Leading the crusade on authenticity

I’m a champion for authenticity. Food that means something, that has a history. How Tuscan cuisine differs from Roman, Sicilian, Ligurian cuisines and how they differ from each other. Where, why, what and how are all questions that have answers in seeking to determine and define authenticity.

They tell me the word “authenticity” doesn’t mean anything anymore, that it’s been co-opted by marketing, advertising and food professionals seeking to legitimize their products in a society with no cultural roots. The word "authentic" is overused and abused, much as the words organic and natural have been. Like those words, it has ceased to mean anything real.

It certainly means something real to the people of Italy producing their authentic regional dishes. They won’t be surprised to hear “authenticity” is dead in America. They never thought it existed here anyway.

I was cleaning up some old magazines this morning when I saw my nemesis in cold stark letters. There, on the back of an old issue of La Cucina Italiana, was an ad in big words: “Proud to be Authentic”. An ad for cheap supermarket balsamic vinegar, one of the most INAUTHENTIC products available.

One of my pet peeves is how inauthentic is passed off as the real thing. Labeling a product “authentic” means nothing anymore, but does it make the real thing any less real?

I’m a champion for authenticity, I guess, and not yet ready to give up the ghost and declare authenticity dead. It’s alive and well. It’s our media-driven, instant-gratification culture that’s the problem.

There was an old cartoon I remember from my childhood called “Crusader Rabbit”, I think it used to play on Captain Kangeroo. It detailed the adventures of a little white rabbit in knight's armor that went around championing causes.

One day when I was about 4 or 5 years old I was going on about something that bothered me, I don't remember what, and my mom looked at me and said, "You aren't Crusader Rabbit!"

But I think I might be.

PS here's a link to the old Crusader Rabbit cartoons. Youtube is indeed an amazing thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voiv8a1vP4w&feature=relmfu

buzzing back to Italy

I'm finally heading back to Italy this week, after a long, very productive and fun winter in the US. I miss my house, I miss my friends but most of all I just miss looking at Italy. The wheat fields are high and green now and it waves like the sea as the wind blows. The wisteria is in bloom, long purple trails on thick gnarled trunks. The roses are just starting to blossom and I'd be heartbroken to miss them.

Here's what I'm going to do as soon as I get back:

Have a cappucino.

Look at the artichokes growing outside my bedroom window.

Go to the market and buy some spring veggies!

Drink some great wine.

Go to the hot springs and sit in the sulphur water.

Have friends over for dinner.

Start cooking in the old mill.....

.....and making wonderful friends!!!

See you all in TUSCANY!!!

Schiacciata di Pasqua Senese (Sienese Easter Bread)

In Italy, each religious holiday brings baked goods and sweets made only and specifically for that season. This is especially true for Eastertime. The many breads, cakes and cookies differ depending on the region of Italy, and the traditional sweets from my family are different from what I find in Tuscany. At Easter in the province of Siena, they make a sweet bread flavored with anice seed, orange and mint. Called schiacciata di Pasqua, it is tall, yeasty and dense, with a rich yellow color, decorated simply with a dusting of powdered sugar. It's rarely found in a bakery because it is still a traditional dessert baked at home, the recipe passed down from generation to generation.

My very good friend, Oriana Bindi, born and bred on a farm halfway between Siena and Montalcino, is intensely passionate about this aromatic bread. She can’t wait until Spring so she can make batch after batch to enjoy for breakfast, merende (snacktime), or dessert, gifting to friends the cakes that turn out especially well. That’s the thing about these special holiday treats – you only make them for a few weeks during their season and then move on. For instance, one would never think of making this in August or September, no matter how badly one wanted to eat it. In this way, the foods of each season remain precious.

Oriana slaves over her schiacciata, planning ahead and worrying over her complicated instructions, ecstatic if it turns out well, downhearted if it doesn’t. The recipe she uses, passed down from an aunt, has many special instructions printed in bold capital letters of WHAT NOT TO DO. If you call the house during these days, you’re told that Oriana is in the kitchen “con la schiacciata”, which is code for she can’t be disturbed with a phone call. I usually run over to watch and discuss the proceedings, trying to understand this special Tuscan recipe while giving her morale support to help ease her nerves.

For anyone who understands the science of baking, the recipe is unnecessarily complicated. For anyone who doesn’t bake often, the complications inspire fear. Oriana finds the name “schiacciata” to be the strangest thing about this recipe. Generally any bread in Tuscany with that name, and there are several, is almost always flat. But this bread is tall and dense. Schiacciare means “to break”. Since this cake is made in the Spring, when the chickens typically laid too many eggs to use, they say you had to break a lot of eggs to make a good schiacciata. Hmmm.

I think the strangest thing about her recipe… actually, there are a couple of strange things about this recipe. The first is the addition of an entire grated orange! An entire grated orange - zest, pith, membrane, segments, juice - you take a whole orange and a box grater and you start grating it, “come un pezzo di Parmigiano”, like a piece of Parmigiano. The first time I saw her do it I was speechless! Anthropologically speaking, this step is most likely based on the inherent frugality of the Tuscan people: if they were fortunate enough to have an orange, they used the whole thing.

The second, and even stranger thing, is the amount of YEAST that is used. 130 grams of cake yeast to 3 pounds of flour! Since most of us don’t have access to cake yeast, let me do the math for you: the equivalent of dry yeast is 65 grams. Consider one envelope of dry yeast weighs 7 grams, that is 9 (nine) packets of dry yeast for just 13 cups of flour to make just three 8” cakes! That much yeast can't be good for you.

But I think I understand why this recipe calls for so much yeast. Remember that this is a traditional recipe, handed down for generations. Before commercial yeast was made widely available, home cooks used a biga ("mother" or starter) for making bread. Once commercial yeast became widely available, home cooks were faced with having to make the conversion between their home starter and cake yeast. They weren’t food scientists, they didn’t know about conversion rates. Whereas you would need a large amount of starter, commercial yeast is more potent and you need to use considerably less. They wanted a tall cake and using a lot of yeast got them there.

I worked with Oriana's recipe and developed one without an exceptional amount of yeast, one that works the dough gently and gives the yeast a chance to rise and do its job. An understanding of the process allowed me to remove the scary warnings in Capital Letters, another very odd thing that I'd never seen in a recipe. If you understand the science behind working with yeast, you can be confident of the joyous results and enjoy this lovely bread.

Many Tuscans are adverse to change, their feet firmly rooted in the past. At first Oriana resisted using less yeast, but this year she tells me she took my suggestion and left out half of the yeast with great results. She sees it as another beautiful example of celebrating the seasons with lovely time-honored traditions!

Giulia Scarpaleggia, a Tuscan who writes the food blog Jul’s Kitchen, also writes about Easter schiacciata. She loves it just as much but fears the process far less.

Below please find the recipe I rewrote for Oriana.

Schiacciata di Pasqua Senese

I’ve cut this down from the original recipe so that instead of making three 8” round cakes, it makes only one. I also cut the yeast way back so it’s an appropriate amount to raise the dough, but not to overwhelm it with a yeast taste. The only other thing I changed is using just the zest and juice of an orange as opposed to grating the entire thing on a box grater. If you’d like to try it, please do so, it’s an interesting experience and not as hard as it sounds! Just watch your knuckles!

3 ¼ cup flour

1 packet dried yeast, dissolved in ½ cup water

2 eggs

½ cup sugar + 1 tbsp

2 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp butter

½ cup Vin Santo, or semi sweet sherry or marsala

½ cup mint rosolio or 1 tbsp crème di menthe

1 tbsp anice seed

Pinch of sea salt

Zest of one orange

Juice of same orange

Powdered sugar

Place all the flour, one teas sugar and the pinch of salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and add ½ of the yeast and water and one beaten egg. With a fork, mix a small amount of the flour into the wet ingredients. You must not mix in all the flour, only enough to make it thick but still very soft and moist, leaving this starter, or “lievitino”, in the center like a volcano. Mix it well and then cover it and allow it to rise an hour in a warm place.

Meanwhile, mix together in a small pan the remaining sugar, oil, butter, orange zest and juice (or the whole orange if you’ve gone that route), anice seeds and liquors. Heat the mixture until the sugar is melted, without bringing it to a boil. Take it off the stove and allow it to cool.

Butter your round pan, either a cake or spring form. If you can find the brown paper pans that are used to make panettone, all the better.

Remove the bowl of flour from its warm resting place, add in the remaining yeast, the other egg and all the liquid mixture. Mix it well, preferable with the dough hook of an electric beater. The mixture is very soft and you won’t be able to knead it on a board. Pour the dough into your cake pan and allow it to rest and raise in a warm space another hour. Heat the oven to 350 and place the schiacciata in the oven. Bake it until it is risen and browned, about 30-40 minutes. When the cake is cooled dust it with powdered sugar.

Lobster Rolls on a Jaunt to New York City

When you think “New York City”, lobster rolls aren’t usually the first things that come to mind. Unless you’re me. I’m crazy about lobster rolls and since I spend most of the year where they aren’t readily available, I tend to go a little overboard when they are.

My sister, Mary, was the first in our family to discover lobster rolls. She’d gone to Boston on business and happened to call on a client at the shore. The business call evolved into an unexpected detour at the water’s edge in a small town on Cape Cod, at a shack with big signs that said “Lobster”. Too early in the day for a whole lobster (is that possible?), she went out on a limb and got something called a “lobster roll”. And then she called me and told me about it. Now, I’ve been a lobster nut since I was a little girl, obsessing over my grandma’s baked lobster with spaghetti. But the thought of someone else cleaning a lobster and putting the meat on a buttered roll rocked my world. I couldn’t wait to get to Massachusetts, or wherever I was going to be able to get my hands on one.

It wasn’t long after that I found myself planning a trip to Rhode Island for a friend’s wedding and realized it was only a short drive to the most lobsterish of states, Maine. I got out there three days early and rented a car specifically to eat lobster and search out the lobster roll of my dreams.

I’ve eaten a lot of lobster rolls since then and I take every opportunity to enjoy them when I’m in New England. The best one I ever had was at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset Maine, the meat of an amazingly fresh lobster stuffed into a toasted, buttered hot dog bun, whole claws sticking out each side. Once on my way to the Boston airport to fly to Portland, Oregon, I ate one for lunch at the Clam Box in Ipswich, Massachusetts; it was so good I got another to go to eat for dinner later. Best decision I ever made. There I was at 30,000 feet, unwrapping the roll with the other passengers staring me down. I could have retired on the sale of that lobster roll, which made eating it all that much more enjoyable.

Fifteen years ago they were almost unheard of in New York City, just a memory of summer at the shore. Then the Lobster Place opened in the re-born Chelsea Market and since then it’s been a steady stream of great lobster roll opportunities.

I was recently in New York City and over the course of four days I tasted three of them. Here are the rolls I had and how I rate them.

The Lobster Place, Chelsea Market

Aside from the food, the Lobster Pound is a great space to hang out and gaze at the seafood. The roll was freshly made but not lobstery enough, I think they’ve been out of the ocean and in the tanks too long. There’s a small amount of celery, chive and mayo, which you don’t need if the lobster is really tasty.

Jean-George Vonrichten’s Spice Market

Nice little twist, rolled into rice paper with a little, cool dill gelee, srirachi mayo for dipping. A yummy little appetizer but obviously not the real thing. I loved Spice Market tho and went back with my sisters.

Luke’s Lobster, 7^th Street between 1^st and 2^nd Ave

From my point of view, Luke’s has the best in town. The lobster has a great fresh taste and it’s just lobster meat on a toasted bun. This time they added a little melted butter, which oozed out as you were eating it. It was overkill, but it was delicious! Now they’re all over town with locations down in the Financial District, the original in the East Village and another on the Upper East Side. Plus I hear they have a mobile unit that shows up in farmer’s markets!

Go out and have a lobster roll and enjoy! Buon appetito!

Tuscan Vegetable Truths - or how a NY journalist proved me wrong

It was April 2008 and my friend Elizabeth Koenig, the head of PR for Castello Banfi in Tuscany, called me to ask if I would talk to a New York Times journalist, Mark Bittman, about vegetables in Tuscany. She said she couldn’t think of a better person for him to talk to about the vegetables in Tuscan cuisine. He said he didn’t think vegetables were very prominent in the Tuscan diet and there wasn’t anything interesting or new to learn. I said that after seeing our vegetable gardens, meeting our growers, and tasting some select dishes, he would appreciate how much a part of our lives vegetables are in Tuscany.

[Mark Bittman is leading the discussion in America on the ethics and health benefits of eating less meat, and has spoken out about the relationship between increased beef consumption and global warming. He writes The Minimalist column in the Times, has written several cookbooks, and was at that time traveling in Italy researching his cookbook ”How to Cook Everything Vegetarian”.]

So Mark and his friend came to lunch. I don’t remember what I cooked, hopefully he does, I’m sure it involved seasonal vegetables like artichokes, asparagus and fava beans. We did spend several very pleasant hours in my old mill kitchen, eating and talking and drinking good local wine, and I don’t know if I convinced him of how much Tuscans love vegetables, but I did enjoy the experience as well as his book when it came out and started winning awards.

It was January 2011 when I went on an all-vegetable diet, also known as the yeast cleanse or acid/alkaline diet. It basically means you eat all the alkaline foods (vegetables/fruits) you can and shun any foods that cause your body to be acid (meat, dairy, alcohol, beans and grains). For two weeks I ate only vegetables and fruit; then for four months my diet was 80% veggies and fruits and 20% fish and chicken. I ate a lot of avocados, olives and almonds - the only alkaline nut - for some satisfying fat. If I had a snack attack I ate a mountain of pumpkin seeds in the shell. Sometimes I cheated but mostly I didn’t. It wasn’t the easiest thing I’d ever done, but it also wasn’t the worst. I started the diet in January while visiting my mom in Florida and had a pretty good rate of success in following it while I traveled around the US doing cooking classes. It took me a month to lose a single pound, but at the end of 4 months I had lost 20 and had a new relationship with vegetables.

The really hard part was when I got back to Tuscany in April. It was easy to continue my new way of eating as long as I stayed at home and cooked. But I’m a social animal. I wanted to go out to restaurants with friends and I frequently had to eat out with the culinary tour groups I lead. It didn’t take me long to realize Mark Bittman was right:

They don’t eat vegetables in Tuscany.

They sell them in the market. Piles and piles of artichokes, peas, leeks and greens.

They grow them in their gardens. Mountains of zucchini and peppers and tomatoes.

You can buy them and cook them at home, but God help you if you have to go out.

My options in restaurants and trattorias were always the same: sautéed spinach or swiss chard, heavy with heated oil, a bowl of plain lettuce leaves or some sliced green tomatoes (Tuscans like their tomatoes green). If I got lucky there might be a mix of zucchini, eggplant and peppers, which are great when grilled and lightly drizzled with olive oil, but an inedible mash of oversalted, overcooked veggies when roasted. Never wanting to be one of “those” people on a limited diet, repeating a litany of what they can’t eat, I often ordered whatever sounded good and then made up for it the next day by eating raw veggies for breakfast and lunch.

In Italy, eating seasonally means celebrating each vegetable or fruit in their season. Your attention and culinary efforts are concentrated on the goodness of each before they’re gone from the market until the next year. I knew that veggies like fresh beets, turnips, daikon radish, cilantro and jicama were “exotic” and impossible to find in Siena, and anticipated that my veggie diet would be more limited than it had been in the US. But what surprised me is that some really common things like broccoli are seasonal and missing from the stores, and the diet, for much of the year.

Mark Bittman was right. Tuscany has nothing new to add to the vegetable discussion. At one time, when Tuscans were poor peasants and country farmers, their diet was vegetable based, meat was scarce and saltless bread was the main starch. But in the last 40 years as Tuscany acquired wealth through international recognition of their wines and an increase in tourism, Tuscans quickly left their vegetable roots behind them and embraced piles of cured meat, grilled meat, braised meat and pasta.

I’m not as religious about the diet as I was a year ago. It turns out 2012 is the year of the cocktail, so I had to add alcohol back into my diet. I feel better when I eat lots of fresh vegetables, and my cooking classes include more vegetables and less meat than they used to, with a fresh green salad rounding out the meal before dessert is served. To date no one has noticed or complained. I tell them Tuscans have a long history of eating vegetables, which is true; now I’m admitting that they’ve left that history behind