Pasta al Limone

 This week’s recipe is from Sicily, not Rome, and yet you’ll see so many similarities to the process I laid out in our Roman Pastas series. Sicilians are famous all over the Mediterranean for their citrus crops, especially their lemons. Accordingly, pasta al limone has been an instant hit from the moment of its inception.

I mentioned several times throughout the previous series that a keystone of Roman cooking was to source only the best ingredients and to use them well and simply to create something so much better than the sum of their parts. This is also completely applicable to the cuisine of an island a few hundred miles to the south, in Sicily. It is important to remember that by no means is Italian cuisine monolithic, but that nevertheless, the same basic fundamentals apply to food from any region.

This pasta recipe is one of the fastest I’ve ever put up here on the website. It comes together in the amount of time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta, very similarly to cacio e pepe.

In fact, think of this as a derivative or descendant of cacio e pepe. Recall that for basic cacio e pepe, a pasta is boiled, a paste of pasta water, pepper and pecorino is made, and then the two are combined until emulsified with extra reserved pasta  water. We will follow the same basic steps, and our only modification to this process will come in how we deal with the stars of the show here, the lemons.

Before we get to the specifics on this simple recipe anyone can make—even on the tightest of budgets—let’s talk citrus. As a note to any Brazilian or otherwise Lusophone readers: My family originally comes from Brazil, and so I know that in Portuguese, there aren’t distinct words for “lime” and “lemon” as there are in English. In Portuguese, we differentiate yellow from green by the location which we add to the generic word that means both “lime and lemon.” If a fruit is a “Sicilian lemon,” then it’s a “lemon” in English; if it’s a “Tahiti lemon,” then it’s a “lime.” For any readers from the Lusophone world, this recipe is meant to be made with the former, not the latter. And for those of us in the US or elsewhere where a distinction exists between generic “lemons” and “Meyer lemons,” this recipe is meant to be made with the former; Meyer lemons are sweeter than regular lemons, possibly as a result of crossing regular lemons with oranges or clementines to create the Meyers. That extra sweetness in the Meyers won’t work with this dish, so make sure to get the best regular lemons you can find.

The lemon will be the star of this recipe, so don’t be shy with it. Wash, zest, and juice 2 whole large lemons. Be careful to only scrape off the outermost yellow part. That yellow outer layer is almost entirely natural yellow pigments and scented oils which together make lemons very aromatic, all of which we want to make use of in our final dish. That layer, however, is very thin, and directly underneath it is the much thicker and far more acidic layer of white pith. Generally, don’t get any—or get as little as possible—of the pith when zesting citrus of any kind (oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, etc.). Either before zesting or between zesting and juicing, roll your washed lemons against your countertop or another flat surface. Doing so weakens or even pre-ruptures some cell walls inside the lemon, thereby making juicing easier later, and increasing yield at that point.

We will also make use of fresh mint to balance out the acidity in this dish. Fresh herbs like mint and basil bruise very easily when hacked at indiscriminately with a knife.

Place 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a wide, shallow pan, and as the oil warms, place the zest into the oil together with a few leaves of mint taken directly from the plant, without any chopping or tearing. There are several compounds in both mint and lemon zest which are (only, or in some cases, more) soluble in oil versus water. When the oil becomes noticeably aromatic, turn off the heat and remove the mint leaves.  

Cook 1 pound of a long, dry pasta according to the manufacturer's instructions to al dente doneness. When 3 minutes remain, reserve 1 ½ cups of pasta water. Grate 1 cup of pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano and combine it with the juice and zest of the two lemons juiced and zested earlier. Take 2 tablespoons of that pasta cooking water and combine it with the cheese and lemon juice and zest so that a thick paste forms. Season this paste liberally with black pepper, just as one would make cacio e pepe.  

From here, the process is identical to cacio e pepe. Drain the pasta once it is al dente, and combine it with the aromatic oil, the cheese-zest paste, and thin and emulsify the sauce by gradually adding pasta cooking water and tossing. Garnish with black pepper, Parmigiano Reggiano, lemon zest, and fresh mint leaves.
   

Pasta al limone, as prepared by Vincenzo's Plate

(Photo Credits to Vincenzo and his team) 

Pasta alla Gricia: the Dark Horse of Traditional Roman Pastas

Of all the Roman sauces, alla Gricia is certainly the dark horse—so much so that, when I started learning Italian in early 2020, I mistook “alla Gricia” (the actual name of the pasta, which came from the name given to small-volume food sellers in Rome in the days of the Papal States, before Italy had even unified) for “alla Grecia” (which would’ve meant that this was “[pasta type] in the manner of the Greeks”). There is in fact nothing that is particularly “Greek” about this dish: no feta, no Kalamata olives, nothing else of the sort. I share this with all of you just to illustrate how obscure this dish actually is. But the truth is, it really should not be: many more people should know about, cook, and enjoy spaghetti alla gricia than currently do. And even though I recognize how small my audience is, I aim to do what I can through here, reaching all of you, to try to help put this wonderful sauce (back) on the map.

By now, you’ve probably seen how similar amatriciana, carbonara, and cacio e pepe are to each other. (If not, go back and revisit the other recipes.) The techniques used for those three are very similar, and the recipes only usually differ by an ingredient or two. Alla gricia is no exception.

A few words about ingredients: Alla gricia contains guanciale, a cured pork product from the jowl. (This can be rather hard to find, so in a pinch, if absolutely necessary, you can use pancetta, which is a cured pork product from the belly instead.) As with the other recipes in this series, the guanciale should be cut into small cubes. Unlike the other related recipes, for alla gricia, I will stipulate the use of a short pasta (rigatoni and penne rigate are the best), rather than a long one. This way, the guanciale will be able to enter into the tubular structure of each piece of pasta, providing an essential contrast in taste and texture.

Alla gricia comes together quickly, in the amount of time it takes to bring a gallon of water to a boil in a 6 quart pan, cook it to al dente per the package’s instructions, and drain it. Start getting everything ready for mise en place as soon as you put the water to boil.

As with the other recipes the call for guanciale, this one calls for smaller-than-bite-size cubes of guanciale. Cut the guanciale exactly as you would cut bacon to be made into lardons, if that were called for in a recipe—about that size, and for those reasons. Our objective is to have both meat and fat on each piece of guanciale. Place the guanciale in a skillet in a single layer (or work in batches if necessary). Do not add any extra fat to the pan. There is already plenty of fat in the guanciale, and there will be more added fat from the pecorino still to come.  Without any preheating, bring the pan and the guanciale to the stove, and turn on a burner to low heat. Let the guanciale render slowly. Turn it often to encourage even browning and rendering, and to prevent anything from sticking to the pan. 

A quick word of caution: Longtime readers may have noticed the absence of an instruction I typically give several times throughout each of my recipes in the Roman pasta series (the standalone recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana that I published late in 2021 and the 3 other bases, plus papalina, which I’ve recently put out). Normally, I’ll call for layered salting of dishes. Make a mirepoix? You should season it? Add some chicken stock? Season again. And so on—for each ingredient or set of ingredients. Each ingredient normally only gets a little bit of salt at a time since my philosophy is to add salt continuously as I cook so that nothing is underseasoned. Salt’s primary function in cooking is not to act as a flavor of its own right, but rather to accentuate the flavors around it. (This is why salt, even in small amounts, is called for in sweet baked goods.)

But all of these Roman recipes contain copious amounts of either guanciale, or pecorino Romano, or both. Pecorino is already a very salty cheese which is aged for several months to allow its flavor to become even more concentrated, and guanciale is cured in lots of salt and other spices for months at a time. These ingredients are both, without any additional salt, more than salty enough to round out the dishes they are a part of. No additional salt should be added beyond what is already in the cheese and the guanciale, lest these classic dishes become so salty as to be rendered inedible.

 When the water comes to a boil, place a pound of pasta into it, and cook per the manufacturer's instructions, just to al dente—never further. Grate 1 cup of pecorino romano. If you cannot find pecorino where you live, you can either use parmigiano regiano, or for an even better substitution, a local firm sheep’s milk cheese. However, do not buy or use industrially shredded or grated cheese of any kind: they often contain anticaking agents that, while they prevent the cheese from clumping (and from my experience, not as well as the manufacturers had hoped), those same anticaking agents also make it nearly impossible, if not entirely so, for the resulting sauce to become creamy and properly emulsified.

2 minutes before the pasta has finished cooking, reserve a cup and a half of pasta cooking water. Take 3 tablespoons of that pasta water to create a thick paste with the cheese and black pepper. Drain the pasta when it finishes cooking per the manufacturer's instructions to al dente, and then, away from the heat, combine the cheese-water paste and the guanciale with the pasta. With only the paste of water and cheese, this “proto-sauce” is too thick to be sauce by itself. Little by little, while mixing constantly and never returning anything to an open heat source, add more pasta water until a rich, creamy, emulsified sauce forms which is capable of not only coating the exterior of the pieces of pasta but also of going inside of them and transporting the guanciale into the center in the process. Once you have added enough pasta water to turn the paste into a creamy sauce, you are ready to serve. Garnish with extra pecorino, black pepper, and guanciale.  

Photo credits to America's Test Kitchen

Roman Cacio e Pepe: The Original Mac and Cheese

 Cacio e pepe (“cacio” is the word for “cheese” in several regional dialects in central Italy; the word for “cheese” in standard Italian is “formaggio”) is one of the four iconic Roman pasta dishes together with amatriciana, alla gricia, and carbonara. One could argue this humble dish made with only four ingredients, is the culinary ancestor of the American classic mac and cheese.

As I mentioned in the article about carbonara, Italian—and especially Roman—cooking is all about using the best, freshest ingredients with great technique, but not trying to reinvent the wheel. There is one step in this recipe that can seem a little daunting, but with enough patience and practice, I’m sure you’ll add cacio e pepe to the list of dishes you cook regularly at home for your friends and family.

First, let’s discuss ingredients. In this regard, cacio e pepe could not be simpler: it only requires pasta, black pepper (whole at first, then freshly ground), Pecorino Romano cheese, and the pasta’s cooking water. Italians are very protective of the regionality of their ingredients, so, although it is much easier to find a good quality piece of  parmigiano regiano, that isn’t the right cheese for this application Parmigiano, as the name implies, comes from Parma, in the north. This dish, and thus the ideal cheese, are both Roman, so the natural choice is, of course, Rome’s best-known cheese, pecorino romano, made from sheep’s milk. (“Pecore” are “sheep.”)

This will certainly raise the price, but you cannot buy pre-grated pecorino in a tub or canister, unless you hand-selected the piece of cheese and it was grated in front of you and put into the container. You must buy a block of pecorino and grate it yourself, either with a box grater or a microplane, or do as I suggested and have someone grate the cheese in front of you if you want to bring it home already grated. (When I grate my own cheese, I prefer the microplane, and why that’s the case will be discussed later.) Any industrially pre-grated cheese will almost certainly have cellulose, calcium silicate, or some other anti-caking agent. These anti-caking agents will make it impossible to form the sauce correctly, so you should not use any industrialized cheese packed with them.

A quick word of caution: Longtime readers may have noticed the absence of an instruction I typically give several times throughout each of my recipes in the Roman pasta series (the standalone recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana that I published late in 2021 and the 3 other bases, plus papalina, which I’ve recently put out). Normally, I’ll call for layered salting of dishes. Make a mirepoix? You should season it? Add some chicken stock? Season again. And so on—for each ingredient or set of ingredients. Each ingredient normally only gets a little bit of salt at a time since my philosophy is to add salt continuously as I cook so that nothing is underseasoned. Salt’s primary function in cooking is not to act as a flavor of its own right, but rather to accentuate the flavors around it. (This is why salt, even in small amounts, is called for in sweet baked goods.)

But all of these Roman recipes contain copious amounts of either guanciale, or pecorino Romano, or both. Pecorino is already a very salty cheese which is aged for several months to allow its flavor to become even more concentrated, and guanciale is cured in lots of salt and other spices for months at a time. These ingredients are both, without any additional salt, more than salty enough to round out the dishes they are a part of. No additional salt should be added beyond what is already in the cheese and the guanciale, lest these classic dishes become so salty as to be rendered inedible.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil (with at least a gallon of water in a 6-quart pot), and cook a long pasta according to the manufacturer’s instructions. While the water is coming to a boil, place a tablespoon of black peppercorns in a dry (i.e., no oil) skillet and keep the skillet constantly moving over the burner for between 30 seconds and 1 minute, or until the peppercorns become fragrant. Then, turn off the heat, and using another pan or another suitable food-safe object, crush and reserve the toasted peppercorns. (If you have multiple pepper mills, use one that until now has been empty, if you want an even easier way to break down the pepper. Otherwise, place the heavy object on top of the peppercorns in a single layer, and put your body weight into that object. You need either the burrs of a mill—that is otherwise empty and contains no untoasted  pepper—or the whole weight of your body pressing down on them in order to crack the peppercorns.) Grate 1 cup of pecorino into a bowl and combine the cheese and the pepper.

When the pasta is 3 minutes from being done, reserve a cup and a half of the pasta cooking water. From that, start by taking 3 tablespoons of water and combining the water with the pepper and cheese. Stir. I mentioned earlier that my grating implement of choice is my microplane, rather than my box grater. Microplanes only have one grating setting, but that setting is usually as fine or finer than the finest setting available on a box grater. In order to prevent something that essentially looks like the iconic “cheese pull” (think of splitting open the two halves of a grilled cheese sandwich, or pulling a single slice of pizza away from the rest of the pizza) from happening to this sauce—which would prevent it from becoming creamy—three things absolutely must be true: you haven’t used a cheese that was pre-grated and processed with an anticaking agent, you’ve grated your own cheese as finely as possible, and you are not combining the sauce and the pasta in a hot pan or over a heat source. Be sure all of these things are true before you proceed any further.

When the pasta finishes cooking, drain it, and place it in a saucepan off the heat. Combine the pasta with your pepper-cheese-water paste. As it is now, the paste should be too thick to be a sauce on its own. Stir and toss to combine. Start adding pasta water (and keep mixing) until an emulsified sauce forms. You will probably add another cup or so of water, but I cannot say for sure, since I do not know exactly how starchy your pasta water was, or how thick you had made your paste. Your objective is to make a creamy sauce (without any cream) that coats each strand of your pasta, but which isn’t too watery.

Serve, optionally garnishing with even more grated pecorino and freshly ground black pepper. 

Photo Credits to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Serious Eats 

Classic Roman Carbonara

Italians, but especially Romans, are known all over the world for their basic pasta dishes which are much greater than the sum of their parts. There are four basic sauces from Rome that any home cook can and should master. The first is carbonara, which we will cover this week. Following carbonara, they also have cacio e pepe, alla gricia, and amatriciana. (I covered amatriciana late last year, and you can find that recipe by clicking on this link.)

The four Roman sauces are as follows: carbonara is an egg and cheese-based sauce; cacio e pepe is pasta water, pepper, and cheese; alla gricia is cacio e pepe plus guanciale; and amatriciana is a tomato sauce with chili and guanciale.

Carbonara, authentically, contains eggs which have barely been cooked. My version of the dish cooks the eggs, so any risk of foodborne illness is removed, but, if executed properly, there should barely be any textural change between the raw eggs and the eggs that have gone through my process.

In a wide, shallow pan, dice some guanciale. Guanciale is a cured pork product like pancetta, but they come from different regions of the pig. Guanciale comes from the jowl/jaw, while pancetta comes from the belly (familiar to the average American home cook as the source of bacon). As such, pancetta and guanciale are both deeply flavorful, cured pork products. Because the traditional recipe calls for guanciale, so will mine, but I will add the caveat that if guanciale is unavailable, pancetta is a perfectly acceptable substitute. Add just a touch of olive oil—barely a tablespoon—to your skillet, and when it comes up to temperature, add the guanciale. Cook the guanciale in the oil until rendered and crispy, like you would bacon. Reserve the guanciale.

Carbonara was invented as a dish for the poor in a time of necessity, so the traditional recipe calls for whole eggs. Two eggs per portion will provide enough sauce, but that may be too heavy. My modification is to instead use 1 whole egg and 1 fewer egg yolk for a given number of portions (3 portions should call for 3 eggs and 2 yolks; 4 portions should call for 4 eggs and 3 yolks; etc.). Beat this in a large bowl until no streaks of white remain. Season this very liberally with freshly ground black pepper. The name of the dish may have come from the fact that the copious amounts of black pepper in the dish resembled the carbon dust on men’s clothes when they returned from mining or otherwise working with coal in Lazio and elsewhere. Into the beaten eggs, place ½ ounce of cheese per egg or partial egg (3 portions call for 3 eggs and 2 yolks, giving 5 parts, thus calling for 5/2 ounces of cheese, etc.).

A quick word of caution: Longtime readers may have noticed the absence of an instruction I typically give several times throughout each of my recipes in the Roman pasta series (the standalone recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana that I published late in 2021 and the 3 other bases, plus papalina, which I’ve recently put out). Normally, I’ll call for layered salting of dishes. Make a mirepoix? You should season it? Add some chicken stock? Season again. And so on—for each ingredient or set of ingredients. Each ingredient normally only gets a little bit of salt at a time since my philosophy is to add salt continuously as I cook so that nothing is underseasoned. Salt’s primary function in cooking is not to act as a flavor of its own right, but rather to accentuate the flavors around it. (This is why salt, even in small amounts, is called for in sweet baked goods.)

But all of these Roman recipes contain copious amounts of either guanciale, or pecorino Romano, or both. Pecorino is already a very salty cheese which is aged for several months to allow its flavor to become even more concentrated, and guanciale is cured in lots of salt and other spices for months at a time. These ingredients are both, without any additional salt, more than salty enough to round out the dishes they are a part of. No additional salt should be added beyond what is already in the cheese and the guanciale, lest these classic dishes become so salty as to be rendered inedible.

This dish involves cooking over a double boiler. Put an oven mitt on your non-dominant hand; you’ll need your dominant hand free to whisk and use a ladle. Set a pot of water onto a burner and bring it to a simmer—not a boil!—and place the bowl that contains the egg and cheese over the double boiler. Be sure that two things are true of the water: 1) it never comes above a simmer and 2) it never touches the bottom of the bowl. If either—or worse, both—of those things are true, you will not maintain a loose, “sauce-able” texture, and you’ll end up with tiny curds of cheesy scrambled egg.

Work on adjacent burners. My highest-powered burner is my left-front, so I like to work on my pasta on my left and my sauce (any sauce, not just carbonara) on my right. As soon as the water in the left burner reaches a rolling boil, the pasta goes in. Simultaneously, the right burner should have the pot of simmering water ready to go. With your nondominant (mitted) hand, place and hold the pot into the double boiler, i.e., put it into the top of the pan but hold it steady so your whisking doesn’t destabilize it. Whisk constantly. If you don’t, you will end up with cheesy scrambled eggs. There is a time and a place for scrambled eggs; carbonara certainly isn’t either of those. Periodically, use your mitted hand to remove the bowl from the double boiler, and whisk for a few seconds off the heat, to further help control the temperature of the eggs and prevent scrambling.

When the pasta is about halfway done (about 5 minutes into the cooking process), take the eggs off the double boiler, momentarily put your whisk down, switch to a ladle, and place 2 ladlefuls of starchy water in a heatproof container. Put the ladle down and return to the whisk. Then, practically drop by drop to start with, start pouring the water into the egg-and-cheese mixture. DO NOT dump all the water in at once. If you do, you will end up with irreversible scrambling because the eggs were over simmering water and the pasta water was vigorously boiling; that temperature difference will be enough to scramble the eggs if you are not careful. As you add more pasta water to the eggs, add the remaining pasta water faster. You will certainly need to use 1 ladleful; the second is there in case you want to slightly loosen the consistency of the sauce if it still seems too firm. Curdling is prevented by constant whisking, which disrupts the egg protein networks and prevents them from seizing up when they come in contact with the boiling water, which is hotter than the eggs.

When the pasta is al dente per the package’s instructions, immediately drain it, turn off the double boiler, and, off the heat, combine the pasta and the sauce.

Garnish with parmigiano reggiano (or, more authentically, since this dish is from Lazio and not Emilia-Romagna, use pecorino romano) and the reserved guanciale.




















(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Lenten Recipes: Week 5: Simple Caprese Salad

1. Wash, core, and slice 4-5 large vine-ripened tomatoes.

2. Slice 6-8 ounces of (buffalo-milk) mozzarella cheese.

3. On the intended serving platter, build alternating overlapping layers of cheese and tomato

4. Season with salt and freshly cracked black pepper

5. Drizzle with olive oil, and optionally (lightly) with balsamic vinegar, preferably aged in oak

6. Scatter whole leaves of Italian basil throughout the salad

7. Serve

(Credit to the Wikimedia Commons)

Lenten Recipes, Week 3: Simple Pasta Puttanesca with Tuna

1. Place the contents of one can of tuna into a saucepan.

2. Begin to cook the tuna, seasoning it with paprika, garlic powder, salt, and pepper.

3. Either make a tomato sauce from fresh using this recipe or use a jarred sauce.

4. Slice as many olives as you’d like (and/or use capers) and place them in the sauce, being careful not to oversalt the sauce if using a jarred one.

5. Prepare a long pasta according to the package’s instructions and drain when al dente.

6. Combine the sauce and the pasta in the larger of the two pans.

7. Serve, without garnishing with cheese. Italians in general never mix cheese and fish (or seafood in general). 

 

(Photo credits to the Wikimedia Commons)

Revised Bolognese

The Bolognese alla Quarentena has to be one of my most cooked sauces here at home, and a few weeks ago, I made a change to the recipe that merits more than a quick footnote update to the original recipe. The alla Quarentena, as I’ve been preparing it, has always been with a rather lean ground turkey, but traditional Bolognese is made with ground beef (honestly, I don’t remember the last time I worked with ground beef), so I’ll make two changes to the alla Quarentena here: 1) ground turkey will revert back to the original traditional ground beef, and 2) I’ll make the signature change that differentiates this recipe from my other one.

This recipe begins the same way, by sauteing 1 pound of ground beef (a good ground chuck is best). Beef has a significant advantage over turkey: it’s a lot fattier. The most common ground beef sold here in the United States is 80/20. That is, 80 percent of the meat is protein and 20 percent is fat. In general, this is the perfect ratio of ground beef for almost anything. If one of my recipes calls for ground beef, you can safely assume I want you to use 80/20 unless I say otherwise. The ground turkey I’ve worked with, on the other hand, is 93/7. Poultry in general is leaner than beef or pork, but even by poultry standards, this is very lean. (So lean, in fact, that I don’t think I could find beef that lean without going to a specialty butcher shop; most ground beef is 90/10 or higher.)

This higher fat content of the ground beef over the ground turkey (20% versus 7% means that the beef is basically 3 times fattier than the turkey) is important for three reasons: Fat is a barrier that allows for even heat transfer from the cooking surface to the protein. Without that barrier to move the heat from the pan to the food, it cooks unevenly. If that barrier doesn’t exist, I need to create it by adding fat into the system myself, which comes in the form of olive oil. Second, cooking an animal (in any form—ground, as a steak, etc.) in its own fat adds another complex dimension of flavor that is impossible to replicate when cooking an animal in some other fat. With fatty beef, most of the fat is in the beef, and it can be rendered out and used to cook the beef with close to no additional fat. Doing this allows the “beefiness” of the beef to shine, whereas with the turkey, since that fat basically isn’t there, the fat isn’t turkey fat, but olive oil. Don’t get me wrong, I like olive oil, but cooking turkey in olive oil (which obviously isn’t the turkey’s own fat) doesn’t give as robust a flavor to the turkey as the method for the beef. Third, fattier meat stays moister longer. This is why, in general, it’s really easy to prepare a filet mignon terribly, but it’s almost impossible to mess up a brisket in that sense. Beef has more fat than turkey, so I have to put in less effort to keep the beef itself just as good as the sauce it’s sitting in compared to the work I have to do to have the same effect on the much leaner turkey.

In any case, the first step to any good Bolognese is browning the protein of choice. For reasons that will become apparent later, do this in an oven-safe vessel. Whether I use this method or my older method, my preferred vessel of choice anytime I make a Bolognese is my 8-quart stainless steel Dutch oven, but you don’t necessarily need a Dutch oven; anything big, heavy, and oven-safe should do the trick. Protein expels water from within its cells at first, and at this point, it looks gray and, frankly, quite unappealing. However, if you’ve been cooking long enough, you’ll start learning to recognize the different sounds proteins make when they’re expelling that water versus when they’re frying in the fat you put in the pan (or which they already naturally contain). Listen for that sound to change, and with it, watch for the color to change. This is one of the points where I deviate from the original Bolognese alla Quarentena, and one of the keys to making this recipe successful. When you start browning the meat, preheat your oven to 250 Fahrenheit. By the time you finish browning the meat and preparing everything else, your oven should be up to temperature. And even if it’s not quite there yet, that’ll be okay—more on that in a few paragraphs.

This sauce is quite simple, and rather similar to the alla Quarentena sauce or the Sauce Tomate I posted in October when I covered the French Mother Sauces. In a food processor, combine 1 large yellow onion, 6 cloves of garlic, 1 large red bell pepper, and 6 Roma tomatoes, and keep the processor running until the sauce is as smooth as possible, given you’re using a food processor and not a blender. Place the sauce into the vessel you have chosen, where the browned meat should already be. Add to that enough water so that you have 3 parts tomato mixture to 2 parts water. Season this with freshly cracked black pepper, dried oregano, dried dill, dried thyme, dried basil, garlic powder, and onion powder. Stir to combine all the spices and to make sure nothing has burned on the bottom or sides. Place this sauce into the oven (which, again, should be set to 250 Fahrenheit). As mentioned before, it’s totally fine if your prep work is quicker than the time it takes your oven to hit 250. If that happens to be the case, just put the oven-safe vessel into the oven and let it go. In any case, leave the sauce in the oven for at least 1 ½ and up to 4 hours. Resist the temptation to open the oven door for any reason; don’t look at it, don’t stir it, don’t rotate the pan, don’t add more liquid. Leave it alone. This, I think, is one of the areas where home cooks struggle the most: knowing what needs constant babysitting and what can be left alone for hours on end. There’s a ton of liquid in that vessel. Nothing is going to burn, and the oven is at such a low temperature that you don’t have to worry about the reduction process. This is absolutely a recipe that can be left alone.

Up to 4 hours after it went into the oven, turn the oven off and remove the sauce. Stir the sauce again and taste it. Only now, salt it and taste it again. This sauce should never be salted ahead of time (i.e., when you’re preparing it to go into the oven) for two related reasons: 1) temperature and 2) time. I don’t know how accurate your oven is (and, truthfully, you probably don’t know either), and I have no way of knowing how long your sauce will stay in the oven. These are the two variables that control how much something reduces, and reduction is an accelerating process. So if something tastes good before reduction and it reduces just a little bit in my oven, it’ll be okay. But if that same dish tastes good before reduction and it reduces by tenfold in your oven, it’ll be inedibly salty by the end. If you know you have to reduce something, or you even think about reducing it, hold off on salting it until you’re satisfied with the final volume.

As with the original recipe, the ideal serving companion to this sauce is a long, wide, dry pasta, like a good tagliatelle, pappardelle, or fettucine. Cook those according to the package instructions, combine with the sauce, mix, and serve.

Bucatini all'Amatriciana

Amatriciana is a classic Roman sauce named after the nearby town of Amatrice. (Sadly, a few years ago, most of the town was destroyed by a very strong earthquake, and the area is still in recovery after all this time.) This is always properly served as a sauce with bucatini pasta, a close cousin of spaghetti. For a long time, given its base, it has been thought of as a close cousin of carbonara. (That recipe will be coming in four weeks.) Even given this close association with carbonara, it is nowhere near as well-known as its relative. If everyone who knew how good carbonara was tried amatriciana, I am sure a significant majority would also become fans of this tomato sauce. This sauce, though a relative of carbonara, is far less technical than it—much closer to the skill level of my sauce tomate from my French Mother Sauces series than to the skill level required for proper carbonara.

One thing stands in the way of the average home cook being able to make this sauce regularly: confusion about one of the ingredients and its substitutability or lack thereof. Amatriciana (and its relatives like gricia or carbonara) call for a protein called guanciale. Guanciale is a salt-and-spice-cured cut of meat that comes in a slab cut from the cheek of the pig. Guanciale has a very distinct flavor not only because of the muscle it comes from but also because of the spices that are used to cure it and the fact that it remains unsmoked. Try to find good guanciale, but if you can’t then get pancetta. If you can’t find either, go for good prosciutto. Only if guanciale, pancetta, and prosciutto (in that order) are nowhere to be found, look for slab bacon.

 
Cut 6 ounces of your pork product into strips and then cut across those strips to make lardons. Bear in mind that the lardons will contract significantly (by about half) as the fat renders out while the lardons are cooking, so cut them larger than you want them to end up in the final dish. Place the pork product (ideally guanciale) into a cold sauté pan. When the guanciale has been placed into the pan, turn the heat to medium (but no higher) and allow the fat to gradually render out of the guanciale. You don’t need any extra fat for this process. The fact that you are starting at a low temperature means the guanciale will be able to cook solely in its own fat since the low temperature gives the fat a head-start at melting relative to the cooking of the protein in the guanciale.

After about 10 minutes or however long it takes the guanciale to get to your desired state of crispiness, place 1 28-ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes into the saucepan where the guanciale is. Be careful since the tomatoes have plenty of water in them and there is plenty of fat in the pan from the guanciale. Because of this, there may be some splattering. Be careful to avoid burning yourself at this stage. Stir to prevent anything from catching and burning on the bottom or sides. Allow the sauce to simmer uncovered on low heat for 20-30 minutes.

Cook 1 pound of bucatini as directed. 2 minutes before draining, reserve ¾ cup of the pasta cooking water. Drain the remaining water when a timer set according to the manufacturer’s instructions beeps. Place the pasta in the sauce. Toss to combine. If the sauce is too thick, use some of the reserved pasta cooking water to adjust the consistency and build an emulsified sauce.

Garnish with fresh-grated Pecorino Romano. If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Spaghetti Aglio e Olio

Today, we’re going back to basics with spaghetti aglio e olio, a Neapolitan pasta with a family twist. Everyone should have this simplest of pasta dishes in their repertoire. It tastes great, it’s cheap, and its ridiculously easy, so even a beginner cook (even a kid, with proper supervision!) can make this without much of a fuss.

Aglio e olio is so simple, and yet so flavorful. This will, quite possibly, be the shortest recipe I’ve ever written. Bring a gallon of water to a boil in a large, lidded pot. When the water comes to a boil, put in a pound of high-quality spaghetti or another long pasta. Cook that according to the package’s instructions, reserving a cup of the cooking water into a heat-proof container at the halfway mark.

Finely chop 3 large cloves of garlic. Coat a sauté pan with about 4 tablespoons of olive oil—enough to generously cover the whole surface of the pan. Be more generous than you think you should be since this oil will form the bulk of your sauce. Fry the garlic until aromatic. Zest and juice one lemon into the oil, being sure to catch any seeds. Lightly season the oil with salt and pepper, bearing in mind that more salt (from parmesan) will be coming later.

Once the pasta has cooked according to the manufacturer’s instructions and drained into a colander, place the pasta into the lemon-garlic-oil sauce, and start stirring. Keep stirring, and slowly stream in your pasta water. Go slowly to avoid splattering. (This step and the draining of the pasta—getting rid of a gallon of boiling water—are steps that require not just supervision but hands-on help from an experienced adult if a kid is making this.) Use as much or as little as you need to form a glossy, emulsified sauce. 

Garnish the pasta with parmesan. Serve.

Our family twist is that we serve this alongside sauteed broccoli; the fact that we sauté the broccoli in garlic-infused oil (separately from the sauce, but with the same intentions of infusing the garlic into the oil) brings a nice unity to the dish, and the cooked-through-but-still-somewhat-crunchy broccoli provides not only a good color contrast (yellow/green) but also a nice texture contrast against the pasta.

This pasta truly is a work of genius. Don’t embellish it too much; let it speak for itself. That something so simple can be so good truly is one of the marvels of proper authentic Italian cuisine.

Sauce Tomate

As I said in the intro, my family’s palate has been distinctly Italian even in the century since we left Italy. So, there’s one French mother sauce we consume and prepare more often than all the others combined—the one some French chefs (Alex included) will actually defer to Italians as the ultimate authority: the tomato sauce. I know I started the series singing the praises of Chefs Escoffier and Carême as titanic visionaries who changed cooking forever, and by saying that the formulation of mother and daughter sauces is an enormous part of that legacy, but dare I say, Alex is right and Chefs Escoffier and Carême are wrong here (especially in the notion that a roux belongs anywhere near a tomato sauce; tomatoes have more than enough pectin-- a natural thickener-- in their cells to no longer need help from anything else but time, and a roux would completely change the consistency). That is, the French “sauce tomate” is not the best form of a tomato sauce and as someone of considerable Italian blood, I’d much rather teach the Italian method than the French one.

I’ll leave no stone unturned, no question unanswered. Nothing will be “too obvious to answer”—a mistake that experienced chefs on the internet sometimes make. Let’s start with what is certainly the most obvious element of a tomato sauce: the tomatoes. I always use some subset of these 4 tomato products in my tomato sauces, prepared in the Italian tradition: Roma tomatoes, on-the-vine tomatoes, cherry or grape tomatoes, and San Marzano tomatoes. Roma and vine tomatoes are best in the summer. Cherry or grape tomatoes, which are much smaller, stay good longer. San Marzano tomatoes, grown in peak season then preserved and packed, are also always an excellent option, though, since they must be grown in a protected area of Italy (in the same way the French are particular about what you can call “real champagne”), they are certainly the most expensive option.

I remember that when we stayed at his place in the summer (winter, technically, in the southern hemisphere) in 2007, one of my granduncles, the most recent link our family has to Italy, spent hours marking a little x at each tomato’s top and bottom poles, dropping the tomato in boiling water, letting the skin loosen, pulling it off, and then shocking it in ice water—before cooking it in the sauce in earnest for several hours. If you want to be as thorough as he was when he made that sauce, you absolutely can follow his lead. But if you don’t have the time or energy to undergo such a labor-intensive process, you can absolutely produce a stunning sauce omitting this step.

How many tomatoes you use depends on a variety of factors largely reducible to only one: personal taste. In general, I like 5 tomatoes per pound of pasta. This can vary depending on whether I have more fleshy vegetables (bell peppers), the juiciness of the tomatoes, or precisely what sauce I’m making. I very rarely deliberately use only tomatoes in my sauces; even by adding bell peppers (usually 5:2 or 6:2, tomatoes: bell peppers), the sauce remains very tomato-forward.

Among Italians, the texture of a proper tomato-based sauce is always one of the hottest culinary debates. If I’m making a sauce destined to be served with pasta, then I keep it fairly chunky, using a food processor. But if I’m making a tomato sauce that will be combined with cream (as in the recipe I posted for Stroganoff), then I make the sauce as creamy as possible by using a blender instead.

We rarely have carrots or celery at home, so I can rarely ever make a complete “sofrito,” but I would strongly recommend very finely mincing—almost to a paste—carrots, onions, celery (the classic French mirepoix) and garlic. I normally only have regular access to onions and garlic, but whatever you have, dice it, and sweat it out (cook off the internal moisture without much color) before adding tomatoes and peppers that have been blended to your desired consistency. When the blended tomatoes hit the pan, season everything with dried oregano, dried basil, and freshly ground black pepper, but wait until the sauce has reached its final volume before seasoning it with salt.

Keep an eye on your tomato sauce to prevent it from burning and add water as necessary. Cook, uncovered at a low simmer for at least 45 minutes and up to 3 hours.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Easy Homemade Pesto alla Genovese

Pesto alla Genovese is a summertime classic that anyone can prepare with the most minimal set of ingredients and tools, and which every cook should know. Most primitively, anyone with something to apply crushing pressure, something to crush, and something to hold the thing that is being crushed (like a mortar and pestle and their contents) can prepare a pesto. In fact, the name of this sauce comes from the fact that Ligurian chefs in the city of Genova used to prepare this sauce strictly with this most ancient of cooking utensils. However, now that we are in the 21^st century, having a mortar and pestle at the ready is quite rare, so this recipe will instead make use of more modern equipment: a blender or a food processor. This recipe might be the simplest I’ve ever posted, so, in all likelihood, it’ll also be the shortest.

The defining characteristic of the best pesto sauces is the freshness of the ingredients. Ideally, you should buy a fresh basil plant and have extra virgin olive oil on hand for this recipe. In addition, you will need 2-3 cloves of fresh garlic (throw it away if it's sprouting) and some kind of nut. This recipe will use walnuts, but pine is most traditional, and I've heard of recipes that use almonds.

Before the nuts can be processed, they should be roasted to maximize their flavor. Be careful: nuts go from “not done” to “done” to “overdone” in seconds. Some people roast nuts and seeds on sheet trays in the oven, but I get too scared, so, for maximum control, I roast my nuts or seeds in a dry (no oil, butter, etc.) sauté pan or frying pan over a conservative medium-low heat. This allows me to constantly move the nuts, so they don’t stick, and constantly evaluate their doneness by how they look and smell. If the nuts burn, start over.

Now, process the roasted nuts and the garlic until a rough paste forms. Add a little bit of salt now—but not as much as you want to season the final product—to take advantage of the abrasive qualities of salt’s crystalline structure. 

              Tear off the leaves and stems from your basil plant and place them in the food processor with the zest and juice of one citrus fruit (ideally a lime or lemon). This will both give the sauce some freshness (by cutting through the richness of the olive oil still to come) and stop the basil from oxidizing. Process again.

Leave the blades of the food processor running and slowly stream in olive oil until a cohesive emulsion forms and there is enough sauce in the processor.

Continue processing while sprinkling in (ideally freshly-grated) Pecorino Romano, Parmigiano Reggiano, or another hard, grated, Italian cheese.

The cardinal sin against pesto is to cook it for a long time. Basil is especially sensitive to heat in its fresh form, and applying any kind of heat to it drastically changes the flavor profile. Cook the pasta to al dente doneness, and then, together with a few tablespoons of starchy pasta cooking water, toss the (hot) pasta and the (room temperature) sauce together. Never make the sauce and let it simmer in a pan on the side, especially not as one would do for several hours in a Bolognese or Pomodoro. 

 

Chicken Marsala

Chicken Marsala is an Italian classic with relatively few ingredients, but that can instantly be elevated by using good ingredients and superior care and technique.

First, let us answer the question of what wines to use, given the importance of wine in the dish as evidenced by its name. There are two general categories of Marsala wine: dry and sweet. Both have sweet and fruity flavor profiles, but the "sweet" variation is much sweeter. Drink that with dessert. For this recipe, use the other kind-- dry marsala. It'll still be sweet, but not so aggressively as its counterpart. Like a lot of things in Italian cuisine named after locations, it's only the real deal if you can verify that it comes from wherever it's named after-- in this case, from a region of Sicily. Imported Marsalas can be significantly more expensive, but if at all possible, find them. In any case, whether you use a domestic wine or an imported one, look for the oldest, darkest Marsala available. They don't sponsor me, so I won't say explicitly who, but for as long as I've been cooking with Marsala, I've been using a high-quality domestic wine from upstate New York; I already have had great success with this recipe as it is, and I'm sure it would be even better after the pandemic ends if I could prepare this with imported wine.

As I've said in nearly every other recipe I've published so far, mise en place (that is "[setting] everything in its proper place" in French-- doing the washing, peeling, cutting, measuring, etc. ahead of time) is of paramount importance for the success of this recipe. You need several things set up for this recipe. Separately, measure out a cup each of Marsala (a third of the bottle-- a "cup" is 8 ounces, which is significantly more than the "glass" one would pour to drink the wine; a cup is 8oz/235mL, while a “glass” is about 5oz/150mL) and some sort of animal stock. Chicken, beef, veal, or any combination of the three are acceptable. However, I do recommend that if you're preparing steak marsala, you use primarily beef stock; veal marsala uses primarily veal stock, and chicken marsala uses primarily chicken stock. I find that cooking animal protein in its own fat or using the same stock to form a sauce to accompany the protein being prepared lends the best flavor, but Marsala wine pairs well with all three, so you can use whatever stock you have.

In a perfect world, the stock would match the protein and be homemade, but store-bought stock that doesn't necessarily match is fine. My only cautions are to avoid fish stock and vegetable stock. The former is far less intense than the wine, so the flavor of the wine would immediately and completely overpower it; especially if it's low-quality, it may also be far too salty. The latter is not only less intense and thus immediately overpowered like the former, but more often than not, its most predominant flavor (especially if it's store-bought) is salt, not the flavor of any of its components.

Additionally, wash and slice half a pound of portobello, baby bella, or button mushrooms. Ideally, introduce as little moisture to the mushrooms as possible, so dampen a paper towel and individually clean the mushrooms with it, rather than under running water. Using the latter method, the mushrooms will saturate; if they do, they'll burn before they release all their moisture, or they won't develop any color and will instead become soggy. Clean the mushrooms well but introduce as little water as possible to them in doing so. Once washed, slice the mushrooms along their length.

Preparation is also required for the chicken itself and the flour that will eventually coat it. Place several heaping tablespoons of flour on a plate, and season the flour with salt, pepper, dry thyme, dry oregano, dry basil, paprika, and garlic powder. Mix by hand until homogenous. On a clean cutting board with a long, clean, sharp knife, butterfly your chicken breasts. That is, make a long cut parallel to the cutting surface along the long edge of the piece of chicken, cutting all the way through to produce two pieces of identical shape but half the thickness of the original. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again because no amount of repetition of food safety information will ever be enough. DO NOT WASH YOUR CHICKEN BEFORE PREPARING IT. DOING SO WILL ONLY CREATE MORE CROSS CONTAMINATION. Once the chicken has been properly cut and butterflied, dredge the chicken in the seasoned flour. Coat the chicken in the flour completely but shake off any excess by tossing each piece of chicken. Any excess flour beyond exactly what is needed to coat and season the chicken will become gummy. Keep the chicken cutlets on a single layer with lateral space between them so they do not stick to any neighbors.

Preheat a thin film of oil (I prefer extra virgin olive or extra virgin avocado)—enough to entirely coat the bottom of the pan, but not any more than is absolutely necessary to do that. The oil will be hot enough when ¼ teaspoon of water dropped into it sizzles and evaporates in 3 seconds. If the evaporation takes longer, your pan is not hot enough; if it happens sooner, back off the heat because your chicken will burn on the outside long before it is cooked on the inside. When the oil is at the right temperature, place the cutlets in the pan in such a way to not overcrowd it. Overcrowding will steam the chicken rather than shallowly frying it; steaming the chicken rather than frying will give the flour-based dredge a very unpleasantly gummy texture; the same effect will occur if the frying oil is too cold`. After 2 minutes, turn the chicken over and brown the other side another 90 seconds. These chicken breast cutlets are thin and cook quickly, but they’re not quite done yet—by design. Reserve the chicken on a separate plate off the heat. You’ll need to come back to it later.

You now need to take advantage of some fond built up in your pan—that is, some of the brown stuff full of flavor that shallow-frying the chicken left behind in the pan. This fond will burn if not covered with stuff, so be sure to do all the chopping you need to do for this next step well before it’s time to execute it—this demonstrates the importance of mise en place, even in home cooking. Add a finely chopped onion, the sliced mushrooms, and 2 minced garlic cloves to the pan, in that order. Stir; minced garlic burns quickly if left unattended. Allow the onions and the mushrooms to caramelize, helping them gain more color and flavor by deglazing the pan with some balsamic vinegar—just a few dashes. The better the balsamic vinegar, the stronger the flavor, so since the balsamic vinegar isn’t the star of the show, I’d say no more than a teaspoon. “Deglazing” simply means “using a cooking-grade acid [citrus juices, vinegar, wine, etc.] to chemically loosen flavorful stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan.” Once the onions are caramelized, pour in the stock first. Then, MOVE THE PAN OFF THE HEAT before adding the Marsala wine to be as safe as possible. Two things make Marsala Marsala. The first is the kind of grape used to make the wine, only found in one area of Sicily. The second is the fact that Marsala wine is not pure wine, but wine “spiked” with brandy. Whereas 10% alcohol might be normal for a white wine (although I’ve cooked with as low as 7%) and 13% might be about right for a red wine (I’ve seen anywhere between 10 and 15), Marsala wines, because of the Brandy, average anywhere between 17% and 22%. (Pure brandy is anywhere from 35 to 65% alcohol, and the presence of the brandy fortifying this wine raises its alcohol content above almost any other wine, like averaging an outlier will do to any statistical set). Cooking with it thus requires the same amount of care as cooking with the pure liquor.

Cooking with any kind of liquor or liquor-fortified wine will produce a colored flame, in a showy cooking technique called “flambé” in which liquor is added to food in a previously-heated pan that has been moved away from a heat source and then returned to then momentarily set the alcohol on fire to burn off the alcohol but leave the desirable flavor compounds that flavor the liquor. White wines, and even normal red wines with “high” alcohol content (by red standards, so around 14%) don’t flambé because even being 1/7 alcohol, that’s not enough to make the alcohol combust. But Marsala does have enough alcohol by volume (20% plus-or-minus a few percentage points depending on who made it) because it contains brandy. The brandy’s alcohol content is so much higher than the content of the wine without it that it brings up the overall average alcohol content by volume of the wine enough that Marsala, but not other wines, will almost certainly flambé. Of course, if you were to cook directly with the liquor, you would need to be extremely careful: pure liquors will certainly flambé because they have enough alcohol in them—in many cases, more alcohol than other things.

Flambé cooking can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Just remember to wear safe clothing (nothing too baggy or dangling) and add the flambé liquid off the heat. If you do, when you put it back on the heat, your pan will catch fire, and you’ll get to enjoy the show (people pay top-dollar to flambé cheese and other foods just to have the fun visual experience of watching the flames, because they look nice and the colors change depending on which spirit was used) for a few seconds. The fire will die down naturally once the alcohol burns off. If you have family around, I strongly suggest that you warn them before you prepare a Chicken Marsala or any other dish that involves flambé so as not to startle them. Once the alcohol has burned off, gently simmer the sauce for a few minutes to intensify color and flavor.

Emulsify 1 tablespoon of cold butter per person into the sauce by cutting pieces of butter straight from the fridge into the sauce and whisking constantly until it melts and is indistinguishable from the rest of the sauce. Return the chicken to the pan. Maintain at a quiet simmer. The chicken is almost cooked through, having gone most of the way in the pan when it was fried and another part in carryover cooking from its own residual heat on the separate plate. Now, lay the cutlets into the finished sauce and spoon it over the cutlets. Let the cutlets meld with the sauce. Leave the chicken in the sauce for another 10 minutes over low heat; after 10 minutes, the chicken will be cooked completely. Some of the coating will—deliberately—come off the chicken. The small bits of the seasoned flour coating that do come off of the cutlet will finish most of what the emulsion of the butter and the burning off of the alcohol has already done: thickening the sauce.

Prepare 1 pound of pasta per 3 people being served (about 5 ounces per person, or about 140 grams per person) according to the manufacturer’s instructions to al dente. For final presentation, once again separate the chicken from the sauce, combine the pasta and the sauce, and present the chicken served on top of the pasta. Garnish as desired with Parmesan and/or Romano cheese.  

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

(Chicken) Cacciatore

        “Cacciatore” is not, unlike most of the other Italian dishes I have posted or will post in the future, a dish specific to one city or region in Italy, but rather, a style of cooking found throughout the whole country. “Cacciatore” simply means “hunter.” The typical way to prepare a “cacciatore” dish in the Italian American sense is to braise chicken in a spicy tomato sauce. But the Italian way is more varied and is usually much less spicy. Any meats that can be braised (certain cuts of beef, pork, chicken, and, especially traditionally, rabbit) works well. This particular recipe will use chicken thighs. 

If you only take away one thing from these recipes, let it be this: The practice chefs refer to as “mise en place,” that is “[setting] everything in its [proper] place” is a very valuable skill for any cook with any amount of experience. This dish, like all braises, is not a particularly fast-paced dish (unlike, say, a stir-fry, when there are mere seconds between the addition of ingredients, and for which mise en place is absolutely essential), but practicing mise en place is nevertheless still a good idea. While making the necessary preparations, don’t worry about making anything too small or being too exact with relative sizes. As long as the pieces are roughly the same size (so they’ll cook evenly), they don’t need to be really precise or look pretty. This dish, after all, is prepared the way a hunter would make it—that is, in a very rustic way. There are times when precise cuts are essential, and this absolutely is not one of them.

As with almost any braised dish, there is one thing that makes or breaks the success of the execution of the recipe: time. Four things need to be considered.

1.    It takes time to brown off the meat of choice so that it does not simply boil in the liquid.

2.    It takes time to develop the flavor of the braising liquid before the meat being braised can be returned to it to actually cook in earnest

3.    Braising meat means cooking it for a long time over low heat in a flavorful liquid, so expect to spend at least an hour with the poultry in the braising liquid (other braises, like short ribs in wine can take anywhere up to 4 hours).

4.    The flavor of any braised dish will always be better and more intense 24 hours after it was prepared; cooling the meat once fully cooked and let it sit in its braising liquid for a day before reheating and finally serving for the first time will provide the best flavor. 

 

I like to start by seasoning flour simply with salt, pepper, and some dried herbs, mixing well to incorporate the seasonings evenly, and then dredge the chicken in the flour. Preheat a thin film of olive oil in your pan of choice—for me, that’s a 9-quart Dutch oven.   Once the chicken has been dredged, split it into batches to be browned. Browning the chicken in batches prevents overcrowding. If the pan is overcrowded, the chicken will steam rather than brown. Leave the chicken on that side for about 2 minutes or until it releases easily from the surface of the pan. At that point, it has browned on one side. Flip the chicken, and let it cook on the other side until that side releases from the pan. This chicken is not cooked all the way through—not by a long shot—but that’s by design. Reserve the chicken onto a separate plate off the heat. This process will have created fond, the technical name for the brown, flavorful bits at the bottom of the pan. Drop a whole sliced onion, three minced garlic cloves, and two julienned red bell peppers (julienning is cutting into long, thin vertical strips) into the pan over medium heat. Drizzle in 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar and 2 teaspoons of red wine vinegar. This will deglaze the pan—that is, lift the fond off the surface of the pan and onto the onions and peppers by the chemical action of the acid in the vinegars. Once the vinegars have been added, stir, and lower the heat if necessary. Sauté the onions, pepper, and garlic until the onions have caramelized, the peppers have softened. Then, add 48 ounces of homemade tomato sauce or passata to the pan, and season as needed with salt, pepper, garlic powder, basil, and oregano. Let this sauce—which will become the braising liquid—come to a boil, then immediately reduce it to a simmer. Hold it there for 5 to 7 minutes, then reintroduce the chicken. Simmer uncovered for an hour on medium-low heat. Stir every 8-10 minutes. Serve as desired. 

Several options exist.

1.    Eating this on its own as a stew—as was originally intended

2.    Serving over rice

3.    Turning the braising liquid into a sauce for pasta prepared to the manufacturer’s instructions until al dente, mixing pasta into the sauce, them topping emulsified pasta and sauce with pieces of chicken  

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Ragù Bolognese alla Quarantena

Ragù Bolognese is a true comfort food, a welcome quasi-nostalgia in this time of uncertainty as we deal with the worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus. Because of this new virus, I’ve had to make some changes to how I prepare Ragù, so this is not a traditional recipe as would be seen in Italy by any means, but it’s similar enough that I’ve coopted the name and adapted a few elements of this classic to make it my own, in part to leave my individual mark on the dish as a home chef, in part because I had to since supplies were limited because of the virus-related lockdowns.

Technically, I’ve only made a proper Ragù Bolognese once or twice since coming home from campus back in March, while we still had wine at home. We haven’t had wine since our only bottle finished very early in the pandemic, and because wine requires handing over an ID for age verification in Georgia, to limit contact with others when we go out, we haven’t bought any in months. Technically, Ragù Bolognese is a simple meat, wine, and stock sauce with a proportionately very small amount of a tomato product (usually highly concentrated tomamto paste, which is just a tomato sauce left over the heat for hours and hours). But since we’ve been out of wine for months now—and we probably won’t get more wine until well into 2021—I’ve made several changes to Ragù Bolognese to fit what we have at home during the quarantines imposed because of the Coronavirus. And while Ragù Bolognese is typically made with ground beef and/or ground pork and/or ground veal, we’ve been using ground turkey since the pandemic broke out. 

My variation on the sauce, in common with the traditional version, starts with browning ground meat: in my case, turkey (traditionally, any combination of beef, pork, and veal). I start with enough olive oil to coat the bottom of my 3-quart sauté pan (or my 9-quart Dutch oven, if the grocery store’s substitutions give me much more meat than I asked for), and I leave it over high heat for several minutes. The oil should be hot enough that a quarter of a teaspoon of water evaporates almost instantly—3 seconds or less—before any meat ever touches the pan. Once the pan is hot enough, the ground meat can go in. When it goes in, it’s okay if the entire block of ground meat goes in as one piece. You will need to stir pretty constantly until it’s broken up into individual grounds of meat. Ground meat doesn’t immediately brown. Before it can do that, it needs to release some moisture which then needs to evaporate. (Don’t worry, this won’t be dry or gummy.) Once the moisture is released and evaporated, the meat will begin to fry in the oil and in its own rendered fat. It takes some time to learn to tell the difference, but the two parts of the browning process sound different.

As with many of the recipes I’ll share, mise en place (“putting everything in its proper place” by having everything chopped, washed, processed, etc. ahead of time) is critical. Part of mise en place here is to process 5 tomatoes, 2 red bell peppers, and one yellow onion until smooth and emulsified (to where you cannot distinguish pieces of tomato from pepper from onion, and you are left with a relatively thick, red liquid in your blender). Once the meat has been browned, this mixture (about 32 ounces of liquid) should go into the pan with the browned meat. Further, add one cup of cartooned, homemade, or reconstituted chicken stock (stock from a powder or bouillon cube is fine). Season with dried oregano, thyme, bay, and dill. Grind in fresh black pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, cover, and let simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring every 7 minutes or so. If the sauce starts to evaporate too quickly, add in more stock. When the sauce is otherwise complete, taste for salt—you added chicken stock, which may have a considerable amount of salt in it already, so taste the sauce before you add any more salt. 

Cook one pound of long pasta (fettucine, spaghetti, pappardelle, etc.) to one minute short of what the manufacturer lists as the time for al dente pasta. At that point, drain the pasta, and finish the last 60 seconds folding the pasta into the ragù. Serve garnished with parmesan and or pecorino romano. 

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Mother's Day Chicken Parmigiana

I prepared the following recipe today as a special Mother's Day Lunch, and it has proven to be quite popular on Instagram, so I thought I'd share it here as well. Enjoy!

1 18 oz jar of fire-roasted tomato and garlic sauce

1/2 onion finely diced

4 Roma tomatoes

4 cloves garlic

1 on-vine tomato

2 Tbsp each of oregano, salt, freshly-ground black pepper

2 oz Chianti or another medium-body red wine

Bread crumbs

Mayonnaise

Milk

Thinly-sliced (about 3/4") whole chicken breasts-- buy them sliced or make a cut along the long side of the breast so it opens up like a book

Long pasta (linguine, spaghetti, etc.)

Mozzarella

Parmesan

Sweat out the onions in a thin coating of olive oil, letting some fond develop on the bottom of the pan, but not allowing the onions to burn in a large sauté pan. Process the tomatoes, onion, and garlic until smooth, and use water to collect bits of sauce that didn't come of the food processor. Season with salt, pepper, and oregano. Allow spices to bloom over low heat. Stir. Once fragrant, add wine and raise heat to high to allow alcohol to cook off quickly, then lower heat to low. Add in sauce from jar in 2/3 cup increments, incorporating each measure into the homemade sauce before adding the next. Once whole jar has been incorporated, season again, raise heat to medium, then cover. Maintain over medium heat until ready to serve-- about 40 minutes.

Combine milk and mayonnaise. Season with salt, pepper, and oregano. Season bread crumbs. Trim excess fat from chicken breasts, discard. Dredge chicken first in milk/mayonnaise, then in bread crumbs, shaking off excess each time. Bake at 350° for 32 minutes.

Remove chicken from oven. Slice medium-moisture mozzarella. Top chicken with sliced mozzarella and grated parmesan. Place back in oven, now set to broil on high or to highest possible temperature if broiler isn't available. Leave under broiler for 4 minutes.

Cook pasta according to packaged instructions to al dente so as to be ready when chicken is ready. One minute before the pasta should be ready, remove it and place it in the sauce, allowing some of the water the pasta was cooked in to come into the sauce. Uncover the sauce, and turn off the burner. Let residual heat in pan finish cooking pasta in sauce.

Once pasta, sauce and chicken are ready, plate and serve.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!