Cooking "The Babbo Cookbook"

Once the fat (mostly) renders, drain on paper towels:

 

Then saute red onions, garlic, the basic tomato sauce, red pepper flakes, and the guanciale in the rendered fat (I drained a bit first):

 

Now, you would normally finish this dish by adding cooked bucatini, a dried tubular pasta that resembles spaghetti.  Mario refers to bucatini as "garden hoses" in the book.  But here's the thing:  I went to two Whole Foods, Kings, Stop N Shop, and Fairway and none of them carried bucatini. Hey guys, get on that!!! 

 

Rather than make the trip downtown from work to the Chelsea market, where I know they have bucatini (thanks to a tip from Victoria over at Cooking Zuni), I decided to substitute.  I know, no substitutes.  But hear me out--this was a substitute that made the dish more complicated, so it wasn't a shortcut substitute, it was a "hey, I'm going to make this more difficult and time-consuming than it needs to be" kinda substitute.  Rather than tossing some dried pasta into boiling, salted water, I made fresh paparadelle using the recipe for fresh pasta from the book.  After cooking until al dente in the salted, boiling water (2 tablespoons of salt for 6 quarts of water), I added the fresh pasta to the sauce and cooked it for a few more minutes. 

 

And here's the dish:

 

This was delicious in all its porky, fatty goodness!  There's definitely a unique, slightly salty pork flavor from the guanciale that's cut by the sweetness of the red onions.  The red pepper adds just a tiny kick at the end.  This was a plate-cleaner, easily.  Now, I still have 3 pounds of guanciale left . . .

 

If bacon has about 60% fat to 40% meat, guanciale as about 85% fat to 15% meat.  But the pork flavor from guanciale puts bacon to shame.  It's very intense and it makes the distinct bucatini all'amatriciana a luxuriously rich, unique dish.

I've found that Mario has published a recipe for guanciale in two of his books, Babbo and Molto Itliano.  The recipes are identical.

It starts with high-quality pork jowls.  These are not easy to come by, unless you want a whole pig's head, but then your left to butcher the jowls yourself.  After a bit of reasearch and a story in the New York Times, I came acorss Heritage Foods.  They sell pre-butched pork jowls.

The jowls are cured with salt, sugar, fresh thyme, and black pepper.  That's it.

Into plastic bags for 10 days or so.

Here they are, cured.  Their color is darker, texture firmer.

Then they hang to dry in my drying cellar (okay, my basement) for two weeks.  This intensifies the flavor. And here's the finished guanciale, cut into half-pound portions for the freezer.

Roman bacon.  Up next, bucatini all'amatriciana.

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.

I picked up some organic asparagus.

After blanching the asparagus, I put them in an ice bath to stop them from cooking.  Chopped, the asparagus are mixed with DaVero extra virgin olive oil, Parmaggiano-Reggiano, and ricotta.  I put this mixture in the fridge.  I've learned that it's easier to make ravioli if the stuffing is cold--it's firmer and easier to work with.

Then I set out to make the fresh pasta.  I've made fresh pasta before using the recipe from Mario's "Molto Italiano."  It's basically one cup of flour and one egg per portion.  For a richer pasta, use two to four egg yolks per cup of flour.  "The Babbo Cookbook" follows the same formula.  But rather than using all purpose flour, I used "00" flour from Antimo Caputo, which I had left over from my vera napolitana pizza experiments.  I found that I needed to add some ice water to get the consistency right, even though it's not called for in the recipe.

To roll out the pasta, I would typically use the the pasta attachment for the KitchenAid mixer, but I decided to buy a manual pasta machine (Italian nonna-style) on my way home.  Not only would it be more fun, but I thought my son could help too.

We rolled out the pasta and made the ravioli.  The manual pasta machine made making pasta so much more gratifying, and, I'm not sure if it was the machine or the "00" flour, but the dough had a wonderfully soft, silky texture.

Here they are just before cooking.

The ravioli cooks for about 5 minutes, then they're tossed with some butter and more sliced asparagus.

And here's the dish:

We loved this.  Fresh, creamy ricotta with the "undisputed king of cheeses" and asparagus was a perfect cobiination, and so simple.  We pureed some left over filling, thinning it out with some water, and little Sofia loved it too!

None of Mario's books, however, have a recipe for pancetta.  There's a recipe in "The Babbo Cookbook" for guanciale, and the same recipe appears in "Molto Italiano."  Mario, why no pancetta recipes?  

My dad said that when his father cured pancetta it was pretty basic.  Salt the pork belly for about a week, then dust it with black pepper and let it hang for a month or so.  Sounds good to me, but NJ doesn't have the same temprature and humidity level as Naples, nor would I have belly that was so fresh that it was "in the pig" less than 24 hours ago.  So my back up resource is "Charcuterie" by Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn.  The process is pretty much as my dad described, only with additional spices in the cure, and a safety net to prevent funky, and potentially harmful mold and bacteria--the addition of pink salt.

I procured a full 9 pound fresh pork belly from Niman Ranch.  I ordered it through Whole Foods and it came skin-on and with ribs.  I had the butcher skin, bone, and trim it for me and told him to pack it all:

That's the skin on the left, some fat above it, the ribs in the middle, and the belly on the right. My dad recommends adding a three inch square of the skin to any tomato sauce that you simmer for at least 30 minutes, especially a Neapolitan ragu.  Apart from adding flavor, it adds a velvety texture to the sauce.  My mother said to save it and use it as a braciole--make a mixture of garlic, parsley and pecorino, roll it in the skin, and tie it into a braciole.  Sear it and then let it braise in your tomato sauce.  

I used the "Charcuterie" cure, which calls for:

4 minced garlic cloves

2 teaspoons of pink salt

1/4 cup kosher salt

2 tablespoons of dark brown sugar

4 tablespoons of coarsely ground black pepper

2 tablespoons of crushed juniper berries

4 bay leaves, crumbled

1 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg

5 sprigs of fresh thyme

Here it is:

This was a particularly good, lean piece of belly:

Rub in the cure:

At this point, the pancetta goes into a resealable bag and sits in the refridgerator for 5 to 7 days, until it is firm.  It took exactly 7 days.

I rinsed the belly under cold water and it looked like this:

Now cured, we can take this into one of two directions.  We can make pancetta rotolata or pancetta stesa.  Panetta rotolata is when you coat the inside of the belly with black pepper and then roll it it into a log and tie it like a roast before hanging it.  Stesa is leaving the belly as it is, flat, much like slab bacon.  You would still give it a good coating of pepper, but it would hang in its natural state.  I divided the belly with my dad.  He went the more traditional route and made pancetta stesa.  He said they never rolled it when he made it and he doesn't really remember seeing rotolata all that much in Italy.  I opted for rotolata.  Once rolled and tied, it's wrapped in cheese cloth and hung in a humid area for 2 weeks.  My basement maintains a temperature of about 60-65 degrees with 65-70 percent humidity, near ideal for curing.

Rolled, tied, and wrapped:

Into the basement for 2 weeks, and it's ready.

I sliced off the ends and put them in the freezer for stock, risotto, sauce, etc.  No waste.  And here it is, pancetta rotolata:

This is a dish I've been wanting to make for some time.  I am obsessed, I think, with brick ovens.  I don't have one, yet.  And just yesterday Heather and I were talking about it and she thinks it would be a fun project to build one together.  (GOOOAAAALLLLL!)

In the meantime, however, I stare longingly into my fireplace wanting to use it to cook.  I can't quite figure out a way to cook a neapolitan pizza in there.  I've been toying with the idea of getting the Steven Raichlin Tuscan Grill, but I'm not there yet.  

But when I was flipping through Chez Panisse Vegetables by Alice Waters, one dish in particular caught my eye.  Beans cooked in the fireplace.  She talks about how the hearth is still used in Tuscany to cook everyday dishes, lending a wonderfully smokey note to any number of dishes.  This recipe doesn't require a Tuscan Grill.  The beans are started on the stove and then the dutch oven is placed in the fireplace near the coals.

Here's the recipe, adapted from Chez Panisse Vegetables:

3 cups dried Borlotto beans or other dried beans

1 large yellow onion

1 medium carrot

1 slice smoked bacon

2 tablespoons duck or goose fat, or olive oil

1 large, ripe tomato or several small canned tomatoes

2 teaspoons of salt

1 teaspoon of freshly ground pepper

1 bay leaf

6 sprigs of thyme

A few leaves of sage and rosemary

6 cups chicken stock

Parsley

3 cloves garlic

1.  Soak the beans overnight.

2.  Start a fire in the fireplace.  Peel and dice the onion and carrot.  Dice the bacon.  Cook the vegetables and bacon in the fat for abut 10 minutes on the stove.

3.  Dice the tomato and add it to the pot.  Cook for a few minutes, then add the beans (drained), salt, pepper, bay leaf, herbs (tied so you can easily lift them out).

4.  Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil.

5.  And now the fun part.  Put the pot on the floor of your hearth, near the coals.  Leave uncovered for 90 minutes and stir occasionally to make sure the beans stay moist.   Also, be careful when you stoke the fire or add more wood that ash and embers don't fall into the pot!  (I speak from experience.)  The easiest way to avoid this is to put the lid on the pot whenever you need to play with the fire.

Here's one more picture:

To serve, sprinkle with pecorino and a fruity extra virgin olive oil.

This was everything I hoped it would be.  The first 90 minutes of cooking with the lid off in the fireplace allows the smoke from the fire to really flavor the beans.  And then there's the rosemary, thyme, and sage.  To me, this is a true example of Tuscan peasant cooking.  If you have a fireplace, you must try this dish.  For me, I think I need to order than Tuscan Grill.

But then there are the more common, yet still hard-to-find ingredients.  In this case, winesap apples.  None of the markets near my home (including Whole Foods) carry them.  So part of my Cooking Babbo state-of-mind is to be on the look out for such ingredients and snap them up as I find them.