April 2009 Archives

It calls for only a handful of ingredients, all of which I had on hand.  I broke out the KitchenAid and mixed together the batter in the time it took Heather to finish half of a sandwhich.

And into the oven for 45-50 minutes.  Heather went to take Sebastian for a haircut and I asked that she stop by the wine shop to pick up some vin santo.  She brought back Bellini Vin Santo del Chianti.

Here's the loaf.

And here's the dish, with the vin santo.

We absolutely loved this cake.  My mother makes an olive oil and orange zest cake, so the idea of olive oil in dessert isn't new to us.  In fact, Mario makes a delicious olive oil gelato at Otto.  But the idea of rosemary in the dessert is what sets this apart.  The cake is slightly sweet from the sugar, fruity from the olive oil (we used one from Puglia), and a a bit savory from the rosemary.  This dish flirts with your sweet and savory senses, really teasing you and pulling you in both directions--almost like it doesn't know what it wants.  It's very sexy for a cake.  "Like a good Italian woman," I told Heather.  She rolled her eyes, naturally.  

The one thing that would take some time, and I could do ahead, is make the basic tomato sauce.  Several recipes in "The Babbo Cookbook" call for this sauce so I made a batch last weekend and froze it in two-cup portions.  I've been using this recipe for my tomato sauce for a few years now.  It's the same recipe that's in "Molto Italiano," which is where I first saw the recipe.  The fact that this same recipe appars in both books tells me it's the real deal.  And everyone who's tried this sauce loves it.  The recipe calls for two, 28-ounce cans of San Marzano tomatoes.  I've found that if you use the cans marked "DOP"--the real deal from Italy--the result is markedly better.  If you're paying $2 or $3 per can, you don't have the "DOP."  They're usually $4 or $5 a can, but they're worth the extra few bucks.  Anyway, here's the beautiful sauce.

I then cooked the couscous and measured out the pine nuts, currants, red pepper flakes, and caperberries, and then cleaned the calamari.

Once everything is prepped, this moves pretty quickly--it's called "Two-Minute Calamari" for good reason.  After getting the pine nuts, red pepper and currants going, you add the caperberries, tomato sauce and couscous and bring to a boil.  Then the calamari goes in and cooks for a few minutes until opaque.  This took about 4 minutes, not 2, but that's fine by me.  

Here's the dish.

This was dynamite, in both senses.  The calamari was incredibly tender and the tomato sauce and coucous along with the pine nuts and currants added texture.  But then there was the tablespoon of red pepper flakes called for in the recipe.  Spicy!  It was a touch too hot for Heather, but she still loved it, especially because she could still pick up the pine nuts and the sweetness from the currants.  We'll dial back the heat a bit next time and use only a teaspoon or so.  To round out the Sicilian theme, we drank a Nero D'Avola from Sicily.

This dish took about 20 minutes to prepare, which is exactly the kind of dish I like when we have several things going on with the kids.  I had prepped the cauliflower, onion, garlic, and mint in the morning (after my morning coffee), so once the water for the pasta was boiling, I got the cauliflower going.

Start with the onion, red pepper, and mint, then add the cauliflower.

Then add the pasta, some of the pasta water, and grate some pecorino over each bowl.  And here's the dish.

Heather described this dish perfectly after her first few bites: "Oh, this is delicious."  The cauliflower is slightly caramelized, the onion gets sweet, and the mixture of the mint, onion, and cauliflower together is like a tight jazz trio, each member of the band playing their own part that, all together, creates unified harmony.  I originally thought the mint would be an odd match but, trust Mario!, it hums in the background and added a unique touch that Heather couldn't place until I told her it was the mint.  Keeping with the Tuscan theme, we served this with Corsignano Pecorino Tuscano, rather than Pecorino Romano.

My dad made sopressata with his father when they lived on a farm outside of Naples.  He said they usually used pork scraps and small casings from the pig.  My mother told me a story of making sopressata with her friend Angie.  They were in Angie's basement mixing the meat and preparing the casings, all the while enjoying some wine.  Angie mixed all the meat and seasonings, and salted the mixutre, while my mother prepared the casings.  They continue chatting, they drink more wine, my mother then salts the mixture, then they stuff it into the asings.  It wasn't until a month later, when they tried to eat the sopressata, that they realized it was too salty to eat.  They then had a good laugh when they figured out they both had salted the meat.

Lesson learned, Heather and I would be more careful.  We started by cutting very cold, organic pork into one-inch cubes.

Using a KitchenAid mixer, we ground it, along with some pork fat.

The seasonings were mixed in, which included garlic, pinot bianco, garlic, red pepper flakes, salt and black pepper.  Then we added the starter culture and pink salt.

Now for the interesting part--the casings.  We used all natural beef middles, which came dried and packed in salt.  This is what they look like out of the package.  

They're clean but they have this very distinct, not very pleasant, minerally scent.  Once you catch a whiff of it, you won't mistake that smell for anything else.  We soaked them in water for 30 minutes and then flushed out any additional salt with water.

Using the KitchenAid sausague-stuffing attachment, we set out to fill the casings.  This was a two-person job.  Keeping a steady flow of casing and sliding the right amount of casing off of the attachment as it filled was a bit of a challenge at first, but once Heather got it, it was pretty easy.  There's an art to sausage-making afterall.

We made four sopressata.  Three weighed in at 1.5 pounds, and one at just over a pound.

They need to hang a room temprature for 24 hours to incubate the culture, then they hang at 60 degrees/70 percent humidty for about three weeks or until they lose 30 percent of their weight.  I hung them in our pantry at first to incubate for 24 hours, but the scent of the casings was slowly building in there and I could just hear Heather groan about it.  So I moved them into the kitchen.

I weighed each sausage and tagged them with the date and weight so I would know when they've lost 30% of their weight.  After 24 hours they moved into the basement.  It took exactly three weeks for the sopressata to dry.  We had Angie and my parents over for dinner so we cut up the sopressata and put it where it belonged--on a platter of salumi.  

Here's one of the larger sopressata. along with some home-made bread, prosciutto, olives, Parmagiano-Reggiano and Coach Farm Triple Cream (ahh, the perfect dinner).

The sopressata was delicious.  The texture was firm and slightly chewy, and the flavor was garlic and pepper, not very salty at all.  It was certainly milder and softer than other sopressata I've had, and my dad and I thought that we should let the three remaining sopressata hang another week or two to dry out a bit more, which, he explained, should intensify the flavors.  Having successfully done this once, I think next time we'll experiment a bit.  We'll divide the mixture into four equal parts and then make one hot, one more garlicky, one mild, and one with red wine.  

With Easter around the corner, my brother and I will be slicing up this home-made sopressata to enjoy with my mother's spaghetti pie.