Chopping, dicing, grating, wine-opening. These sounds combine to musical effect in this commercial for the Saclà brand of Italian sauces. Do you hear strains of "Hey, Mickey!" in this beat, too? Listen closely—and watch—after the jump.
The New York Times raises the question of authenticity of Italian cuisine as it examines the growing number of foreign chefs cooking in kitchens of Italian restaurants. Does, say, an Indian chef preparing Italian food make it any less Italian? One restaurant owner claims that "it's not racism, it's culture"; another says that the ethnicity of a chef changes nothing. This isn't anything new in restaurants in the U.S., but it might be a different story if you're eating abroad: Do you go to the Italian restaurant manned by the Chinese family or stick to the one run by Italians?
This year for Valentine's Day, I'm taking my kids and wife, Susi, out for our traditional fondue fest at Artisanal. We all send Susi a dozen wacky flowers (never roses—way too common), and then it's out for the first seating at 5:30 p.m. for some cheese and chocolate, and then home early!
My ideal menu celebrates the most mysterious and romantic town of Italia—Venezia—and is based on Carnevale, which always falls near, and sometimes overlaps, with Valentine's Day. The celebration is simple and based on seafood and birds from the Venetian lagoon—or the closest lagoon to you.
As the interest in fine spirits and cocktails has grown in recent years, demand has likewise increased for Italian amaros. The garnet-red Campari has long held a place of prominence, and recently the milder flavored Aperol has earned fans in the cocktail community. Now, the Sicilian herbal tonic called Averna—already the leading amaro in many parts of the world—is hoping to become the next indispensable ingredient in the American bartender’s arsenal.
With a recipe dating to the 1860s, Averna is a much different style of bitter spirit than the more familiar Campari. Where Campari is sharp and bright (essential elements for an aperitivo), Averna is deep and rich, with a gentle, slightly sweet bitterness and a full, firm body that makes it great as an after-dinner drink.
Conventional wisdom in the food world is that desserts in Italian restaurants are an afterthought. All I can say is that the people spouting that conventional wisdom have never had Gina DePalma's desserts at Babbo in New York City. I have had the privilege of eating DePalma's desserts since the restaurant opened. I have over the years sampled every dessert on the menu at least once, and I can tell you there isn't a loser in the bunch. Now that DePalma has written Dolce Italiano: Desserts From the Babbo Kitchen
As you may have guessed, Dolce Italiano is this week's featured Cook the Book entry. Like all Cook the Books, we have five (5) copies to give away. Just tell us what your favorite Italian sweet is.
Five winners will be chosen at random from among the comments. You have until 3 p.m. ET Saturday, November 10, to comment. The standard contest rules apply.
I did a double-take when I first saw Sara's photo of basil liquor—my first impression was "mint" when I saw the green liquid, but the neighboring tomatoes gave me the sense that it was something else.
Sara describes basilcello as "a very sweet basil liquor that will help take away your indigestion just like the best limoncello." Although anything with alcohol in it tends to give me indigestion, not take it away, I'm curious to find out what this tastes like. Read Sara's recipe to make your own basilcello!
Although Tuscany and other regions of northern Italy have become the fashionable food areas that food writers have explored in recent years, southern Italy has been mostly ignored (with the exception of Arthur Schwartz's seminal Naples at Table).
Until now. Cucina del Sole
For modern American cooks and diners, la cucina del sole is the kind of food we want to eat right now—the bold simplicity of easy, straightforward techniques and natural ingredients smartly combined.
Thanks to the good folks at William Morrow, we are giving away ten copies of Cucina Del Sole. To enter the drawing, tell us what your favorite southern Italian dish is. Ten (10) winners will be chosen at random from the comments here. Comments will be open until 9 p.m. ET Friday, August 3. The usual Serious Eats contest rules apply.
This snap caught my eye in the Serious Eats group on Flickr. It's easy to imagine breaking off a hunk of this coppa di Parma–stuffed bread and devouring it.
This photo is from serious eater Sara - Piperita, and there's a recipe for it on her blog so you can make it yourself.
I love the looks of the Mario Batali Pizza Set by kitchenware manufacturer Copco, with its orange colorway to match Batali's famous ponytail and clogs, and I'm sure it makes great pizza, but who's the target market for a kit like this when it's priced at $169.95—and used to cost $63.50 more?
Serious cooks will already have most of the equipment in there and the ones they don't, well—Batali's pizza cutter is well-regarded, available without the kit and affordable at $14.95, and how many people do you know who want a garlic slicer?—and it's an expensive investment that might not pay off if you don't already know your way around the kitchen, or if you're buying it for someone else who doesn't. So whom do you give it to? College graduates moving into their first apartments? Newlyweds? People with really big kitchens? [via Uncrate]
Previously: How to Outfit a Kitchen for $300
Bruni also failed to mention the place mats at Mozza. One is an attempt to teach the unwitting Mozza customer how to speak Italian in seven not-so-easy hand motions, as this video shows.
You've probably already read that Danny DeVito's recently launched his own brand of limoncello to make the most of his drunken appearance last year on The View, which he blamed on a long night out with George Clooney, saying on the show, "I knew it was the last seven limoncellos that was going to get me." But have you visited the official website for Danny DeVito's Limoncello?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is liquour with a THEME SONG—a happy kicky one at that. I'll be singing it all day and I suspect you will be too.
Every once in a while you get an email so passionate that all you can really do is share it, because paraphrasing would never do it justice. Here's something I received today from my pal Finn:
From: Finn
To: Lia
Subject: GromFYI
excuse my friend's, um, exuberant writing style. his gf is in italy right now and he visits fairly frequently, hence his experience with this gelato joint. he's probably serious about the dream too -- he really likes ice cream.
----- Forwarded message -----
From: Jeb
To: Finn
Subject: yotell your foodblogger friends that they should go to grom and write about it for the food-blobs RIGHT AWAY! GROM is SO FRAKING GOOD. I had a dream about it last Sundae (you catch what I did there with the 'ae'?)
The Grom causing all this excitement is an Italian gelato chain opening its very first outpost in the US this Saturday at Broadway and 76th Street in New York. We'll do what we can, Jeb! We'll do what we can.
N.B. If you'd like to send tips in, my email is lia@seriouseats.com. Exuberance, abuse of the caps lock button and even multiple exclamation points are almost always welcome.
I have eaten in Mario Batali's restaurants perhaps a hundred times (and had at least very good meals 95 times), but I was extremely skeptical when I heard he was putting his name, complete with photo, on a line of General Mills frozen pasta dinners called Mario Batali's Regional Recipes, which will be sold initially at club stores like Sam's, BJ's, and Costco. So when we received some samples at Serious Eats world headquarters I volunteered to be the first guinea pig.
Deb of Smitten Kitchen had all but given up on ever making good gnocchi at home, until recently coming across an ingenious technique: "Get this: you grate the potatoes. No food mill or ricer purchase required! (Which is great because you don’t have room for one anyway!) After grating the baked and peeled potatoes, you knead in some flour, salt and an egg, and your dough is complete! And people, these are some killer gnocchi, with a lightness that I’ve only had before at top-notch Italian restaurants."
I can guarantee you that the cutest, most joyous food-related item you will see this week, maybe even this entire month, will be this series of commercials for Parmigiano Reggiano, a.k.a. parmesan cheese:
Can you go wrong with dancing, singing vegetables? Excited about cheese? In Italian? I think not. [via Brandon Eats]
One of the greatest April Fools pranks of all time was pulled in 1957 by the BBC, of all institutions. Aired as an ordinary episode of the renowned series Panorama, it purported to be a documentary about "a family from Ticino in Switzerland carrying out their annual spaghetti harvest. It showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry."
It sounds ridiculous now, sure, but back then many people had either never heard of spaghetti or had only ever had it from cans, and the episode was shot in a completely straightforward fashion and narrated by the respected journalist Richard Dimbleby. Hundreds of people called the BBC to ask where they could purchase spaghetti bushes for themselves!
In yesterday's T Style Magazine, Oliver Schwaner-Albright says "the meat slicer could be the first appliance to earn a place on the kitchen counter since the espresso machine. That’s because American artisans are no longer hiding the salumi — Italian for cured meats. The process by which cuts of meat, usually pork, are salted and aged in a place that’s cool, dark and drafty, like a mountain cave (the traditional method) or a well-ventilated meat locker (the Food and Drug Administration’s preference), is now being mastered on these shores." Prosciutto we all know by now, but he also discusses seven other kinds of salumi—bresaeola, coppa, lardo, mortadella, salame, soppressata, and speck—as well as where you can find them online.
In the NY Times, Melissa Clark realizes no one she knows actually knows what shrimp scampi is and so she figures it out for herself:
Scampi are in fact tiny, lobster-like crustaceans with pale pink shells (also called langoustines). One traditional way of preparing them in Italy, [Lidia] Bastianich writes, is to sauté them with olive oil, garlic, onion and white wine. Italian cooks in the United States swapped shrimp for scampi, but kept both names. Thus the dish was born, along with inevitable variations like adding tomatoes, breadcrumbs, or, as Ms. Bastianich does, tarragon.
As I saw it, this meant I was free to interpret shrimp scampi pretty much any way I wanted. And I wanted my scampi to be something buttery and rich, with pan drippings intense enough to act as a sauce for pasta, or to make a tasty bread sop reminiscent of the other dish I associate with melted butter and garlic: escargots à la bourguignonne. If I could come up with a scampi sauce as addictive as snail butter, I’d be one very happy.
Marce from Pip in the City, on her lazy ravioli: "I was too tired to make the ravioli dough from scratch, so I grabbed a pack of won ton wrappers I had in the freezer and made some huge ravioli with a shitake-panko-potato flakes-onions-parmessan filling with a mozzarella cube in the center, served with a very simple tomato sauce." Necessity is the mother of invention, and also in this case of tastiness.
[via not martha]
Jane Snow of the Akron Beacon Journal, on how "Tuscan" is used and abused as an unauthentic adjective today: "White beans are in so many dishes that Tuscans are called “bean eaters” elsewhere in Italy. But that doesn’t mean a recipe for canned beans and chopped tomatoes in salad dressing should be called “Tuscan,” as it is in The Dinner Doctor by Anne Byrne. Or that a Pillsbury Bake-Off recipe for Tuscan Roasted Potato-Chicken Salad made with frozen potatoes, cubed mozzarella cheese, canned white beans and pre-cooked chicken strips deserves the name. But what the heck. Almost any dish with garlic, basil, rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes and even chicken has been tagged “Tuscan” somewhere, sometime in the United States."
Exciting news: "New Zealand fishermen have caught what is expected to be a world-record-breaking colossal squid. Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said the squid, weighing an estimated 450kg (990lb),took two hours to land in Antarctic waters. Local news said the Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni was about 10m (33ft) long, and was the first adult colossal squid landed intact. One expert said calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tyres."
Wikipedia's Colossal Squid is fantastic, if you'd like to read more about the species. If you'd like to make dinner in honor of New Zealand's catch, Leite's Culinaria has Mario Batali's recipe for Stuffed Calamari on the Grill from his book Simple Italian Food: Recipes from My Two Villages.
Jan Norris of the Palm Beach Post: "We got sticker shock, seeing 'premium' jars of red sauce, ranging from $5.69 to $10.29, prominently displayed at the supermarket, while the $2.07 Ragú sat on the bottom shelf. So, if they cost nearly five times as much — and contain, on average, 2 ounces less — these pricey pasta potions must be nearly five times better than Ragú, right?" Norris got five Italian grandmothers to blind taste test 16 different sauces—they thought the most expensive sauce was the worst of the lot and gave the highest rating to Barilla's Tomato and Basil, the cheapest of all the sauces at $2.50!
The Philadelphia Inquirer's Marilyn Marter, on a favorite comfort food: "The first choice to satisfy - and to comfort and cure cold weather ills - is a steaming bowl of chicken soup. And that is not just in America, but in most of the world." If you're feeling adventurous, she includes two recipes for bases as well as four different chicken soup recipes: Guatemalan Ginger Chicken Soup, Thai Chicken, Galangal and Coriander Soup, Pennsylvania Dutch Style Chicken Corn Soup and Italian Wedding Soup.
MORE TO CHEW ON
Pizzeria Mozza [official site]
The Greatest Pizza in the World (Maybe) [Serious Eats]
Week in Review, Part 2: Can't Stop the Mozza [Eater L.A.]
Hot spot? Mozza is on fire [L.A. Times; Grr: Registration required]
MORE EDIBLES
Magnificent Mozza [Wednesday, January 31, 2007]
Quotations from Chairman Bruni [Tuesday, January 30, 2007]
Jamba Juice [Monday, January 29, 2007]
Sour Sunny Bears [Friday, January 26, 2007]
All Edibles
La Tartine Gourmande, on the unfortunate irresistibleness of her Butternut Squash and Sage Ravioli: "I had initially planned to keep some ravioli for our respective lunches the following day, but my plan failed. We could not stop. One more, and one more again, until it became obvious that lunch for the next day was slowly becoming more of a wish than a reality. In the end, there was only barely enough for a one-person lunch."
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