Italian lifestyle

Portofino Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Pancetta

October 4, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

Christopher Columbus floral display in Genoa Don’t forget, Christopher Columbus was Italian. Although his voyages were sponsored by the Spanish, some of the expenses were underwritten by investors from his hometown, Genoa, one of Italy’s great maritime republics at the time.

So I’m thinking there’s no better way to commemorate “Cristoforo Colombo’s” sighting of the Americas than eating Italian over the Columbus Day weekend (or, if you want to be a stickler, on October 12). Specifically, a caramelized onion, mozzarella and pancetta pizza from the Ligurian coast.

On a visit to Genoa shortly before Columbus Day, I saw an elaborate floral display depicting the the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa Maria. You can also see the site of what is reputed to be Columbus’s childhood home, renovated in 2001 with the help of the American Women’s Club of Genoa and the National Italian American Association.

As the story goes, Columbus’s father was a wool weaver and the young boy may have worked at a family cheese stand before setting out to sea. I’m buying into the idea that Columbus was a cheese monger at heart and figure that if he were alive today, he’d really like this glazed-onion pizza from Portofino, only a short ferry ride from Genoa.

Portofino Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Pancetta

Prep Time

35 mins

Cook Time

20 mins

Total Time

55 mins

(from Piatto Unico, by Toni Lydecker)

Course: Main Dish

Cuisine: Italian

Servings: 1 16-inch pizza or two 9-inch pizzas

Ingredients

2 ounces pancetta diced small (about 1/3 cup, packed)
Extra virgin olive oil
2 large onions thinly sliced
½ to 3/4 teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon sea salt or kosher salt
1 pound pizza dough at room temperature
2 to 3 cups grated fresh mozzarella

Instructions

Line a lower oven rack with quarry tiles or a pizza stone (if you have either) and preheat the oven to 500°F or the maximum temperature. In a large skillet over medium-low heat, sauté the pancetta in 2 tablespoons olive oil until it has rendered most of its fat but is not crisp, about 8 minutes. With a slotted spoon, remove to a small bowl.
Add the onions to the pan; add up to 1 tablespoon more oil and cook until soft and the edges are beginning to bronze, about 15 minutes altogether. Add the sugar and salt. Continue to cook until the onions are a medium golden (they will brown more in the oven); cool to lukewarm.
Lightly oil a pizza pan or baking sheet. Gently stretch and pat the dough into a 16-inch round or two 9-inch rounds. Sprinkle the cheese over the dough. Spread the onions on top; sprinkle with the pancetta.
Place the pizza pan on the rack with the tiles for 5 minutes. Once the crust has firmed up, slide it directly onto the tiles. Bake 5 to 7 minutes longer or until the crust and topping are browned.

photo by Tina Rupp

What’s Different about Italians (Still)

August 30, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

It’s harder than ever, visiting Italy, to get that delicious jolt of something foreign to American habits and tastes. Partly because we’ve gotten to know them and vice versa (I once ran into a busload of Italian tourists in a remote New Mexico town). And also because we’ve appropriated so many aspects of Italian food, fashion and culture into American life (I met those Italians in an espresso bar).

A few things, however, remain distinctly Italian (and endearingly so, for the most part).

Men in scarves. Out for a spin in his convertible, our friend Luciano flings a voluminous scarf around his neck. Now that’s a look not often seen in the U.S., except for a few urban fashionistas. His behavior touches on Italian notions about health as well–the desire to protect against maladies of the throat. That same preoccupation with chills and drafts explains why the signora in the house where my daughter Kate stayed during a semester abroad tucked a cashmere-lined hot water bottle into her bed each night and argued strenuously against going to bed with wet hair.

Street watching as a major life activity. Italian men (usually but not always oldish) typically do this in groups, sitting on benches or chairs outside a store front–or maybe playing scopa at a club with one side open to the street. They chat or doze for hours, content to be part of the changing street scene.

For women, street watching tends to be a solo activity. They peer at the street through a living room window or from a chair on the front stoop. Staying a few days in a Sicilian town called Scopello, I kept an eye on one such street watcher. Except for breaks to eat, nap or fetch water from the village fountain, she relied on piazza life to entertain her all day long.

Paying bills at the P.O. Along with just about any dealings in an Italian bank, the system of paying bills and taxes at the post office has always perplexed me. These days a lot of business takes place by electronic transfer from one party’s account to another, but the P.O. is still the place for many transactions. When I showed up to pay taxes owed by a couple for whom we were housesitting, the postal worker sent me away.”Come back when I’m not so old Italian woman in street busy–this is going to take a lot of time,” she complained irritably.

When I returned later that morning, nothing had changed–the line was the same length. She sighed and began to fill out the forms, page after page. Meanwhile, I held my breath–I wouldn’t know the exact amount until she had done the calculations and only hoped I had brought enough euros. This system I find utterly without charm but it does qualify as alien. (Of course, I don’t imagine an Italian would enjoy a visit to our DMV.)

Doily know-how. Using doilies as a child to make paper Valentines–that’s the last time I did something purposeful with these lacy circles. But every Italian with a well-equipped household seems to have a quantity of doilies, crocheted by someone in the family. If you come for coffee in the afternoon, they’ll slip one between the cup and the saucer. They have paper doilies, too, to line a dessert platter. Doilies provide a genteel touch that I love but would feel ridiculous emulating myself.

cuttlefish in an Italian market

Rooster heads and other exotic fare. At a street fair–a sort of progressive dinner– in a small Tuscan town called Bucine, my husband was delighted to discover a local home cook serving up stuffed rooster heads. That was an easy challenge–we just ate the stuffing and left the heads behind. I’ve also tried donkey and can confirm that octopus, cuttlefish and even lattume (tuna semen sac, a Sicilian delicacy served in spring) are delicious if strange looking. But I can only down a bite or two of tripe, and find it mystifying why some Italians have a taste for lungs and nerves in the age of mad cow disease.

The weirdest of all, for me, is the maggot-ridden pecorino called casu marzu. These vermin, introduced deliberately into the cheese, chew and excrete their way through the cheese, giving it a soft texture that is prized. I bought one of these cheeses by mistake, discovering its nature only after I proudly carried it to the dinner table. I’ll generally try anything once, but ewwww! I tossed the cheese into the freezer–anything to make the maggots stop writhing–and then into the garbage.

A lot has been published on the mammismo that keeps men living with and being fed by their mothers into middle age. Women aren’t immune, either. A Wall Street Journal story talked about a delivery service that delivered a southern Italian mama’s eggplant parmigiano to her working daughter in Rome.

But perhaps those differences between our cultures are narrowing. After all, we have “helicopter parents” who lavish attention on their children to the point of following them to college. And the Italian emphasis on multi-generational households starts to make sense in an age as economically stressful as this.

Italians are soccer crazy, but so is the rest of the world. Americans just need to catch up, and our kids, who have grown up playing soccer over the past quarter century, will make that happen.

Politics? These days, it’s hard to feel smug about the dyfunctional nature of Italian politics. Looking at how the U.S. Congress operates, I’m thinking we can’t be outdone.

Besides, there are other things to think about–like what is that musical instrument and why are the grapes propped on top?

Dan Bavaro: A Pizzaiolo’s Story

May 21, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

Dan Bavaro with his pizza dough and Ferrara oven

Ninety seconds is what it takes to cook one of Pizzaiolo Bavaro‘s pizzas in the blistering heat of the wood-fired oven. Four years is the amount of time Dan Bavaro invested in research, planning and testing before opening the doors of his downtown Tampa restaurant and sliding that first pizza onto a customer’s plate.

Now that those hard-earned skills are in place, he’s a pizzaiolo (master pizza maker) for life.

“I knew I wanted to open a gourmet pizza place, with no chintzing on ingredients,” Dan says. So he headed to Naples, the birth place of pizza. There he visited the best pizzerias and ordered the round tile-covered Ferrara oven that would become the focal point of Pizzaiolo Bavaro.

Only an oven like this generates the intense heat needed to create the unique crust–thin, slightly crisp and yet chewy–of a genuine Neapolitan pizza. (Most American pizzerias add oil and sometimes sugar to their dough to make the pizza brown at lower temperatures.)

When I stopped by Pizzaiolo Bavaro, Dan had just plopped an enormous spongy mass of dough on the granite counter. It had been made with nothing more than flour (16 kilos!), yeast, sea salt and water. Dan uses costly Caputo double zero flour, which he remembers seeing made near Naples: “The wheat starts out on the roof of a three or four story mill and by the time it reaches the bottom, it’s been milled to a very fine consistency.”

natural starter for the dough

The natural starter–known as poolish in baker’s lingo– came from a baker in Italy and must be fed two or three times a day with a mixture of flour and water. “Whether we’re open or closed, the beast has to be fed,” says Dan. “There have been times when I’ve come over here in the middle of the night.”

Even the water gets its share of attention. The fluoride in Tampa water, which would affect pizza crust flavor, is filtered out.

Dan learned skills such as “logging” the oven from the Ferrara folks. Most of his dough making and shaping know-how during those four research years came from working with bakers in the New York metro area, where he used to live. After resting for a while, the dough on the counter would be divided into 120 balls (each the right size for a 12-inch crust) and placed in the cooler for a super-slow rise of about 48 hours. This old-school method gives the pizza its characteristic flavor and handling qualities.

Dan Bavaro shaping the pizza

Genuine San Marzano tomatoes grown and canned near Naples are the foundation of three all-natural sauces for pastas, lentils and other dishes. As with the pizza dough, ingredients are held to the bare minimum–just organic onions and garlic, sea salt, sugar (only in the marinara) and hot red pepper (only in the arrabbiata). The sauces gained such a following that Dan created a private label. The bottled sauces are sold through 60 venues, including Whole Foods, Fresh Market and Rolling Oats.

It was 3 p.m., a sleepy time of day for restaurants. Dan was thinking his wife Anna Maria might stop by with their five children. Instead, Tony Orlando, a regular, wandered in, sat down at the bar and ordered a pizza Margherita. Dan chatted with him while making the casual-looking but rapid flipping motion that, in a pizzaiolo’s hands, transforms a dough ball into a uniform disk. He brushed a thin layer of crushed San Marzano tomatoes onto the dough, topped it with shreds of buffalo mozzarella (yes, imported from Naples), grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and a few fresh basil leaves.

Then it rode on his paddle into the oven for that 90-second trip to pizza perfection.

Tony ate his pizza with knife and fork, the intended way. “This kind of pizza is supposed to be savored, not scarfed down,” says Dan. “But you should eat it right away. Within 10 minutes, it won’t taste the same.”

Five Books that Take You to Sicily

May 11, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

reading list for Sicily

There’s no better way to build anticipation than settling into my airline seat with a book centered on the region I plan to visit. Once I’ve arrived, the reading offers insights or just flows into my experience of that place.

Sicily is on my mind but, oh well, I’m not there. So it’s armchair travel time and I’m pulling favorites from several shelves of books acquired during my research for Seafood alla Siciliana. These include at least a dozen Sicilian cookbooks in English and Italian, and one of these days I’ll share my faves among those.

But, for now, I’ll point you to five books that convey the essence of Sicily and its traditions. They’re all novels, short stories or memoirs. None are new, but it doesn’t matter.

Sicilian Carousel, by Lawrence Durrell, takes us on a fictional tour of Sicily with a narrator who has procrastinated too long about visiting his friend Martine, making the trip only after her death. Careening around the island with colorful and sometimes comical British companions, he broods about mortality while making dead-on observations such as this, alluding to the island’s fertility: “Everything ‘takes” and there is a suitable corner where soil and temperature combine to welcome almost everything.”

For Durrell, Sicily is a sub-continent requiring at least three months to absorb its overlapping cultures and traditions.” He has this to say about a wheat field that the rest of us might say is golden: “It is impossible to describe the degrees of yellow from the most candent cadmium to ochre, from discoloured ivory to lemon bronze.” His opulent but pin-pot precise language shames me into stopping, looking again and sharpening my senses.

The Wine-Dark Sea, by Leonardo Sciascia. In the title story of this Sicilian author’s superb short story collection, a civil engineer from northern Italy takes an interminable train trip to Sicily in the company of a boisterous Sicilian family. When one of the children compares the sea to wine, the rest of the family mocks him. Green or blue, they laugh, but certainly not red like wine. The engineer doesn’t associate the phrase with its source, The Odyssey, but it sounds familiar and he muses over the meaning. By the end we understand that the protagonist is–and may remain–as much a stranger to Sicily as any foreigner.

In another story I love, “The Long Crossing,” would-be immigrants pay a smuggler to take them by boat to what they believe to be New Jersey, with tragicomic results.

Mattanza: The Ancient Sicilian Ritual of Bluefin Tuna Fishing, by Theresa Maggio. In this memoir, this author tells of the year she spent on Favignana, an island off the west coast of Sicily. Slowly she is accepted by the tonnaroti (tuna fishermen) and other locals, and is invited to witness the laying of the traps and bloody killing of enormous bluefin during their spring migration.

In so doing, she bears witness not only to the long history of these traditions but to their disappearance. That the Mediterranean’s bluefin tuna are mostly gone is due not to the ancient method of trapping and killing them one by one, but to a voracious worldwide appetite for bluefin and to technology that makes it easy to scoop them up.

As a bonus, the book contains diverting stories of everyday life on Favignana and a love story of sorts with a tonnaroto.

The Snack Thief, by Andrea Camilleri, is just one among many titles relating the adventures of Inspector Montalbano, a deliciously irascible police official with strong culinary desires and opinions. Here he looks into seemingly separate events that turn out to be connected–the murder of a Tunisian sailor on a Sicilian fishing trawler, an elderly man stabbed in an elevator, a housecleaner/prostitute’s young son who steals other kids’ snacks.

While he lazily but astutely solves crimes, Montalbano eats one vividly described meal after another, almost always involving seafood. Stuffed bass in saffron sauce, roulades in tuna, pasta with crab, to name a few. Eating a hake with anchovy sauce, he declares that one whiff is sufficient to determine that “the hake were crying out for joy at having been cooked the way God meant them to be.”

Montalbano’s girlfriend Livia lives in Liguria and misses most of these meals, so it’s typically others who take the brunt of his wrath when a culinary misstep occurs. When Mimi, a colleague, sprinkles Parmesan on her spaghetti con le vongole, Montalbano heaps it on: “Even a hyena, which being a hyena, feeds on carrion, would have been sickened to see a dish of pasta with clam sauce covered with Parmesan.”

On Persephone’s Island, by Mary Taylor Simeti. Central to this book is the insight that rural Sicily still belongs to Magna Gaecia, with an annual rhythm of harvests and celebrations echoing those of the ancient Greeks. Into this seasonal structure, Simeti weaves a memoir that begins with her arrival in Sicily in 1962, her marriage to a Sicilian and the experience of raising a family in Palermo and her husband’s country estate.

For example, Simeti describes the arduous work of the olive harvest. Most are pressed into oil but some are gathered in October, still green, for table use. After soaking in water, they are combined with oregano and fennel in brine salty enough to float an egg. Once the bitter juices are drained, the olives are glossed with fresh olive oil.

In this world, Greek myths co-exist peaceably with Christian rituals and secular realities. Persephone was queen of the dead and daughter of Demeter, the goddess of wheat and in a more general way of fertility and the harvest. All of these traditions come together in All Souls Day, the most beloved of Sicilian feast days and a time for displays such as sugar peasants bearing baskets of fruit and fish on their heads.

This book is a feast too, beautifully written and as open to Sicily’s flaws as to its beauties. As Simeti writes, “Sicily is a fun-house mirror in which Italy can behold her national traits and faults distorted and exaggerated.”

So that’s my Sicilian reading list and I’ve only grazed the tip of Mount Etna. It’s outrageous to leave out Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), with its unforgettable dinner scene featuring a drum-shaped timballo stuffed with meat, pasta and all manner of other ingredients.

But I had to stop somewhere.

Cuban Sandwich Wars: Tampa vs. Miami

May 1, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

Tampa Cuban sandwich

Giving new meaning to the term “pork barrel politics,” the Tampa City Council threw down the gauntlet with a resolution declaring the Cuban sandwich its signature sandwich. Miami fired back indignantly, insisting that its version is the authentic one.

In an NPR survey, Tampa won handily as the Cuban’s first city, with 57% of the vote compared to 43% for Miami. The hostilities will continue May 26, with a “smack down” between the two cities at a Tampa festival.

Tampa claims that the Cuban sandwich can be traced back to cigar workers in its Ybor City neighborhood at the end of the last century. Familiar with their homeland’s “mixto,” a sandwich of mixed cured meats, they used meats available where they lived. These included marinated roasted pork, ham and a few slices of Genoa salami or mortadella–the last of these contributed by Italian workers (mostly Sicilian) who also worked in the factories.

Somewhere along the way, Swiss cheese got into the picture. Traditionally, the long loaves contain lard and a fresh palmetto leaf creates the signature split down the middle. The Tampa resolution originally laid out some other rules–exactly three pickle slices, for instance–but retreat became necessary because of enforcement issues.

As far as I can tell, Miami’s claim is based on its status–pretty much undeniable–as the center of contemporary Cuban-American culture. I gather that their bread is different, and the idea of putting Genoa on a Cuban makes them crazy.

To see what the excitement was about, I headed for La Segunda Central Bakery in Ybor City. Other customers were ordering the Turkey Cuban (I’m guessing the Miami folks would also consider that an abomination) but I went for a straight-ahead Cuban. My sandwich maker showed me the three-foot loaf before stripping off the palmetto leaf and whacking off my portion.

I chose to have my Cuban pressed and was pleased that the lettuce and tomato were added after the pressing. That lettuce, tomato and the mayo, too, are interlopers apparently not present in the original sandwich. I don’t find that surprising because of the American tendency to embellish ethnic specialties.

For instance, the muffaletta took its lead from Sicilian bread and olive salad, but the pile-up of deli meats and cheese is pure New Orleans. And a typical panino in Italy, the kind you order at a bar, is a simpler affair than our so-called Italian deli sandwich. If it’s prosciutto and cheese, that’s what you get–no lettuce, no tomato, not even the vinaigrette we’re accustomed to here.

Back to the cubano. I enjoyed the sandwich but, honestly? Not a life-changing experience. If memory serves, the Cuban sandwiches I’ve had at no-name places in New York City were better. I know someone’s going to tell me about a better Cuban in Tampa (and maybe a field trip to Miami is in order), but for now my favorite regional sandwich continues to be the grouper sandwich.

You can find grouper sandwiches anywhere along Florida’s Gulf Coast, which means endless arguments over whose is the best. BellaBrava in St. Petersburg makes a mean grouper sandwich, but my favorite place to go is Hurricane, on St. Pete Beach, where I order my grouper grilled with Cajun seasoning. It comes with a beach view that makes every bite taste better.

Calzones and Other Pizza Foldovers

April 13, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

Calzones (or calzoni, if you’re in Italy), stromboli, pizza rolls, Sicilian schiacciata. There’s really no consensus on what these are supposed to be.

By most accounts, calzones are half-moons of pizza dough folded over a filling that usually contains ricotta or other cheese, vegetables and deli meats. Sometimes they’re served with marinara or another sauce. Log-shaped stromboli are an Italian-American invention, wrapped around the usual pizza fillings or a chicken-and-cheese filling. Pizza rolls are a frozen commercial product or a mom’s name for the pizza-like spinoff she makes for her kids. Sicilian schiacciata is made by baking the dough halfway, splitting and filling it, then baking it a second time to create a delicious something that walks the line between pizza and panino.

On Chowhound or Yelp, you could no doubt find differing opinions on everything I just said. There are enough regional variations and vivid memories to counter each and every assertion. Basically, though, I think all of these are born of the same impulse that makes New York pizza eaters fold over a huge, floppy slice and walk off down the street. It’s not only a way of getting the thing into your hand, but of putting all the crust on the outside, for no reason but the pleasure of crunching down into a soft and savory filling.

The other variable about pizza foldovers is size. I was startled to see, on my first visit to Sicily, that one calzone could sprawl across an entire plate. Basically, we’re free to make these any size we want. Recently I experimented with one of my recipes for calzoni, downsizing them to party-size dimensions. They were fine, but fussy to make. So, instead, I patted and stretched the pizza dough to make rectangles for filling and rolling. Cut crosswide, they made great party pick-ups.

What were they? Stromboli? Well, not exactly. Pizza rolls? Maybe–you decide.

Pizza Rolls Filled with Escarole, Smoked Mozzarella and Dried Sausage

Prep Time

30 mins

Cook Time

20 mins

Total Time

50 mins

(Adapted from Piatto Unico, by Toni Lydecker

Course: Appetizer

Cuisine: Italian

Servings: 2 dozen hors d'oeuvres

Ingredients

1 head escarole cored (or substitute spinach or chard)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil plus more for the pan
1 small onion chopped
2 garlic cloves finely chopped
2 ounces cacciatorini or other dried sausage Genoa salami or soppressata, cut in small squares (about 2/3 cup)
1 pound pizza dough homemade or purchased
1 to 1 1/2 cups shredded smoked mozzarella, Scamorza or imported provolone

Instructions

Wash the escarole well, changing the water until no grit remains. Cut the leaves in shreds.
Fill a large saucepan two-thirds full of cold water and bring to a boil. Cook the escarole until tender, 5 to 10 minutes. Drain well, pressing with a spatula to help eliminate liquid.
Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Saute the onion until soft and golden; stir in the garlic, cooking just until fragrant. Stir in the drained escarole and sausage, cooking for a few minutes to blend the flavors; cool and mix in the cheese.
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Lightly oil a rimmed baking sheet. Divide the pizza dough in 2 pieces. Roll and pat one of them to make a rectangle slightly smaller than the dimensions of the sheet.
Spoon half of the filling on the rectangle, leaving a ½-inch border. Starting at one long side, roll the dough around the filling to make a roll. With a sharp knife, slash the dough in a couple of places to allow steam to escape. Repeat with the rest of the dough and filling.
Place the rolls side by side on the baking sheet. Bake on the center rack until well browned and some of the filling oozes out the vents, about 20 minutes. Cool slightly and cut each roll crosswise in 2-bite pieces.

Chocolate Chicken for Sicilian Easter Dinner

April 3, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

For quite a while I’d been eying Katia Amore’s recipe for chocolate and Champagne chicken, a Sicilian Easter dish. Chicken thighs simmered in a sauce of onion, fennel, clove, hot red pepper and, of course, bittersweet chocolate. I knew this dish had interesting roots in Aztec chocolate, Mexican mole and Italy’s Baroque cooking traditions of the 16th and 17th centuries. But chicken and chocolate on the same plate, that just sounded weird.

My recent post about Katia renewed my curiosity about her chocolate chicken, which she recommends serving for an Easter lunch. Then our neighbors Joe and Lynn, who (lucky them) own a home in Modica, brought me a bar of that southeast Sicilian city’s distinctive chocolate.

Chocolate originally made its way to Sicily from Mexico via the Spaniards who conquered both lands. As Katia explains, Modica artisans make it from cocoa beans, following a low-heat method similar to that of the Aztecs, and it retains nuances of flavor lost in conventional ways of making chocolate. With no added cocoa butter, the chocolate has a gritty texture because it never gets hot enough to melt the sugar. This is not a nibbling chocolate but one that turns rich and creamy when dissolved in a hot liquid.

So, with Easter on the way, I finally made chocolate chicken. Which, as it turns out, tastes quite good. Like that of a well-made mole, the sauce is a harmonious blend that hits every taste marker. It fits in with the Sicilian tradition of agrodolce (sweet and sour) but with added complexity contributed by the chocolate and a mild hit of heat at the end. No need to analyze this way while eating–just enjoy the chicken with its dark, luxuriously rich sauce.

I’ve made this Sicilian-Aztec novelty dish a couple of times, and my version of Katia’s recipe includes a bit of tinkering as well as conversion to American measurements. I found that white wine works as a substitute for the prosecco and that any bittersweet chocolate is fine in the likely event that you don’t have Modica chocolate on hand. Katia serves her chocolate chicken with “potato puré,” equivalent to but more elegant sounding than mashed potatoes, and rice is also good.

Chocolate and Champagne Chicken

Prep Time

25 mins

Cook Time

45 mins

Total Time

1 hr 10 mins

Course: Main Dish

Cuisine: Italian

Servings: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

8 bone-in chicken thighs 3 to 3 ½ pounds
1 cup or more prosecco, Champagne or white wine
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
Sea salt or kosher salt
Extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion chopped
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 ounce bittersweet chocolate preferably from Modica, grated
1 tablespoon sugar
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
Ground hot red pepper to taste
Fresh oregano or marjoram leaves optional

Instructions

Arrange the chicken in a single layer in a nonreactive dish (such as Pyrex). Pour 1/2 cup prosecco over the thighs, turning them to moisten. Marinate, refrigerated, for several hours or overnight.
In a mini-processor or using a mortar and pestle, grind the fennel seeds to a coarse consistency.
Drain the chicken, discarding the liquid, and blot dry with paper towels. Salt on both sides. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium-high heat in a large skillet. Cook on both sides until golden brown. Transfer the chicken to a platter.
Add a little more oil to the skillet if needed (or, if the chicken generated a lot of fat, pour off all but enough to coat the bottom of the skillet). Over medium heat, cook the onion until soft and golden. Reduce the heat to low and stir in the vinegar, chocolate, sugar, fennel, clove and a light sprinkling of red pepper (about 1/8 teaspoon). Stir until dissolved.
Return the chicken thighs to the skillet, spooning the sauce over them. Add 1/2 cup prosecco and simmer, partly covered, over medium-low heat until the thighs are tender and the sauce is fairly thick, about 25 minutes. If the sauce thickens too much, add a splash of prosecco or water.

Cooking with Katia Amore in Modica, Sicily

March 21, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

Katia Amore was beyond busy when I visited her a few years ago in the beautiful Baroque city of Modica, She had launched a culinary vacation and cooking school called Love Sicily, while caring for a new baby and renovating her grandparents’ home (stone by stone) as a permanent home for the school.

But Katia took time to help me with the cookbook that became Seafood alla Siciliana. We stayed in touch and now I value her not only as a Sicilian food authority but as a friend. Katia could be your friend, too–all you have to do is go cook with her in Modica! But first, listen in on our Q&A…

Toni: You and your husband met while doing advanced degrees in the UK and pursued research careers there. Anything you admire about the cuisine?

Katia: We watched Chef Rick Stein’s show Food Heroes and always looked for local products. That’s how I fell in love with top-quality cheddar cheese, great bacon and other fantastic foods. I know this could sound as cliched as saying that you eat pizza when visiting Italy, but I love going to a tea house for a proper cup of tea with scones, jam, clotted cream and cucumber sandwiches.

Toni: What inspired you to return to Sicily?

Katia: Our wedding in Sicily took place during April, when the air is filled with the smell of orange blossoms and you can go for walks on warm deserted beaches. That was when we started thinking we wanted that beauty to be part of our daily life and not just a week-long holiday. Food and cooking were always a passion of mine…I cooked for my friends in the UK, taught them Sicilian recipes and, when they came to visit me in Sicily, took them to the best wineries, pastry shops and restaurants. I thought this was the right time to turn a dream into a reality and start my own cooking school. My surname, Amore, means “love” so the name of the school came easily and Love Sicily was born.

View from Love Sicily’s terrace

Toni: What was it like, renovating your grandparents’ hillside house to house the school?

Katia: The biggest challenge was definitely the 80 steps leading up to the house because all the building materials had to be carried by hand or with a special machine only a few companies have. But I say to people that the wonderful view of Modica made it all worthwhile. And, when we cleared the house before the project began, I found my grandmother’s handwritten recipe books in a dusty chest of drawers. My mother remembered they existed but had never managed to find them. They include not only recipes but tips on plating food and organizing the table for dinner parties.

Toni: What did you learn from your grandmother and mother about cooking?

Katia: The most important lesson is keeping an open mind about food, to respect tradition but at the same time be creative and experiment. In the 1930s and 1940s my grandmother used to buy the first recipe books about food from other Italian regions, which at the time was equivalent to my mother buying books about French cuisine in the 1970s and 1980s and me getting books about Asian or Mexican cuisine today. If we are talking about techniques, the most important thing I learned from them is kneading dough. I realized when I started teaching that it is not as natural and simple for many people as for me. My mother and grandmother gave me dough to play with before I could even say my first word, so I guess they made it easy for me!

Toni: What surprises students about Sicilian cooking?

Katia: That there is much more to Sicilian cuisine that what I call the three C’s: caponata, cassata and cannoli! Organic and biodynamic wines, award-winning olive oils, great cheeses, almonds, pistachios and chocolate are great gifts of our land that are now often managed by very modern and efficient companies run by talented Sicilians who care about their island. For many people this is a nice surprise.

Toni: As a mother, what are your views on feeding children and teaching them about nutrition?

Katia: Cooking is fun! It is creative, you use your hands, get messy, play with colors and tastes, turn into a little chemist, plus you can even enjoy the fruit of your playtime in the end. My daughter loves cooking and I often involve her when I run cooking classes for other children. We need to prepare good fresh meals for our kids but food is not something we should get them too stressed about. If they are naturally pointed in the right direction, they do not need to become nutrition experts and start counting calories. Also, we should accept that even children have different likes and dislikes and that their taste will naturally evolve. Of course, they should try everything, but we should also respect the fact that they might not like it. And remember that, like with everything else, they learn by example!

Toni: What’s in season now that you’re enjoying?

Katia: At the moment I am cooking a lot with Sicilian oranges and lemons, which are fantastic. I am making liters of freshly squeezed orange juice, turning them into great marmalade and preparing orange-based cakes and biscuits. I also use citrus in savory dishes such as salads, pasta sauces, fish and even meat-based recipes.

Next post: I’ll share Katia’s Easter recipe for chocolate chicken thighs, strange sounding but surprisingly good.

Farmyard Chicken Braised with Sweet Peppers

January 31, 2012 by Toni Lydecker

Walking along country roads in the Arno Valley south of Florence, I’ve seen chickens scuttling here and there in the vineyards, pecking for insects. For farmer-served feed, they’re free to return to the chicken pen. Many are small and russet in color, and are usually in the company of a few imposingly large white chickens (a variety of leghorn, I think) that take the name of the area–pollo valdarno–and are justly famed for their flesh as well as eggs.

In Italy butchers proudly display a free-range chicken (known as pollo ruspante) with its head and feet still attached, the latter’s scuff marks testifying to a life well spent as a forager. These chickens cost significantly more, and they’re worth it.

What I wouldn’t give for one of those chickens right now! Because the fact is that a true free-range chicken is hard to find. Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and Glynwood, both in New York, take chicken raising seriously but now I’m a thousand miles away and can’t find a local market selling chickens with old-fashioned barnyard credentials. If you succeed in finding such a bird, buy it and you’ll be rewarded with authentically chickeny, deeply satisfying flavor.

The white, flaccid flesh of most U.S. chickens billed as “free range” points to a different upbringing. That’s because USDA regulations are gutless–“free range” means only that chickens have access to an outdoor area. Industrial-scale producers that house 20,000 chickens in a 20-square-foot facility, with a patch of grass at one end, are meeting that incredibly vague standard.

That’s my rant about chicken. But meanwhile there’s dinner to make and I’m in the mood for chicken. So I’ll do what I recommend you do when options are limited–settle for the best organic chicken the supermarket has to offer. Eliminating hormones and chemicals from chicken feed has to be a good thing, though it doesn’t guarantee anything about the way the chicken was raised. I’ll take my good-enough chicken home and braise it, a method that extracts every bit of flavor the bird possesses.

Peperonata, a braised dish of peppers and onions, is usually served on the side but here the vegetables share their flavors with the chicken.

Braised Chicken with Sweet Bell Peppers

Prep Time

45 mins

Cook Time

1 hr 30 mins

Total Time

2 hrs 15 mins

(from Piatto Unico, by Toni Lydecker)

Course: Main Dish

Cuisine: Italian

Servings: 8 servings

Ingredients

1 chicken 3 to 4 pounds, preferably free-range with neck, etc.,* cut into serving pieces and washed well
1 medium onion
2 or 3 parsley sprigs
Sea salt or kosher salt
Extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup red or white wine
2 small red and/or yellow bell peppers cut into small squares
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
3 to 4 anchovy fillets pinched into small pieces
1/2 cup strained tomatoes such as Pomì or chopped canned plum tomatoes
Freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

To make the broth: Combine the wing ends, neck and cleaned gizzard in a medium saucepan; if the chicken was sold with head and feet, throw them in too. Trim and peel the onion, adding the ends and skin to the saucepan; chop and reserve the onion. Cut off the parsley stems; add to the saucepan; coarsely chop and reserve the leaves. Cover the contents of the saucepan with water, add 1 teaspoon salt, and bring to a boil; reduce the heat and simmer, skimming off any frothy scum and fat that rise to the top, for 20 minutes to 1 hour.
With paper towels, blot the chicken pieces dry and sprinkle with salt. Over medium-high heat, heat enough oil to coat the bottom of a large skillet. Cook the chicken, turning with tongs, until well browned on all sides. Lower the heat and add the wine and about the same amount of broth (dip it out of the saucepan and pour through a small strainer into the skillet); stir and cook until the liquid is reduced, 5 to 10 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a platter, pouring any pan juices over it.
Add a little more olive oil to the same skillet. Over medium heat, sauté the chopped onion until golden brown; add the bell peppers and garlic and sauté 1 to 2 minutes longer. Stir in the anchovies, pressing them into the sauce with a wooden spoon until they semi-dissolve. Add the strained tomatoes and an equal amount of the broth.
Return the chicken pieces to the skillet, and stir to combine with the peperonata (pepper mixture). Simmer, partially covered, for about 30 minutes or until the chicken is tender. Taste and add more salt (if needed) and pepper. Garnish with the chopped parsley leaves.

Recipe Notes

* If your chicken doesn't come equipped with all its parts, buy a few extra wings for the broth.

Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

December 27, 2011 by Toni Lydecker

spaghettata platter For years a small oval platter celebrating “La Spaghettata” has languished in one of our kitchen cupboards. Acquired at a church attic sale for a couple of dollars, it has an unknown provenance. Pulling it out occasionally to serve crostini, I’ve always wondered how good the platter’s recipe for spaghetti alla puttanesca might be.

You’ve probably heard the story of spaghetti alla puttanesca (“whore-style pasta”). It’s based on ingredients easy to keep on hand–pasta, cured anchovies, olives, capers, garlic, canned tomatoes–that prostitutes could supposedly assemble to make a quick and tasty dish between customers. I’ve always thought the forthrightly strong flavors allude to the coarse nature of the cook’s clients, and perhaps that’s the true meaning of an story that is suspiciously hard to authenticate.

In any case, spaghetti alla puttanesca dates back only to the middle of the 20th century, more or less, at a time when, as the Accademia Italiana della Cucina points out rather disapprovingly, a taste for gusti violenti (“violent flavors”) came into vogue. It is linked to Sicilian and other Southern Italian cuisines, which have always had the good sense to include anchovy pasta sauces, though typically seasoned in a more discreet way.

I’m a big fan of the spaghettata–a impromptu pasta pig-out using available ingredients, served at whatever time of day or night anyone gets hungry–and have relied on all of these ingredients in different combinations. But I had never set out to make a proper spaghetti alla puttanesca. This was the moment.

The Accademia is as good a source as any for the “official” recipe and, as it turns out, the version on my platter is quite similar. Both call for butter as well as olive oil, something missing from my previous puttanesca-like improvisations. The butter turned out to be a brilliant touch, taming the harshness of the anchovy and garlic while adding a luscious richness. It is also important to choose good-quality anchovies and salt-cured capers such as those from Agostino Recca. Hot red pepper doesn’t appear in either of my source recipes but is perfectly at home in this dish.

My little platter accommodates one abundant serving of spaghetti alla puttanesca, but it’s far more fun to cook up a spaghettata for four.

Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

Prep Time

20 mins

Cook Time

30 mins

Total Time

50 mins

Course: Appetizer, Main Dish

Cuisine: Italian, Southern Italian

Servings: 4 generous servings

Ingredients

1 pound spaghetti
2 cloves garlic
6 anchovy fillets
1/4 cup unsalted butter
3 to 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 canned plum tomatoes chopped, with some of the puree (about 1 cup)
2/3 cup black or green olives pitted and slivered
2 teaspoons capers rinsed and roughly chopped
Kosher salt or sea salt
Hot red pepper flakes optional
1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves

Instructions

Fill a large saucepan about two-thirds full with cold water and set over high heat to boil for the spaghetti.
Chop the garlic until fairly fine. Add the anchovies, chopping both until almost a paste. Melt the butter with the oil over medium heat in a skillet or saucepan large enough to hold the cooked pasta. Add the garlic-anchovy mixture, cooking just until fragrant. Stir in the plum tomatoes, olives and capers. Season to taste with salt (if needed) and hot red pepper flakes (if using). Simmer the sauce while the pasta cooks.
Add a small handful of salt and the spaghetti to the water, pressing with a wooden spoon until fully immersed; stir well. Cook until al dente, 8 to 12 minutes. Drain the spaghetti, reserving about 1 cup of the cooking water, and turn into the skillet with the sauce. Mix well, adding cooking water as needed for a saucy consistency. Sprinkle with the parsley and serve immediately.

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