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Beyond "regular"


Picture the scene. Busy restaurant. Tables packed with hungry guests. A guest in jeans and a tee shirt gives the menu a cursory glance. They scan the appetizers for words they know. Their eyes fall on the heading: bruschetta. They see chicken liver bruschetta then salt cod bruschetta and, suddenly, they’re confused.

“Don’t you have a regular bruschetta?” they say in a pained voice.

“I’m sorry,” I try to say with a blank look on my face (I hear this question twenty times a night). “What exactly do you mean by regular?”

Now, I know it’s not fair asking a question I already know the answer to. But I always want to be sure that my guest really is thinking that they want garlic bread with tomato, olive oil and basil—despite the fact that they have three or four other really amazing (and far better) options to choose from on the menu.

Unfortunately, “regular”, in the mind of my restaurant customer, actually means “what I’m used to.”

You see, when it comes to food, there really is no “regular”. There are regional dishes and traditional fare, but every chef in every culture has their own way of doing things. In the case of bruschetta, bruschetta is to the Italians what toasted bread is to us—it’s just a starting point for something else.

According to Italian food expert, chef and cookbook author Marcella Hazan, the word bruschetta comes directly from the Latin verb bruscare, which means to toast (as in a slice of bread). “In bruschetta,” she says, “the most important component, aside from the grilled bread itself, is olive oil.”

So, thinking beyond the “regular bruschetta”, I’ve been experimenting. I’ve been trying to stay within the world of Italian cooking, while thinking of bruschetta as a sort of open faced sandwich or a tiny vehicle to showcase a handful of exciting flavors.

I found some gorgeous Italian dandelions and fresh goat cheese at the farmer’s market this weekend and came up with this simple, and delicious nibble that’s just perfect for a before dinner snack. The dandelion greens are bitter so I recommend using something sweet to balance out the flavor. I used a slightly spicy (as in mustard, spicy) clementine jelly for mine. If you don’t have access to an Italian market then be sure to use a nice honey in its place.

Italian Dandelion, goat cheese and bacon bruschetta with salsa di Clementine
Serves 6–but feel free to adjust recipe to make as many or as few as you want!

1 bunch of washed and dried dandelion greens (cut into 1” pieces)
1 garlic clove (whole)
olive oil (for drizzling)
1 small container of fresh goat cheese (a fresh sheep cheese would also work)
3-5 pieces of bacon (cooked and cut into 1 inch pieces)
1/2 batard of rustic bread or ½ of a well made baguette
Salsa di Clementine (an Italian, spicy clementine jelly) Feel free to use any other moustarda jelly or specialty honey.

Cut the bread into ¼ inch thick slices. Heat up a saute pan over medium high heat, then add bacon. Cook until crisp. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and place on paper towels to remove excess oil. If bacon hasn’t given off too much grease, throw cleaned and chopped dandelion greens into the same pan and quickly cook until wilted (about 2 minutes). Otherwise, remove the excess grease, leaving about a tablespoon worth of bacon fat behind in the pan for cooking the greens.

Meanwhile, toast the bread. When bread is done, rub the bread with the garlic clove. *this is my favorite part, watching the garlic melt like butter onto the bread. Then, drizzle bread with a tiny amount of olive oil and then spread a small amount of spicy Clementine jelly on top. Note: if using honey, drizzle honey over the greens at the end. Add a teaspoon of goat cheese to each piece of bread, then top with a heaping teaspoon dandelion greens. Top with bacon. Eat immediately.

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Soffritto: (Trying to) Learn from a Master–Part II

BACK HOME
I unload my farmer’s market finds and start prepping. I quickly glance at my copy of Soffrito. The recipe for Ragu is about seven pages—including a lovely picture of a finished Ragu and a three page essay on meat sauces. I force myself to skim the dense paragraphs describing the history of meat sauces and stop at the list of ingredients for the Ragu.

1 1/4 lbs of beefsteak (sirloin, rib eye or round steak)
1 pork sausage
2 chicken livers
1 chicken neck
1 large or 2 small red onion, minced
1 carrot, peeled and minced
1 large stalk celery, minced
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
½ cup dry red wine
salt
2 fresh or canned tomatoes, peeled
4 cups water
1 piece of lemon zest, cut into thin strips
2-3 tablespoons of butter for dressing the pasta
1 cup Parmesan cheese for serving

Though the list of ingredients calls for beefsteak, it isn’t until I start reading the actual recipe that I realize I was supposed to ask the butcher to mince the meat for me. Upon further reading, Vitali suggests strongly that the butcher must only put the meat through the mincer once in order to “prevent excessive flaccidity.” I try to imagine myself returning to the meat counter with my sirloin and asking the old man for a shot at the mincer. I made a fool of myself in front of him once today. There is no way I’m going back there.

Luckily, a few sentences later, Vitali says a good home mincing is also an ideal for a ragu, but warns the reader that it is not only time consuming, but requires “a certain skill.” Hoping I have the innate skills needed, I commence mincing.



Based on the size of my dice, I decide I have quite possibly succeeded in making a somewhat proper mince. I begin my soffritto and heed Vitali’s advice to do nothing but observe the cooking process of these key three ingredients.

I marvel at the smells of this holy trinity
and admire the way the heat and oil changes the texture of the vegetables over time.

What was once clearly separate becomes one in velvety texture. It is at this point, when the soffritto gets to the “moment before it burns” I toss in the meat and let it brown.

As I do I read Vitali’s advice with the hunger of a starved pupil.

“Don’t be seduced into forgetting what you are doing and letting browning turn to burning. In this recipe you work at full attention, monitoring all operations…as the browning of both the soffritto and the meat should stretch your attention to the maximum. You will need all your senses, including the olfactory one, to prevent disaster.”

I tell myself Vitali is my greatest teacher yet, and continue on. If anyone can teach an Anglo Saxon how to cook like an old school Italian, it’s Vitali. She describes the browning process as one of making the meat “suffer”. Without browning, she explains, the meat will taste like it was boiled.

Sure. Brown the meat. Got that. Check.

I brown the meat for 15 minutes, waiting for the tell tale “crust” to appear on the meat and on the bottom of the pan. When this begins to happen, I add ½ a cup of wine and let it cook off.

With the wine cooked off, I begin to add my two cans of peeled tomatoes.

After adding the first can I realize I have been using the wrong pan for the job.

I re-read the recipe and discover that Vitali calls for a 10 inch diameter POT, not a 10 inch in diameter PAN. Suddenly, I am forced to move all cooking operations into the right sized container.

***It is this moment here, when things began to go astray, that I should have realized there was something wrong. I should have turned off the heat, stepped away from the stove and re-read Vitali’s 7 page recipe. Had I done that, dear reader, I might have discovered that the recipe called for TWO TOMATOES. Not TWO CANS of peeled tomatoes. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I definitely have problems with paying full attention to the little (and some times big) details. Just ask my husband. He’d be the first one to say with a smile that I am one quick moving person of the Aries persuasion. ***

With my meat and two cans (blush) of peeled tomatoes transferred to a pot, I am ready to add the 4 cups of water to the sauce. I lower the flame to minimum, add salt, pepper and lemon zest and leave it for 2 hours.

At the end of the cooking time (no wonder it took my sauce about an hour more to cook down), I remove the chicken neck and pull the meat off the bone. I toss the bones and return the chicken neck meat to the sauce. Delish! While I cook the pasta, I heat up my oven to 100 degrees so I can warm my pasta dishes.

When the pasta is al dente, drain and save some pasta water for thickening the sauce. Pour a ladleful of sauce into the bottom of the pasta bowl with a dab of butter.

Add a serving of drained pasta in the pasta bowl and add more sauce. Turn the pasta with a fork and spoon so as to blend it and serve immediately with grated Parmesan cheese.

Though the meal was a success (the house smelled like Casalinga a favorite Italian trattoria), I know I sti
ll have much to learn. The ragu would have been a true meat sauce had I followed the directions to a T. What I ended up with was a saucy meat sauce.

I have to admit, this dish as prepared, was amazing. Next time, I shall try it with the requested TWO TOMATOES and see what the difference is!