An italian feast brings out the best in everyone
Preparations for a recent Italian dinner party we hosted began 24 hours before guests were to arrive. The occasion was the result of four generous people making a donation to Rotary for the opportunity to enjoy a meal of Italian food and wines in our home.
I started the night before by making cacciatore. It is a hunter’s stew and, like all stews, it tastes better after a day that allows flavours to meld.
The rest of the menu wasn’t particularly complicated. I planned to make a variety of crostinis, toasted slices of baguette topped with things like almond pesto (the almonds substitute for the traditional pine nuts, or pignoli), grape tomatoes and ribbons of prosciutto — ham sliced so thin, as the joke goes, that the pig didn’t feel it coming of its hind end.
While a typical Italian meal sees salad served after the main courses and before dessert or cheese, we continue to serve it first. Otherwise it seems to get lost or, on occasion, even forgotten. My choice was a Caprese-style salad, with fresh basil, cubes of fresh mozzarella cheese, grape tomatoes, black olives and Italian spices, tossed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Following the salad would be seafood cioppino, a stew with a tomato base that is ultra-easy to make and great for company because one can prepare the base early, then bring it to a boil and add a selection of seafood 10 minutes before it is to be served. I chose mussels, scallops, cod, prawns and clams. The base includes onions, garlic and green pepper, finely chopped and sautéed in olive oil. Spices, white wine, canned Italian tomatoes and clam juice complete the stock. Serve slices of Calabrese bread to soak up the sauce and it’s a meal in itself.
Dessert was one we hadn’t tried before and it, too, didn’t require much work. Two dozen dried figs are simmered for about 40 minutes in a cup of red wine, along with sugar, a cinnamon stick and slices of fresh ginger. Once the figs are very soft they are removed, then the wine is cooked down by two thirds, then strained. To serve, I mixed fresh cream with mascarpone (an Italian cream cheese), spread couple of tablespoons on each plate, cut the figs almost in half, spread them apart and placed them on the cream cheese base, then drizzled the sauce on top.
Among my preparations earlier day was the making of a batch of pasta, which I rolled into sheets that were allowed to dry for an hour on floured towels. Then I used a pizza wheel to slice the sheets into wide ribbons, or pappardelle, which continued to dry on the counter until ready to cook. It would be served with the cacciatore.
When our guests arrived we toasted the occasion with flutes of prosecco, a dry rose sparkling wine from northern Italy. Placed in the bottom of each flute before the wine was poured was a preserved edible hibiscus flower. The red flowers and juice stain the prosecco to a deeper pink colour and makes a very nice presentation. We sat for an hour, sipping our wine, chatting and nibbling on the crostinis before moving to the dining room table.
The meal went entirely as planned and my selection of Sangiovese wines proved to pair well with each dish, in large part because the salad, cioppino and cacciatore all included tomatoes, which are a particularly good marriage with medium red wines like Chiantis.
Our guests chose to drink cappuccinos with their dessert and we lingered at the table, enjoying the company and conversation, until late in the evening. We have hosted many such dinners (some featuring Indian dishes) as Rotary fundraisers and I heartily recommend the practice. We make our donation by providing the food and wine and guests contribute cash for a worthy cause. And everyone benefits from the enjoyment that inevitably comes when food, wine and friends are combined.
January 2012 - La Dolce Vita
I started the night before by making cacciatore. It is a hunter’s stew and, like all stews, it tastes better after a day that allows flavours to meld.
The rest of the menu wasn’t particularly complicated. I planned to make a variety of crostinis, toasted slices of baguette topped with things like almond pesto (the almonds substitute for the traditional pine nuts, or pignoli), grape tomatoes and ribbons of prosciutto — ham sliced so thin, as the joke goes, that the pig didn’t feel it coming of its hind end.
While a typical Italian meal sees salad served after the main courses and before dessert or cheese, we continue to serve it first. Otherwise it seems to get lost or, on occasion, even forgotten. My choice was a Caprese-style salad, with fresh basil, cubes of fresh mozzarella cheese, grape tomatoes, black olives and Italian spices, tossed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Following the salad would be seafood cioppino, a stew with a tomato base that is ultra-easy to make and great for company because one can prepare the base early, then bring it to a boil and add a selection of seafood 10 minutes before it is to be served. I chose mussels, scallops, cod, prawns and clams. The base includes onions, garlic and green pepper, finely chopped and sautéed in olive oil. Spices, white wine, canned Italian tomatoes and clam juice complete the stock. Serve slices of Calabrese bread to soak up the sauce and it’s a meal in itself.
Dessert was one we hadn’t tried before and it, too, didn’t require much work. Two dozen dried figs are simmered for about 40 minutes in a cup of red wine, along with sugar, a cinnamon stick and slices of fresh ginger. Once the figs are very soft they are removed, then the wine is cooked down by two thirds, then strained. To serve, I mixed fresh cream with mascarpone (an Italian cream cheese), spread couple of tablespoons on each plate, cut the figs almost in half, spread them apart and placed them on the cream cheese base, then drizzled the sauce on top.
Among my preparations earlier day was the making of a batch of pasta, which I rolled into sheets that were allowed to dry for an hour on floured towels. Then I used a pizza wheel to slice the sheets into wide ribbons, or pappardelle, which continued to dry on the counter until ready to cook. It would be served with the cacciatore.
When our guests arrived we toasted the occasion with flutes of prosecco, a dry rose sparkling wine from northern Italy. Placed in the bottom of each flute before the wine was poured was a preserved edible hibiscus flower. The red flowers and juice stain the prosecco to a deeper pink colour and makes a very nice presentation. We sat for an hour, sipping our wine, chatting and nibbling on the crostinis before moving to the dining room table.
The meal went entirely as planned and my selection of Sangiovese wines proved to pair well with each dish, in large part because the salad, cioppino and cacciatore all included tomatoes, which are a particularly good marriage with medium red wines like Chiantis.
Our guests chose to drink cappuccinos with their dessert and we lingered at the table, enjoying the company and conversation, until late in the evening. We have hosted many such dinners (some featuring Indian dishes) as Rotary fundraisers and I heartily recommend the practice. We make our donation by providing the food and wine and guests contribute cash for a worthy cause. And everyone benefits from the enjoyment that inevitably comes when food, wine and friends are combined.
January 2012 - La Dolce Vita
No-knead pizza dough the easy solution for great pies
Should anything this easy taste this good? I wondered as I bit into the pizza I had just pulled from the oven.
The story actually starts near six years ago, when I read a New York Times article about a simple way to make bakery-quality bread in a home kitchen. I’m talking about bread that has a crunchy crust and chewy interior, like a good baguette or Italian loaf.
I enjoy making bread, so the article really got me thinking. Chewiness results from the formation of gluten in the dough, so a combination of kneading and resting it can approximate the chewiness one expects from an artisanal loaf. But the crisp crust is elusive for the home breadmaker — it comes from a combination of high heat and moisture that a regular oven just can’t provide.
The Times article was about Jim Lahey, a New York City baker who had come up with a way to overcome these challenges at home. Somehow I managed to forget about the article, not trying his technique. Then, a few weeks ago, I saw his name on the cover of Bon Appetit while I was browsing my grocery store’s magazine selection. “Make pizza like a pro...pie master Jim Lahey shares his secrets”, the cover said. Snaking around the edges of a rustic and very attractive pizza was another sentence: “It all starts with a no-knead dough as easy as pie.”
So, I dutifully started out on the odyssey to replicate that scrumptious-looking pie. I halved the recipe so that I could make three small pizzas the following night. Just under four cups of flour, four teaspoons of sea salt and a quarter-teaspoon of yeast (yes, a quarter-teaspoon) were mixed in a bowl, to which three cups of water were added. Clean hands mixed the ingredients into a sticky and very rough dough, which was then covered with plastic wrap and left to sit until the following afternoon.
A few hours before dinner time, I turned the gloppy mixture out of the bowl and onto a floured board and shaped it into three soft balls, which then sat to rest and rise. An hour before it was time to eat, I put a pizza stone into 500-degree oven.
Toppings prepared, I began to shape the first pie. The dough was so loose and stretchy that all I had to do was flatten it a bit, then work it with my hands, holding it up so that its weight would allow it to stretch downward. I held the dough by its edge and rotated it like a steering wheel. Soon it was about a foot in diameter and maybe a quarter-inch thick. I placed it on parchment paper atop an aluminum pizza peel.
I spread some spaghetti sauce on the dough, then laid thin slices of salami on top. Then I scattered caramelized onions and fried mushroom slices and covered the works with shredded pecorino Romano, one of my favourite cheeses. Slices of fresh mozzarella were arranged on that, then a final sprinkling of grated parmigiano reggiano completed the toppings. I slid the pizza onto the hot stone and turned the oven setting from bake to broil, and began to prepare the next pie. Five or six minutes later, the first one, blistered, bubbly and smelling like heaven, was ready to pull out. The hot stone baked the dough beautifully and the broiler melted the toppings and browned the cheeses and dough edges.
We sat down to slices of this very chewy pizza and toasted the recipe’s success with glasses of 2006 Setta Coppa, Sal d’Angelo’s great Bordeaux-style blend that he makes on the Naramata bench. D’Angelo Estate Winery has been one of our favourites since it opened, and we have happy memories of our stays at the winery’s bed and breakfast.
The pizza, I am convinced, was the best I have every made. And since, I have been experimenting with Jim Lahey’s bread-making recipe, having found it in the New York Times archives. The results will have to wait for a future column.
March 12 - 2012
The story actually starts near six years ago, when I read a New York Times article about a simple way to make bakery-quality bread in a home kitchen. I’m talking about bread that has a crunchy crust and chewy interior, like a good baguette or Italian loaf.
I enjoy making bread, so the article really got me thinking. Chewiness results from the formation of gluten in the dough, so a combination of kneading and resting it can approximate the chewiness one expects from an artisanal loaf. But the crisp crust is elusive for the home breadmaker — it comes from a combination of high heat and moisture that a regular oven just can’t provide.
The Times article was about Jim Lahey, a New York City baker who had come up with a way to overcome these challenges at home. Somehow I managed to forget about the article, not trying his technique. Then, a few weeks ago, I saw his name on the cover of Bon Appetit while I was browsing my grocery store’s magazine selection. “Make pizza like a pro...pie master Jim Lahey shares his secrets”, the cover said. Snaking around the edges of a rustic and very attractive pizza was another sentence: “It all starts with a no-knead dough as easy as pie.”
So, I dutifully started out on the odyssey to replicate that scrumptious-looking pie. I halved the recipe so that I could make three small pizzas the following night. Just under four cups of flour, four teaspoons of sea salt and a quarter-teaspoon of yeast (yes, a quarter-teaspoon) were mixed in a bowl, to which three cups of water were added. Clean hands mixed the ingredients into a sticky and very rough dough, which was then covered with plastic wrap and left to sit until the following afternoon.
A few hours before dinner time, I turned the gloppy mixture out of the bowl and onto a floured board and shaped it into three soft balls, which then sat to rest and rise. An hour before it was time to eat, I put a pizza stone into 500-degree oven.
Toppings prepared, I began to shape the first pie. The dough was so loose and stretchy that all I had to do was flatten it a bit, then work it with my hands, holding it up so that its weight would allow it to stretch downward. I held the dough by its edge and rotated it like a steering wheel. Soon it was about a foot in diameter and maybe a quarter-inch thick. I placed it on parchment paper atop an aluminum pizza peel.
I spread some spaghetti sauce on the dough, then laid thin slices of salami on top. Then I scattered caramelized onions and fried mushroom slices and covered the works with shredded pecorino Romano, one of my favourite cheeses. Slices of fresh mozzarella were arranged on that, then a final sprinkling of grated parmigiano reggiano completed the toppings. I slid the pizza onto the hot stone and turned the oven setting from bake to broil, and began to prepare the next pie. Five or six minutes later, the first one, blistered, bubbly and smelling like heaven, was ready to pull out. The hot stone baked the dough beautifully and the broiler melted the toppings and browned the cheeses and dough edges.
We sat down to slices of this very chewy pizza and toasted the recipe’s success with glasses of 2006 Setta Coppa, Sal d’Angelo’s great Bordeaux-style blend that he makes on the Naramata bench. D’Angelo Estate Winery has been one of our favourites since it opened, and we have happy memories of our stays at the winery’s bed and breakfast.
The pizza, I am convinced, was the best I have every made. And since, I have been experimenting with Jim Lahey’s bread-making recipe, having found it in the New York Times archives. The results will have to wait for a future column.
March 12 - 2012
no-knead bread a rising trend in the home kitchen
A few weeks ago I wrote about making pizza using a no-knead dough recipe from New York baker Jim Lahey (no relation to the fictitious security guy on Trailer Park Boys). It reminded me that I had read about his same approach to making loaves of bread in a New York Times story in 2006.
Not wanting to let the idea slip away for another six years, I dove in and began experimenting, adjusting the recipe and using different pans.
The recipe itself is ridiculously simply. To three cups of flour add 1 ¼ tsp. salt and ¼ tsp. of regular yeast. Mix them together and add about 1 2/3 cups of water, enough so that a moist dough can be roughly mixed into a ball. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit for 24 hours (though up to 72 hours is fine).
Turn what should be a bubbly, gloppy mess out onto a floured board and sprinkle the dough with a bit more flour. Push the air out of the dough with a few pushes and turns, then form it into a ball (I used a dough scraper to make the process easier), cover with a floured cloth and let rest for two hours.
At least a half-hour before baking, preheat the oven to 500 degrees and place in it your large baking container of choice. Lahey says enameled cast iron ware, pyrex and ceramic containers are all fine, as long as they have a fitted lid. When the oven reaches temperature, pull out the pot, remove the lid and carefully drop in the dough, seam-side down. Replace the lid, return the pot to the oven and bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and continue baking for 20-30 minutes, until the internal temperature of the loaf is about 200 F.
The result is a beautifully browned, crunchy-crusted bread with a chewy exterior. The covered container (which needs to hold about six quarts) and high oven temperatures are key. Inside the container, the dough’s moisture is trapped and it works to form the crust.
I made my very first dough, then went to pre-heat the oven and discovered that I didn’t have the large container and lid I thought I had. So I cut the dough in half and put one Pyrex casserole dish and a three-quart enameled cast iron pot into the oven. Because the loaves were smaller, I reduced the cooking time by about a third and the results were perfect.
Some more reading revealed that some bakers use the stainless steel cookware. I also wanted to experiment with terracotta, so I splurged and bought a plain $6 pot. I mixed another batch of dough and used it, putting a round of parchment paper in the bottom to cover the drain hole and covering the top with tin foil once the dough was dropped in. The loaf was beautifully shaped and cooked and that particular experiment was a success.
Over the next few days I continued, usually mixing one batch in the morning and another in the evening. I used different combinations of flour, including local whole wheat and hard spring wheat, added rolled oats and even chopped dates and walnuts. I made loaves in the plant pot and in my large stainless steel pots, and did some by putting the dough on parchment paper on a cookie tray and putting on a stainless steel pot or the terracotta planter upside down for a cover.
Invariably, the results were edible and attractive. This is a recipe that is very hard to go wrong with. Follow the instructions for ingredients fairly closely and then make sure to use the hot oven and cover the loaf — other variables seem to work fine.
Personally, I am quite happy to make bread in the traditional way, but I’ll admit that the lack of work is a great appeal in the no-knead process. My guess is that I will use it more often.
If you are a bread machine user, I challenge you to try the no-knead process and see just how different the results are.
April 2012 – La Dolce Vita
Not wanting to let the idea slip away for another six years, I dove in and began experimenting, adjusting the recipe and using different pans.
The recipe itself is ridiculously simply. To three cups of flour add 1 ¼ tsp. salt and ¼ tsp. of regular yeast. Mix them together and add about 1 2/3 cups of water, enough so that a moist dough can be roughly mixed into a ball. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit for 24 hours (though up to 72 hours is fine).
Turn what should be a bubbly, gloppy mess out onto a floured board and sprinkle the dough with a bit more flour. Push the air out of the dough with a few pushes and turns, then form it into a ball (I used a dough scraper to make the process easier), cover with a floured cloth and let rest for two hours.
At least a half-hour before baking, preheat the oven to 500 degrees and place in it your large baking container of choice. Lahey says enameled cast iron ware, pyrex and ceramic containers are all fine, as long as they have a fitted lid. When the oven reaches temperature, pull out the pot, remove the lid and carefully drop in the dough, seam-side down. Replace the lid, return the pot to the oven and bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and continue baking for 20-30 minutes, until the internal temperature of the loaf is about 200 F.
The result is a beautifully browned, crunchy-crusted bread with a chewy exterior. The covered container (which needs to hold about six quarts) and high oven temperatures are key. Inside the container, the dough’s moisture is trapped and it works to form the crust.
I made my very first dough, then went to pre-heat the oven and discovered that I didn’t have the large container and lid I thought I had. So I cut the dough in half and put one Pyrex casserole dish and a three-quart enameled cast iron pot into the oven. Because the loaves were smaller, I reduced the cooking time by about a third and the results were perfect.
Some more reading revealed that some bakers use the stainless steel cookware. I also wanted to experiment with terracotta, so I splurged and bought a plain $6 pot. I mixed another batch of dough and used it, putting a round of parchment paper in the bottom to cover the drain hole and covering the top with tin foil once the dough was dropped in. The loaf was beautifully shaped and cooked and that particular experiment was a success.
Over the next few days I continued, usually mixing one batch in the morning and another in the evening. I used different combinations of flour, including local whole wheat and hard spring wheat, added rolled oats and even chopped dates and walnuts. I made loaves in the plant pot and in my large stainless steel pots, and did some by putting the dough on parchment paper on a cookie tray and putting on a stainless steel pot or the terracotta planter upside down for a cover.
Invariably, the results were edible and attractive. This is a recipe that is very hard to go wrong with. Follow the instructions for ingredients fairly closely and then make sure to use the hot oven and cover the loaf — other variables seem to work fine.
Personally, I am quite happy to make bread in the traditional way, but I’ll admit that the lack of work is a great appeal in the no-knead process. My guess is that I will use it more often.
If you are a bread machine user, I challenge you to try the no-knead process and see just how different the results are.
April 2012 – La Dolce Vita
