Category Archives: Cooking Tips and Ingredients

May 6, 2011 · 7:58 pm

asparagus 101

.

spring on the plate: soft scrambled eggs with fragrant wild asparagus

With all the running around, worries and excitement about the new house I forgot to post my April article in The American in Italia magazine featuring another of my favorite recipes, Parmesan and asparagus eggs.

Please remember that if you don’t have wild asparagus or the season is over, you need to choose fairly thin green asparagus and use them as soon as possible so they stay fresh and crunchy. Remove the woody part of the stem, toss with 1 tablespoon olive oil per 1/2 pound asparagus and broil them for 15-20 min until just cooked through and slightly charred.Remove from under the grill, add some crushed garlic, cover and let them infuse for at least 10 min.

I use this method of preparation as a lovely side dish and for most of my asparagus recipes like risotto, spaghetti, and beef. I also chop them, mix them with equal weight of fresh ricotta and a couple of tablespoon grated Parmesan to use as a filling for ravioli or as a spread on crostini.

The picture below has nothing to do with the recipe. Its an Apsara, a heavenly dancer I got to know about during our winter trip in Cambodia. It’s just that I have this crazy name association between their name and my favorite vegetable. It’s becoming an obsession, but I promise, no more asparagus until next year!

An Apsara, a heavenly dancer of Hindu Mithology

10 Comments

Filed under Appetizers, Cooking Tips and Ingredients, Fresh Pasta, Recipes, Spring, Vegetables

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

November 2, 2010 · 5:40 pm

pasta for beginners

a good plate of pasta is true art

Pasta is such a convenient food and it’s made in a million ways all over the planet. Accordingly, it will taste everything from boring, to vibrant, from disgusting to heavenly. Don’t believe anybody who tells you they don’t like pasta. Most likely they have not tasted the real thing.

Sorry to be smug, but the real thing is made and cooked like Italians do. We do so few things really well in this crazy country. Pasta is one.

However, even if you don’t have it in the genes, you can make magic with our national starch.

Let’s see, did you buy good quality, durum-wheat, bronze-drawn spaghetti? Even better, did you just make some fantastic noodles or ravioli? Did you make some sauce?

Fine. Now you need a really large pan, better a tall stockpot, water and salt. You also need a shallow pan to assemble sauce and pasta. For this purpose, I prefer to use a wok-like pan which in Italy is called saltapasta.

The key to a perfect pasta is to keep it at a high temperature throughout cooking, saucing and serving.

Here are the rules:

  1. Use lots of water, typically 1 lt per 100 gr (1 quart per 3 oz) of dry pasta. Only start cooking the pasta when the water is on a rolling boil. You need to keep it at a high temperature so it cooks as fast as possible. As a result the pasta will keep its shape and texture (al dente).
  2. Use lots of salt, about 1 teaspoon of salt per lt (quart). Pasta cooked in unsalted water will be bland no matter how much salt you add to the sauce. I know it looks like a lot of salt, please just try and taste the difference.
  3. Keep the starch. During cooking pasta releases starch in the water which will provide a creamy texture and help the sauce  clinging to the pasta. To retain the precious starchy film, don’t rinse the pasta after draining. On the contrary, you need to reserve some of the pasta water for the finishing (see below).

Here is the method:

While your pasta is cooking keep the sauce warm in the saltapasta or similar pan. Fresh pasta will cook in 1 to 3 minutes, dry pasta will cook in 6 to 12 minutes depending on package instructions. If you don’t overcook the pasta, there is no need to add oil to the water.

As soon as the pasta is cooked, drain and transfer to the sauce pan. You actually need to drain it a good half a minute before is cooked as you will finish it while saucing. Increase the heat and stir the pasta into the sauce. Add the pasta water – up to one tablespoon per person – and grated cheese, if using. Stir some more until the excess liquid is absorbed. Sprinkle with fresh herbs and a drizzle of good extra virgin olive oil. Serve on warm plates at once.

And please remember, no swimming!

18 Comments

Filed under Cooking Tips and Ingredients, Dried Pasta, Fresh Pasta, Recipes, Sauces, Video

Tagged as , , , ,

February 9, 2010 · 10:33 pm

the 5th taste

the umami royalty

Did you ever ask yourself why some Italian foods have become universally accepted? Nowadays pizza, tomato sauce, lasagne, cured olives, prosciutto can be found  in the most unsuspected corners of the globe. There are many historic and cultural reasons for this phenomenon. It’s delicious food, you will think. Convenient, yes. Kid friendly, great. But what else?

Umami.

Umami, a Japanese word meaning “savoriness”, is the 5th basic taste after sweet, sour, acid and bitter. The umami taste in a certain food  is defined by a high content of glutamate. Umami rich foods,  such as soy and fish sauce, are flavor enhancers. That’s why glutamate is commonly used in Asian cuisine.

What does this have to do with Italian food? Flavor enhancers have been used for thousand of years.  Garum, a pickled  sauce made with fermented fish, fetched fantastic prices in ancient Rome. By the way, Worcestershire sauce is its direct descendant.

There’s lots of umami foods in Italian cuisine. Parmesan is the umami king, the humble anchovy is the princess, they rarely go together. And there’s more.  Cured meats, stock, ripe tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, capers, mushrooms, olives are daily helpers to add depth and flavor to our food.

So now you know what makes the magic. A sprinkle of capers, a drop of balsamic, a handful of olives, few cubes of pancetta, a dusting of Parmesan. Be wise though, you don’t want to eat the condiment, you need the condiment to improve the rest.

8 Comments

Filed under Cooking Tips and Ingredients, Recipes

November 14, 2009 · 9:07 pm

the antimafia and other very good pasta

anelletti pasta

bronze drawn anelletti pasta from Palermo

“GO BUY  ME A KILO PASTA, WILL YOU?????”

This Italy here  is a crazy country and always will be, but important priorities are respected. A good bowl of pasta is  hardly ever refused. So easy,  so good, so comforting. It’s in our genes, in our blood, it’s the mother of foods. Pasta comes first, not for nothing we call it primo.

Eating store-bought dried pasta is so fundamental to Italian life that we have gotten organized. And I don’t mean grandma rolling fettuccine for the kids, I mean industrial amounts.

In Gragnano, South of Naples, artisan pasta makers have been producing high quality pasta for as long as 500 years. Until relatively recent times the whole town was decorated with kilometers of noodles hanging to dry outside the pasta workshops. In the late XIX century the town was even granted the right to open a train station to be able to “export” their product to Northern Italy.

From then on, industrially produced pasta became the cheap and convenient food that by now appears on the tables of a large portion of the world’s population.

If you look for good dried pasta make sure that what you buy  is made with 100% durum wheat semolina, not with tender wheat flour which is used for bread, fresh pasta and general cooking.

To make the pasta, semolina is first mixed in a dough and then extruded through a die -named trafila in Italian -  to obtain the desired shape. Dies are made of teflon or bronze.   Standard pasta is teflon drawn, it’s quite smooth and yellow. High quality pasta is bronze drawn – trafilata al bronzo – and has a lovely powdery surface like that one in the picture above.

The bronze extruder makes the surface of the pasta more porous so that the sauces clings to the uneven surface of it rather than slipping away.

Bronze drawn pasta is widely available in Italy. However, there is one brand, which in our house has been nicknamed the “antimafia”, that sums up all goodness of flavor and thinking.

The Libera organization produces organic bronze-drawn pasta using wheat that is cultivated on estates confiscated from the mafia lords. Volunteer work by young people who believes in future.

So next time you come on holidays you know one more thing about this country.

We have some really good pasta. Sometimes we have some real courage.

antimafia pasta

organic pasta made by the Libera organization

10 Comments

Filed under Cooking Tips and Ingredients, Dried Pasta, Life in Umbria, Pasta, Recipes

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 14, 2009 · 9:09 am

I’m going eggplant

Eggplant, aubergine, has been around the Mediterranean for more than 500 years. No wonder this luxurious vegetable of Indian origin became a staple of Sicilian cooking. In a land too dry and warm to support large-scale cattle breeding, meat was an expensive rarity. Peasants in Southern Italy lived on a basic diet of olive oil, pasta, cheese and vegetables, occasionally fish. Eggplant, enriched by cooking in oil, must have been a welcome addition to their simple dishes.

Later in history some unknown gastronomic hero conceived the heavenly combination of tomato and eggplants. Fried eggplants are still used for a number of spectacular – and virtually vegetarian – dishes like eggplant parmesan,  caponata, pasta incasciata. I promise recipes for all these.

In my memory, the aroma of fried eggplants permeates images of luminous Sicilian summers. Memories of  green shutters closed against the heat. Tiny whitewashed alleys where you don’t see anybody but someone is cooking something magical somewhere. Memories of fragrant spaghetti with the sweetest tomato sauce piled high with slabs of golden aubergines and a sprinkle of baked ricotta, pasta alla Norma.

Yes, you can use grilled eggplants instead of fried, I know. But for a real bite of Sicily, please just try, even if only once. Fry and be happy.

13 Comments

Filed under Cooking Tips and Ingredients, Recipes, Summer, Vegetables, Video

Tagged as , , , , , , ,