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?”.
The Wonders of Cheese
Posted: April 27, 2011 Filed under: Cheese, Ingredients | Tags: cheese, piedmont, slow food Leave a comment »Of the experts they’ve brought in to talk to us so far one of the first was Alberto Marcomini, who came to talk to us about dairy products.
His introduction to the world of Italian cheese struck me. He talked for a long time about it’s industrialization, something I would have expected to hear more about American cheeses than Italian ones.
After World War II, when much of the grazing land of Italy had been torn to pieces, people were searching for stability. For some, industrialized, standardized food was just that. They (particularly in the north) began to produce cheese in large factories, as opposed to up in the mountain pastures at structures called malghe (or one malga), which translates to an ‘alp’ according to wordreference.com. I didn’t know you could only have one alp.
These structures, set way up in mountains, at least a 3000 ft above sea level, and as high as 5000 ft, made cheeses that varied greatly with the seasons. Mountain pastures provided varying fodder all year long for cows, sheep and goats grazing in the meadows. Fresh cheeses especially bore the flavors of the plants that were growing at that time of year. Industrialization destroyed this connection to the land.
Instead of working on the malghe in the years after World War II the younger generations moved down into the plains and began working in factories. Massive farms would combine the milk of hundreds, even thousands, of animals and heat it to a point that eliminated most of the bacteria (pasteurizing it). This eliminated all of the harmful bacteria that could cause contamination, but also all kinds of good bacteria that add to flavor. This mixture of various milks (which is all milk in the States, and most of Europe, that you would buy anywhere – only if you got it directly from a farm would this not be the case) was then mixed with various preservatives and made into a few different cheeses. Cheeses that never changed. The most famous example still made today is Bel Paese. A cheese that does not age, and which our cheesemonger for the day, Alberto, looked down on as a product that symbolized the downfall of great Italian cheeses of the past.
After this relatively depressing introduction, he headed in a more optimistic direction.
The Slow Food movement was born in Italy in the 80s and since then has picked up quite a head of steam and now has members in 130 differente countries. On the cheese side, Alberto said it really began in the mid-90′s, with people returning to the old cheese making methods. In 1995 there was an event in Bra (in the Piedmont) called Primo Cheese and there were about 50 vendors selling – and educating people – their wares. Just two years later that same event paired with the Salone del Gusto in Turin and there were hundreds of cheese makers who came out of the woodworks.
So according to Alberto Marcomini, and after the cheeses we tasted after our discussion, I would have to agree that Italian cheeses are heading in the right direction.
“When I was climbing a cinnamon tree in Zanzibar…”
Posted: April 26, 2011 Filed under: Ingredients | Tags: spices 3 Comments »That’s not exactly the start to a sentence you expect to hear every day. And you can imagine that the kind of person who would say such a think would have to be a character, to say the least.
And Franco Calafatti, the man behind the Spices Academy is just that, a character.
He talked to us for almost two straight hours, seemingly without breathing, about his experiences across the globe looking for exotic spices, and how, when the globetrotting spice-hunter side of him returned to Rome, he becomes a mad-spice-scientist looking for new combinations of spices and salt to wow people’s palates.
While I’m not going to recount his stories, partially because they were so run together I wouldn’t know where to start or finish, and partially because I don’t remember half of them, he did start out his discourse with an interesting thought.
“It’s important to have a touch of home mixed with something exotic. If it’s just exotic people will say, ‘Well, they eat that over there and I’m going to eat what I know’. If they feel mostly at home they’ll more likely eat and enjoy it.”
He was saying this as he unpacked his duffle bag full of 32 different jars of mix salts and spices. They ran from the reasonably simple – paprika and onion or salt and capers – to curious – salt and rose petals or laurel and fennel fronds – to the downright bizarre – vanilla, cinnamon, star anise and hibiscus flower or manna, cacao, mint and wild mint. That’s right, manna, as in the biblical food God provided the Israelites.
Once they were all laid out on the table in front of the classroom, his previous statement made a lot more sense. I could see people having trouble with the idea of manna as a spice, but mixed in with the very familiar flavors of cacao and mint it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.
After the first two hours of him rambling we spent the last hour evaluating our perceptions of the mixes and their best pairings. The evaluations forms looked something like the layout below, and were a great exercise in spontaneous creativity.
Spice - Pasta Mix with Chives (consisted of chives, garlic, chili peppers and coarse salt)
Flavor - fine, medium, intense – fine
Aroma - (1-10 from soft to decisive) - 7
Perception - (i.e. first thoughts) – sharp, herbs of Provence with a kick
Persistance - (1-10 from short to lasting) – 8
Levels of Perceptions - singular, gradual or sequential – sequential
Scents evoked - aioli, chili peppers stays with you
Ideal Pairing - fish soup, like a bouillabase
Creative pairing - marinated anchovies with apple vinegar
Immediate recipe - mussels, clams, moscardini, calamari, other little fish, tomato sauce
The goal of the exercise was to do it reasonably quickly and trust our olfactory senses rather than spend time thinking things through. I’ve only done a few of the spice combos so far, but the idea is to have all of them done when Franco comes back in a month so we can pool everyone’s ideas together and see what comes out of it all.
And back to the quote from the beginning – here’s a cinnamon tree, which can apparently grow up to 50 feet.
and the reason Franco was climbing one, was to get to the outer branches. Apparently the tips of the branches have an entirely different flavor from the thicker parts and the trunk (which we usually eat), that we might not even recognize as cinnamon.
