The perfect pizza oven is a work of art, heated to 500? Fahrenheit, designed to give a combination of air rolling over the top of the pizza, while the bricks underneath seal the base immediately and it becomes so crisp that when it comes out of the oven and you cut a slice, it will be completely ?rm. I’m not saying anything that has a thick base of dough topped with tomato and cheese is bad — in fact, the kids love it; it’s just not pizza.
I am very proud of the pizza we introduced to London when I worked at the Red Pepper, and later during the time I was at Zafferano, when we launched Spiga and Spighetta, and though we don’t serve pizza at Locanda, we often serve these little pizzette to our guests with aperitifs, while they are waiting for their table. If you want to make big pizza instead of little ones, this recipe will make three — just bake them for about 10 minutes.
Bagna cà ôda (anchovy sauce) is a very typical sauce in the North of Italy. Not everyone likes anchovies, I know (in which case, serve the pizzette without the sauce); but, if you do, you can make up bigger quantities of it and store it in a squeezy bottle in the fridge, then just shake it up before you use it and drizzle it over pasta, or toasted bread rubbed with garlic, whatever you like … Though I would normally say buy anchovies in salt, this is one recipe that is traditionally done with anchovies in oil.
Pizzette
Makes around 24 small pizzette for serving with drinks, or 12 larger ones
For the bagna cà ôda:
For the topping:
Put all the ingredients for the pizzette, except the salt, into a food mixer with a dough hook. Mix for 3 minutes on the ?rst speed, then add the salt and mix for 6 more minutes on the second speed. The dough should be very soft and sticky. If working by hand, mix with a wooden spoon, rotating the bowl as you do so for about 5 minutes, then work it for another 5 minutes with your hands until the dough is smooth.
Turn the dough out on a work surface (you don’t need any ?our), dimple with your ?ngers and fold (see page 140) and leave to rest for 20 minutes.
Lightly ?our your work surface and roll out the rested dough thinly. Have ready 2 upturned baking trays.
With a 5—6cm diameter biscuit cutter, cut the dough into rounds. Lay them on the baking trays and put into the fridge for at least 4 hours — but no longer than 8. If you like, you can roll the trimmings of dough into rough grissini and bake them (see page 142).
A good hour or so before you are ready to bake, preheat the oven as high as it will go. If you have a baking stone, put it into the oven as soon as you turn it on; if you don’t have a stone, use a baking tray.
To make the bagna cà ôda: put the garlic in a small pan with the milk, bring to the boil and then turn down to a simmer and cook until the garlic is soft, about 10 minutes.
While the garlic is cooking, put the anchovies with a little olive oil and butter into a small bowl over the top of the pan and stir to ‘melt’ them — it will only take a few minutes. (Alternatively, what I often do is just put the closed tin of anchovies into boiling water for 8—10 minutes, then take it out carefully, open it up and discard the oil.) Push through a ?ne sieve. Crush the garlic with a little of the cooking milk and mix into the anchovies. Loosen, if necessary, with a little more extra-virgin olive oil.
Remove the dough from the fridge and, with your ?ngers, prod each circle of dough, starting from the centre and working out and around in a circle, then back to the middle again. Prick the tops with a fork, and add your tomatoes, sprinkled with a little sea salt, and the olives.
Slide on to your hot baking stone or baking tray in the oven and cook in batches for 7—10 minutes, depending on the thickness, until golden brown and shiny. Drizzle with a little bagna cà ôda and serve.
]]>You can also serve it with short pasta, such as penne or farfalle; in fact, when the meat is minced (as in the case of beef and pork), it works better with these pastas, and also with fusilli. When you make ragù with wild boar or game, which is cooked on the bone to retain the ?avour, and then ?aked, the meat has a different consistency which will coat long pasta, such as pappardelle or tagliatelle, better. Sometimes, too, we use ragù as a ?lling for ravioli.
Each region of Italy has its favourite ragù; sometimes you will even ?nd a mixture of veal, pork and beef all in one sauce. In Toscana, where my sous chef Federico comes from, they like to add chicken liver to pork or beef ragù. At Locanda we vary the ragù according to the season: so sometimes it might be venison or kid (baby goat) — which we get just after Christmas.
We make ragù with baby goat in a similar way to wild boar but we don’t marinate the meat ?rst. At other times it might be hare, pork, veal or lamb. The beauty of making it at home is that you can cook up a big quantity, then divide it into portions and freeze it, ready to heat through when you want it.
Cook the pasta, reserving the cooking water, as usual, then toss the pasta in the pan of ragù, adding a little of the cooking water if necessary to help the sauce cling to the pasta. Stir in a couple of knobs of butter, and if you like, add some grated pecorino or Parmesan.
Sometimes I make a very quick and simple sausage and tomato ragù, which the kids love. I chop up some good pork sausages, sauté them in a pan with some garlic cloves — no onions — add a tin of good tomatoes and maybe some chopped fresh ones, bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for about 40 minutes until it is good and thick.
Because it makes sense to make ragù in large quantities, I have broken with the pattern of the rest of the book and given recipes that should make enough to feed eight people, or four for two different meals. If you only want to make enough for four at one sitting, just reduce the quantities.
Ragù alla bolognese
Makes enough for 8
To serve:
In the restaurant we cook this in the oven in big pans at about 120?C, gas 1?2, so it just simmers, for about the same length of time as if you cooked it on the stove — if you have a big enough oven and big enough pans, you can do the same.
Take the meat out of the fridge and lay it on a tray and let it come to room temperature, so that it will sear, rather than ‘boil’ when it goes into the pan.
Heat the oil in a wide-bottomed saucepan, add the vegetables, herbs and whole garlic cloves, and sweat over a high heat for 5—8 minutes without allowing it to colour (you will need to keep stirring).
Season the meat with salt and pepper and add to the pan of vegetables, making sure that the meat is covering the base of the pan. Leave for about 5—6 minutes, so that the meat seals underneath and heats through completely, before you start stirring (otherwise it will ooze protein and liquid and it will ‘boil’ rather than sear). Take care, though, that the vegetables don’t burn — add a little more oil, if necessary, to stop this happening.
Stir the meat and vegetables every few minutes for about 10—12 minutes, until the meat starts to stick to the bottom of the pan. At this point, the meat is ready to take the wine.
Add the wine and let it reduce right down to virtually nothing, then add the tomato paste and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring all the time.
Add the passata with 1 litre of water. Bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook for about 11?2 hours, adding a little extra water if necessary from time to time, until you have a thick sauce.
When you are ready to serve the ragù, put it back into a pan and heat through. Cook your pasta (preferably pappardelle, tagliatelle or short pasta) and drain, reserving the cooking water. Add the pasta to the ragù and toss well, adding some of the cooking water, if necessary, to loosen the sauce. Serve with freshly grated pecorino.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, check out this video of Giorgio making Pheasant Ravioli. Enjoy!
]]>I really believe we should eat everything from an animal; it doesn’t make sense to eat only ?llets and steaks, which make up only a small percentage. In Italy, just as I feel salumi represents the traditional food of the people, so too do the recipes for brains, kidneys and feet, since the prime cuts were for the rich people only.
A dish of fried brains says more to me about Italian food than something like tournedos rossini, which is only the grand idea of a composer, not at all re?ective of what the rest of the people ate.
Brains are very popular in Northern Italy, to the point that people used to say that if you ate them, they would make you clever. That’s what my grandmother used to say to my brother Roberto all the time, when he complained that they were soft and he didn’t like the texture — even though she used to keep them in the oven until we came home, so they were really, really crispy on the outside. I always loved them; I thought the sweetness was fantastic, and I liked the quite weird way they were crispy and then so soft inside you didn’t need to chew; they just disappeared in your mouth — a bit like arancini, the fried balls of risotto.
At Locanda, we don’t often put brains on the menu, because not many people order them, but we have regular customers who love them, and we will always cook them for them, as a special.
We serve them cooked in two ways, deep-fried and shallow-fried, on either side of a big square plate (cervello fritto e al saltimbocca). To prepare the brains, you have to wash them gently under water, so that you can take the skin off. The ones that are going to be deep-fried are ?rst passed through some ?our, beaten egg and ?ne breadcrumbs before they go into the hot oil. Next to them, we usually serve a little salad and a very strong salsa verde made with more capers than usual.
We experimented for some time to ?nd another, more unusual way of cooking the brains to serve alongside the deep-fried ones, and eventually came up with the idea of rolling them, like a cigar, inside a slice of prosciutto. Then we sauté them in a non-stick pan with just a ?lm of oil, and a little butter towards the end, and serve them on a bed of stewed leeks, with a sharp Marsala sauce over the top. It is a dish that looks and tastes fantastic.
]]>In Italy, butchers’ shops mostly still do well, because people are concerned about traceability. Just as a tomato isn’t just a tomato to an Italian, we are also very choosy about the meat we eat.
When I go shopping at home with my father, it takes hours, as he goes to this butcher for one particular piece of meat, somewhere else for another, because he thinks they source it or look after it better. Of course, he also knows everyone by name; so there must a big conversation while the meat is being prepared and wrapped up in little paper parcels.
Even in places where supermarkets have killed off the local shops, what they often do is re-employ the butchers to run the supermarket meat counters, so you still have someone there who understands about the meat, someone with knowledge, so you can build up a relationship. Sometimes I think people feel more secure in a supermarket where the meat is portioned up with price tags, so they know how much their bill will be, but if you get to know your butcher, you can say: ‘This is how much I want to spend and who I am cooking for — what do you suggest?’
In Britain, the disasters of BSE, etc., have surely proved that everybody has to take responsibility all the way along the chain. Nobody must cut corners. Think about it: if you rear an animal in its natural habitat, with its natural feed, and slaughter it locally and carefully, you should have no problem. But in the name of pro?t and speed what do we do? We rear our animals intensively, we pump water into them to plump them up and fetch a better price, we inject them with antibiotics, not caring that if we ingest so many our bodies may become so exposed to them that one day, when we are sick and the doctor says, ‘Take antibiotics,’ they won’t do anything for us.
When we compare prices of meat, we have to consider not why something seems expensive, but why its equivalent can be so cheap. How is it possible to rear a chicken properly, kill it, take off its feathers, hang it, etc., and then charge only a few pounds for it? It isn’t possible; really, it isn’t. Short cuts must be taken at the expense of the animals and the quality of the meat.
We have become so used to seeing bright-red beef in vacuum packs in the supermarket that we are apparently suspicious of anything that looks dark. However, the meat is bright red because it has gone from the abattoir to the chill counter as quickly as possible, as it is considered too expensive and time-consuming to hang it in the traditional way, so that it matures properly and its own natural enzymes work on the proteins and break them down. This is the process that makes the meat more tender and improves the ?avour — and turns the ?esh dark-red in the process.
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