Hi relatives, I am writing this post to recommend you this video and to put the video-recipe down in words. I shall be brief and painless. I only have one thing to say before I start: this is easily the tastiest easy meat-based pasta than you could ever make. Hence, give it a chance with your guests.
Disclaimer. Do not use pancetta nor bacon. It has to be guanciale. The flavour is completely different, lightly smoked and earthy, nutty… Heaven on Earth. In Sydney, you can find it in Harris Farm (I found it in two different shops, check the product at this link) and Crown Street Grocer (which has lots of top Italian imports and a fair price).
Ingredients. I think last time I made it for two people I used 200g of guanciale. The only other ingredients are spaghetti, a drop of white wine (best if dry), salt (for the pasta water) and pepper. The rule for buying good quality pasta, is to pick pastas that have at least 12.5 grams of proteins per 100g of product. A weak basic Barilla features only 11g, not to mention international brands. No, please, no. It will overcook and spoil your meal.
This one I got was a bit too fatty. Better to have more “red stripes” in it.
The recipe, in bullet points.
Cut skin of the guanciale (cotenna)
Cut the guancile in strips about .5 cm thick (no need for them to be cubes)
Put in pan. Nothing else: no butter nor oil go with it
Let it release its grease (the fat needs to melt)
Keep mixing it so that it cooks evenly and does not stick to the pan
When they are nice and golden, take the guanciale pieces out of the pan
Now the pan only contains the guanciale fat
Pour a little bit of white wine (less than half a glass) to take the edge off the taste of the fat
Max the heat
Use pecorino that is fairly fresh (not very seasoned and salty)
Grate it as thin as possible: it should look like a cloud!
When the alcohol has evaporated, put the pasta in the pan (when it is still a bit raw) . At this point, he removes some fat from it, I don’t… why lose flavour?
Add a bit of pasta water too, to finish cooking the pasta
Now grate black pepper on generously (the grey of the pepper gives the pasta its name)
Food unites people and creates fond memories. It is then only natural that a person like you and I, who intimately loves food, will at some point get interested in bread. Indeed, bread is at the core of Italian and more in general of Western cousine.
In our tradition, the simplest meals are made by “pane e companatico”, which means “bread and what-goes-with-bread”, aka cheese and cold cuts. Bread adds to cooking the fascination of the live component: yeast. This introduces and element of care for a living being in the process, not dissimilar to growing a plant. We feed our yeast appropriately and keep our dough at the right temperature so that it may deliver us with well-developed rich loaf.
Getting a bit more practical, let’s start by seeing what will be needed for this simple recipe:
350g of wholemeal flour;
650g of high-protein (approx. 13% of protein) white flour (I use the Caputo Cuoco);
tap water;
a “lentil” of dry yeast (or 3g of fresh yeast);
20g of salt;
Not much, right? In terms of utensils, the only one I use is a scraper. This can be useful to clean up your hands and the working surface and to handle the dough without getting entangled in its stickiness. If you plan on baking from now on, buy one.
Executive summary.
Make poolish (350g water, 350g wholemeal flour, 1g of dry yeast) and let it rest for 8-12 hours;
Add other ingredients (650g high-protein white flour, 420g water, 20g salt);
Let the dough rest during the day and fold it in a couple of times in the evening;
Shape the dough, score it and bake it at 250° for 15 minutes and then at 180° for 35 minutes;
Let it cool overnight, wake up and enjoy.
Phase 1. You are about to go to bed when you remember that you want to make a pre-dough (poolish), so that the morning after the next one you will be able to start the day with your very own long-fermentation loaf. Put 350g of lukewarm water in a bowl and mix your tiny bit of dry yeast (1g max) in it. If the temperature in the room is hot, use colder water, while if cold, warmer. Now gently mix your 350g of wholemeal flour in it, until the flour has absorbed all the water. This should take you 5 minutes or less. Cover with a wet towel and let it rest overnight, for up to 12 hours.
Fermented poolish. You wake up to the thought of your poolish. You rush to the kitchen and find it grown and bubbly on the surface; the yeast has been eating sugars and producing CO2. If you cut the poolish in two (don’t do it), you would see that the above process has formed a gluten net in the dough. In other words, the flour’s gluten has successfully trapped the CO2 produced by the yeast into bubbles.
The poolish.
Forming the dough. Now you need to form the final dough, by adding the other ingredients. First, spread out the poolish on a large bowl. Gradually add your 650g of white flour and another 400g of lukewarm water while folding it as best as you can. The idea is to maintain intact the net that you have created in your poolish, while enlarging the dough. As a final step, mix your 20g of salt in 20g of water and add it to the dough. Notice that our dough has a hydration of 77%, so we are using 770g of water per each 1000g of flours. We have already put 350g of water in the poolish, so this is why in this phase we add 420g. Remember that the slower you add the flour, the easier it will be to mix it well with the water and the poolish. Keep in mind the water temperature advice is even more important here. During a hot day you should use cold water, thus preventing the dough from getting too warm in the following hours.
Autolysis and kneading the dough. If you want to have an easy life, while you enjoy your breakfast, leave your new dough to rest in its bowl. Leaving it for 30-45 minutes will make the dough self-knead (by autolysis). Once breakfast is over, you should find that your dough has become more wholesome, more united and less prone to break if stretched. Fold it now a few times and form a nice ball. Help yourself not getting all sticky by dusting your hands with flour frequently. As a reference on how to you can fold it, watch this slap-and-fold video here. The kneading process is instrumental to the reinforcement of the gluten net. You will need it to hold during the long fermentation process, where more and more CO2 will be produced in the dough. If your net lacked strength, the pressure created by the growing CO2 would tear it apart and your dough would collapse. A collapsed dough would produce a loaf with a disappointingly dense crumb. You do not want that.
Phase 2. Leave the dough resting in a bowl covered with a wet towel until you are back from work. This will be your main fermentation phase. If you are back in the late afternoon and still have several hours of wakefulness ahead, fold the dough, as shown in this video. Wait for about 45 minutes (30 minimum), then repeat. After 45 minutes, shape the dough as illustrated here. If you have less time, shape the dough straight away, ideally twice with a 45 minutes interval. The issue is that, according to professional baking manuals, you should have 3 fermentation phases of similar length. Instead, our fermentation time is concentrated in the first phase. Therefore, these tiny phases of 45 minutes combined with structure-enhancing procedures help us building back that structure and shape that has been lost during the long fermentation. The more you work on them, the less your dough will flatten out while baking.
This is how you will find your dough after it grew during the day. You will need to shape it.
Notes. Firstly, apply minimal pressure to the fermented dough while working it. You don’t want to squeeze the air out! Secondly, after the first shaping, put your dough in a bowl on top of a heavily-floured dry towel. Still put the wet towel on top, making sure it does not touch the dough. If it does touch the dough, use a drainer as a lid to the bowl and place the wet towel on top of it.
Almost ready to bake. Now the dough only needs to be scored.
Baking. It’s time to bake! Turn on the oven in (static) bake mode and set the temperature to 250°. Once it has reached the temperature, put a bowl of hot water at the bottom of the oven. Now score the bread and put it in the oven for 15 minutes. At the end of the 15 minutes, remove the bowl of water and lower the temperature to 180°.
Now simply remove the bread from the oven and let it cool down overnight on top of a cooling rack (I use the top of my gas stove).
Go to sleep, wake up and enjoy your very own bread!
Your loaf!
PS these are another couple of useful links: this and this
When a year ago I started getting into Italian seafood cousine, I immediately got obsessed with one of the world’s highest delicacies: crustacean pasta. Here in Australia I tried both the Blue Swimmer Crab and the Mud Crab, which is much bigger and more impressive, and for pasta sauce purposes I preferred the former.
This is a great dish and I decided to write about it after making it for New Year’s Eve and being enthusiastic about the outcome. I used this video recipe as a starting point and modified it slightly.
Boil the crabs (or crab) for 3 minutes circa in a pot with enough salted water to use later to cook your pasta. The idea is to start cooking the crabs while enriching the flavour of the water in the process. For bigger crabs, cook for a couple of minutes extra.
In the meantime, make a soffritto by lightly-frying a garlic clove, a chilli (it’s not a spicy dish, this is just for extra flavour) and a parsley stem (no leaves because they burn quickly). If you leave them cooking on minimal heat you can proceed with the next steps without turning the fire off.
Remove the crabs from the water and clean them as shown here. Mine is a lazy man’s recipe, so I simply remove the tail of the crab and its gills, but I do not extract any meat from the crab. It’s boring, it takes time and appropriate tools and getting dirty is integral to the crab-eating experience.
IMPORTANT: When you crack the torso open, it will release a sizeable amount of juicy water. Do not let it go to waste. Collect the water using a bowl during the procedure.
Put the top part of the torsos — the meatless shells — and the residual water detailed at point (4) into the boiling pasta water. To confirm, this is the water you have cooked the crab in in step (1). You are hence left with the legs and the meaty part of the torso — which you have split in two as shown here.
Crab parts that will go in the sauce pan.
Put the pasta in the boiling pasta water. The juices of the crabs should have made this water dark and flavoursome. You can remove the crab shells and use them to embellish the plate in the dishing phase.
Pasta getting cooked in salted water rich with crab juices.
While the pasta starts cooking, throw the legs and torsos in the soffritto, together with some plum tomatoes (the sweet kind). Add half a ladle of tasty pasta water too, allowing you to cook on a high flame without burning the soffritto.
After about 5 minutes, add some brandy (or cognac) to the pan and flambé, as shown here or by lighting it using a match.
It is important that you finish cooking the pasta in the sauce pan. This procedure is called risotto-ing the pasta. The pasta still needs to cook for, say, 3 minutes. You place it in the sauce pan and add ladles of pasta water until the pasta is ready (to check when ready, simply keep tasting it). Watch this helpful video if you are confused. Keep either flipping the pasta or mixing it vigorously with a wooden spoon throughout the process. The idea is to trap air into the sauce so that it might thicken.
While cooking, add some tomato paste. It will enrich the flavour while not making the sauce too tomato-y. During the last minute of cooking, add some chopped parsley too. Keep a pinch of parsley on the side to add directly on the pasta when plating the dish.
Congratulations, you have successfully prepared a dish that will make you famous among your friends!
This is my super duper quick version of the totani ripieni recipe; perfect for when you want to treat yourself but have worked long hours.
Get 4 nice calamari. You know they are fresh when they still have their skin on. Clean them and separate the tentacles from the long head.
Now blitz the tentacles with stale bread, a bunch of parsley, one garlic clove and add salt and pepper. Take the oven to 175°. Stuff the calamari head with the paste obtained, close them with a toothpick as shown in the picture below. Put some baking paper on a tray and place the calamari on it. Grind a little bit of salt and pepper on them, grease them with a touch of extra virgin olive oil and then bake for 30 minutes. You are done, congratulations!
This recipe was a nice surprise. When I think of sardines, I think of a strong fishy taste that needs to be heavily tempered by a variety of other ingredients. However, either there is something wrong with that memory, or Australian sardines are more delicate than the Italian ones. In any case, this recipe manages in it simplicity to deliver a quick and mouth-watering meal, while helping you getting rid of old bread.
But first things first. Buy a bunch of fresh sardines (in my opinion, 5 per person is more than enough). Check if you have some old bread in the house; if not, fresh will work just fine. Crack an egg and beat it with a pinch of salt and pepper, even just with a fork. You can always add more eggs when you run out of it.
I used wholemeal bread, so they look particularly brown
Now take each sardine, dip it in the beaten egg and batter it with the breadcrumbs. Fry the sardines for 1-2 minutes in a pan using the oil of your choice (I used sunflower oil). Pass them in paper-towels to get rid of the oil in excess and serve! Adjust salt if necessary.
Furthermore, if you really enjoy a good batter, try to double batter it by passing the sardines in: (1) water, (2) flour, (3) egg, (4) breadcrumbs.
However you make it, this simple recipe will deliver. Trust me.
It’s scallop season! I took this opportunity to try a classic Italian recipe, often found at Christmas family gatherings. It’s super easy and the result is just delicious. This recipe is a slightly modified version of the one found here at Giallozafferano.
Buy the scallops (here 8). If fresh, clean them as shown in this video. Remember to not discard the orange part, or “coral”, as it tastes great too. Remove the crust from a piece of bread and place 100 g of bread in a mixer together with some parsley, 40 g of extra-virgin olive oil, a touch of lemon zest and a pinch of salt and black pepper. When adding salt to the breadcrumbs, keep in mind that this is the only salt you will use. Mix it: you have your panure.
Now, put the scallops back in their shells, cover them with the panure. Place them on a tray and the right in the oven, where they will cook for approx. 15 minutes at 190°. Complimenti!
This is a very basic recipe and a solid place to start. You can play around with the flavour by adding thyme, marjoram and other aromatic herbs. I might be trying another version soon, by legendary Chef Gualtiero Marchesi… I will let you know!
I tried out this recipe from the book “in cucina con Nadia & Giovanni Santini” for a dinner party with friends and it was a massive success. To give you some context, Nadia won the Veuve Cliquot World’s Best Female Chef prize in 2013 and cooks with her son Giovanni in the 3-Michelin-stars restaurant “Il Pescatore”.
So, ask your friends to provide abundant quality red wine and buy lots of ribs (they happen to be inexpensive). Here I am giving you the recipe for 12 ribs (4-6 people). Rub the ribs with salt and pepper and put them in a pan that can be placed in an oven, together with 1 litre of water, 50 ml of extra-virgin olive oil, the lemon juice of 1 lemon and 1 rosemary branch. Yes, you have to put it all together before you turn the flame on.
Cook them on a medium flame until all of the water has evaporated, then either place them in the oven (180°) or leave them in the pan. It is going to take around 50 minutes (minimum, in my experience) to make the water evaporate. Take them out when they have properly browned. If you opt for the pan, make sure to turn them continuously.
Have the parsley sauce ready to pair them with. For 6-8 people, start by finely chopping 1 bunch of parsley and putting it in a small bowl. Cover it with extra virgin olive oil (3 table spoons), add 1 undressed garlic clove cut in half and a pinch of salt and pepper. Add also the juice of half a lemon and 1 table spoon of white-wine vinegar. Your sauce is now ready. Enjoy.
Isola d’Elba, best know known for being Napoleon’s luxury exile destination, is a wonderful island located in front of Tuscany. It is a truly remarkable place, which has escaped the over-development that has interested many tourist destinations in the past decades. My family’s restaurant, part of a wider business, is there located, close to one of Italy’s best beaches: Fetovaia.
Enough marketing though, I want to talk with you about an essential recipe of the Elban cousine. Polpo all’Elbana is the way to eat octopus, to access its true flavour. It is a simple recipe, yet it does not disappoint. My source is Chef Alvaro Claudi (video), who passionately took upon himself the duty to put in words (he wrote several books) the secular culinary tradition of the island. In the video, he reminds us how octopus is not only a delicacy, it is also very low in calories if cooked simply.
Let us get to the point(s) now and see how to make it:
Fill a pot with water and boil it;
While you are waiting for the water to boil, clean the octopus. It is easy: just remove what is in the head, carve the eyes out and remove the beak, located at the intersection of all the tentacles;
Once the water is boiling, salt it. It should be 3 times the amount you would put for cooking pasta. If you don’t know how much salt to use, put 30 g for every litre of water in the pot. This is supposed to replicate the salinity of sea water. Add also a generous amount of chilli to it;
Fork the head of the octopus and bathe it all three times in the boiling water. This has a twofold function: to toughen the skin, so that it will not fall while cooking, and to give the octopus a pleasant shape, as you will be able to see yourself;
Leave the octopus in the boiling water for 20 minutes per each kilo of octopus;
Turn the heat off and leave the octopus to rest in the water for as much time it took to boiled it, while placing a lid on the pot. E.g. for an octopus weighting 1.5 kg, boil it for 30 minutes and leave it in its water for another 30 minutes. This will soften its texture;
Take it out of the water and serve it with no condiments added (only a drop of extra-virgin olive oil is allowed).
I served it with barley, boiled and the pan-fried in a garlic, pepper and thyme soffritto. The white wine is a divine 2013 Pinot Grigio Nals Magreid Punggl from Alto Adige.
Spaghetti con la bottarga has always been one of my favourite dishes. It is so full of character, so quintessentially marine. Enough poetry, let us learn how to make this delicacy. The idea is to make a aglio, olio e peperoncino (aka spaghetti with garlic, e.v. olive oil and chilli) and then to grate bottarga on it. Hence,
Fill a large pot with water and put it on a high flame; while it you wait for it to boil, do the rest;
Finely chop a bit of parsley: you will need it later;
While the water heats up, pour extra virgin olive oil (e.v.o.) on a pan, medium flame. It needs to be a good quality e.v.o.;
Once the oil is hot, put garlic and chilli into the pan and let them lightly fry;
The water is boiling: salt it. If you don’t know how much salt to put, follow this rule of thumb: For each 100 grams of pasta, put 1 litre of water and 10 grams of salt;
Now put the spaghetti in the boiling salted water;
Cook the pasta al dente. The suggested cooking time for pasta al dente is usually written on the pasta box. However, for this recipe, drain the spaghetti one minute before that suggested cooking time and place the spaghetti in the pan (with the garlic and chilli). Keep some pasta water on the side, in case you need to adjust the density of the “sauce”;The aglio, olio e peperoncino finishes to cook in the pan (I added some water because it needed more cooking)
Pan-fry the spaghetti for a minute;
Once the minute has passed, turn the flame off and finely grate about a tablespoon of bottarga onto the spaghetti and gently mix. Be careful not to over do it, you will grate some more bottarga on each individual plate that you serve;
The final step is to serve the pasta! As already noted, you may grate a bit more bottarga on top of the spaghetti. Don’t forget to sprinkle with parsley.
Congratulations! You are a privileged human being. Fortunately I still have some bottarga in the fridge…
Hi mum, hi sisters. Thank you for being my only readers, although you certainly do not need me to explain to you in a foreign language what you can find in most Italian cookbooks. Today we continue our fundamentals series, by adding the crustacean stock to the list. As I said before, a good stock is key to a restaurant-level dish.
There are several ways to make this recipe, some methods being more complex than others. I like this version, because it gives the maximum result with the minimum effort:
Start by removing the shell and head from the crustaceans.
Prepare a pan with a thin layer of extra-virgin olive oil on a medium-high flame.
Once the oil is hot (you can check by throwing a breadcrumb in to see if it fries), put the shells and the heads in the pan and brown them. The more you brown them, the stronger the flavour. In any case, it is a matter of 5-10 minutes maximum.
After this,splash them with brandy (or another sweet liquor) and set it alight (flambé). Once the fire wanes, add cold water. Be sure to add enough water to cover the shells and heads completely. Any extra water will only dilute your stock.
If you don’t have cognac/brandy or you don’t feel comfortable with the flambé, pour half a glass (approx.) of white wine and let it evaporate, then cover with water as described above.
Right after pouring the cold water, you may choose to add herbs to the stock (see bouquet garni). I prefer to enhance the delicate flavour of the crustacean as much as possible, without adding anything extra.
Allow the stock to gently boil (sobbollire) for half an hour (minimum) and then filter. You have your stock!
Browning prawn heads for another instance of crustacean stock.
Now, as you can see in the pictures above, I like making this recipe with the heads only. This is because I generally make this stock in preparation for a seafood pasta and I prefer to cook the tails with their shells on when preparing the sauce.
As a side-note, there is a trick for the lazy and for the late. If you are making a seafood pasta, just put the shells in the same boiling salted water in which you will later cook the pasta. They will release their flavour while you prepare the rest of the sauce!
See you in a few days with more about how to make a beautiful sauce with this stock!
Italo's Kitchen 