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

Frittelle di San Giuseppe

The feast of St Joseph, earthly father of Jesus Christ and husband of Mary, is celebrated on March 19 in Italy, which is also Father’s Day. (Which makes sense really. He’s also the patron saint of anyone wishing to sell a home and homeowners desperate to sell their homes have been known to bury a statue of St. Joe in their front yard to help it sell – sometimes upside down, although I’ve never understood the logic of that – but that is all another story.)

As with any religious holiday in Italy, there are specific dishes and desserts to celebrate the occasion, differing from region to region and town to town. In Siena, from mid-February to mid-March the bakeries are filled with Frittelle di San Giuseppe, fried pastries made with rice and orange zest and rolled in granulated sugar. Sometime in February, a small wooden hut is erected in the Piazza di Campo in the middle of Siena and retired men and women of the community take turns frying the delicacies and selling them wrapped in cones of paper, 3 for a euro.

Originally a Sicilian custom, the Italian American community in the US actually celebrates St. Joseph’s Day with more sincerity than do the Italians; many churches and families of Southern Italian heritage build St. Joseph’s tables to honor the saint. The table typically has a shrine to St. Joe or the Holy Family and is decorated with baked goods, cakes and cookies and occasionally savory dishes as well. After prayers and blessings are said everyone partakes in the bounty.

Here is the recipe for Frittelle di San Giuseppe:

Frittelle di San Giuseppe (St Joseph Fritters)

1 lb rice

3 quarts water

1 teas salt

Zest from 1 orange and 1 lemon

2 tbsp flour

2 tbsp sugar

1 egg

Peanut oil for frying

Granulated sugar for coating

Bring the water to a boil with the salt and cook the rice until it is really well done, stirring occasionally and adding additional water if necessary. Drain the rice, place it in a colander over a bowl and leave it to drain, then spread it on a sheet pan and leave it to dry out, at least 4 hours.

Mix the rice with the citrus zest, flour, sugar and egg until it becomes creamy. Heat the oil, scoop small balls of dough about 1” in diameter into the oil and fry until golden brown, turning for even cooking. Drain on paper towels and roll in sugar to coat. Served hot, warm, or room temperature.

Carciofini Sott’Olio – preserving baby artichokes under olive oil

I’ve been missing artichokes this winter. I’m in the US and while I see them in the stores, they just aren’t as fresh and beautiful as what I get in Italy, plus the price is astrological. So I’ve been missing them. Sometimes I succeed in talking the produce manager into discounting old artichokes he won’t be able to sell, but generally not. Apparently they’d rather throw them out than sell them cheap, but I keep trying!

So I was thrilled yesterday to find a beautiful pile of firm, fresh baby artichokes at a little produce store, and I snapped them up and ran home to preserve them, pretending I was in Tuscany, which I will be again shortly.

The Tuscans preserve most of their vegetables under oil, as opposed to southern Italy where they tend to preserve things in vinegar, pickling vegetables like eggplant or peppers, or the mix of carrots, celery, cauliflower and onions known as “giardiniera”. In Tuscany we preserve “sott’olio”, or under oil, grilled eggplant and zucchini and fresh porcini or chanterelles when they’re in season. But artichokes are especially good under oil and very easy to make, although a little labor intensive on the front end.

Baby artichokes are especially plentiful in the spring. Contrary to popular belief, they are not a variety of artichoke, but actually what any artichoke plant will bear after the adult bud has been picked. With almost no choke at all and with the exception of a few layers of outer leaves, the whole thing is edible.

Cut off the top of the artichoke, peel off and throw away the outer dark green leaves and carefully peel the stem. Bring to a boil a mixture of white wine vinegar (or cider vinegar), white wine and water, enough to cover the artichokes, add them and boil for no more than 4 minutes. Take them out and drain them upside down on paper towels. After a few hours remove them to a rack and allow them to airdry at least 12 hours.

Next get large jars that have been sterilized in the dishwasher, and pack the artichokes in, layering them with whole garlic cloves and a sprig of mint, pressing them down to compact them in the jars and squeeze the air out. Cover them with good quality extra virgin olive oil, making sure that the oil completely covers every bit of artichoke, mint, or garlic, with a good ½” on top. If any food is exposed to the air, mold will grow and you’ll have to throw the whole thing out. Believe me, it’s a tragedy when that happens.

You don’t need to run them through a hot bath to seal the jars. That actually will cook the artichoke more and heat the oil, which changes the flavor. The oil acts as a natural seal, preserving the vegetable in the semi-crisp state that it was blanched in.

These will keep for months and are wonderful on an antipasto platter or in a salad. They make a wonderful warm dip pureed with garlic and a little mayonnaise, and the oil can be reused in a salad dressing.

This is just the beginning of the preserving season, followed soon by spring strawberries and early summer cherries and mulberries. But more on that later. Buon Appetito!

Making Salami in Winter

Italians eat with the seasons. That’s about the only way you can generalize Italian food, except maybe to say that their food is always fresh and simply prepared. Which is a direct result of eating what’s in season. What is seasonal generally is taken to mean local fresh fruit and vegetables, harvesting what’s growing in the gardens and ripening on the trees and bushes. But in the past, the winter season was pig-slaughter and salami-making time, fresh roasted meat was only available during the cold months, and eating with the season was more than just vegetables and fruit.

December, January and February was traditionally the time of year when Italians butchered their pigs to make salami, prosciutto, sausages, and other cured products because only then was it cold enough outside and in the slaughter house to butcher the meat safely, ensuring that it wouldn’t spoil or rot before they could get it cured. While today the butchering and curing goes on inside climate-controlled environments all year long, you do still find small operations and individual households that stick to the tradition of only butchering and curing meats in the wintertime. And if you only butchered animals in cold weather, that usually meant that for the mostly poor and agriculturally based population, fresh roasted meats were a wintertime delicacy.

I have several friends in Italy who always buy a pig in September and spend the winter fattening it up with table scraps and corn. Then after the first of the year, they schedule a weekend of sausage and salami making. The pig is killed on Thursday night, they pick it up on Friday and three days of cutting, seasoning and hanging meat begins, culminating with a big Sunday lunch of fresh grilled ribs and roasted pork loin. Friends pitch in and bring desserts and antipasti or fresh tagliatelle. A big fire is started early and by the time lunch comes it's burned down to a nice bed of coals for grilling pig liver wrapped in caul fat, pork steaks and ribs.

Vellutata - velvet vegetable soups

This is the time of year I always turn to soups. There's a little chill in the air but you can tell spring is coming. You want something warming but light and reflective of the season, and a creamy vellutata that is basically sauteed and pureed vegetables is perfect.

Meaning "velvety" in Italian, vellutata's were one of the principle dishes I learned on my first stay in Tuscany back in 1996. I was living on the estate of Spannocchia and working in exchange for a bed and meals. My job was to make lunch for about 20 workers and it was my first experience at planning an interesting and enjoyable meal on a daily basis. The Tuscan food I was learning was rustic fare with big overpowering flavors but the creamy veg soup that is vellutata is gentile and elegant, the opposite of the traditional cuisine. But just like all Tuscan dishes, it is simple with just a few ingredients, highlighting whatever was coming out of the extensive estate garden.

The most important thing in any creamy vegetable soup is that it should be thickened with the vegetable that is the main ingredient, not with potato. Unless it's a potato soup, of course. That is to say, if you're making a vellutata of broccoli or asparagus, use lots of broccoli or asparagus and just enough broth or water to cover the vegetable as it cooks. Let the vegetable simmer for at least 20 minutes then puree it with an immersion blender. You can add additional water if it's too thick, and you can add a little cream, but the starring vegetable both flavors and thickens the soup.

Just saute some onion and whatever vegetable is in season in a little olive oil; this week my favorites are broccolli or carrot & fennel, and I can't wait until the spring for asparagus to be in season. Add a little water and cook until the veg is really soft, then puree it with a handheld immersion blender. A shot of cream is optional. Nothing could be simpler or more warming!

Buon Appetito! Gina

Vellutata di Broccoli (velvety broccoli soup)
4 cups chopped broccoli
1 onion chopped
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
3 cups chicken or vegetable broth, or water
1/2 teas fresh rosemary, chopped
1/2 cup cream (optional)
salt
white pepper

Saute the onion in the oil until soft, add the broccoli and the rosemary and saute until the broccoli is cooked, being careful not to brown the onion. Add the broth and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and simmer about 20 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and puree with an immersion blender, adding additional water if it's too thick. Add the cream if you're using and serve with a drizzle of olive oil on top.