"Italian" Ricotta Cheese Pie (Torta di Ricotta)

One of my favorite cookbooks is Susan Purdy’s As Easy As Pie (Atheneum, New York, 1984), a book I found about 12 years ago at Strand, the large used bookstore on Fulton Street in Manhattan.  From it you can learn about the history of pies from Biblical times to the New World.  You can also learn what makes an American pie (“any pastry crust with a sweet or savory filling baked in a shallow round dish with a slanted sides”) a tart (a European cousin of the American pie with only a bottom crust and baked in straight-sided pans), and that deep-dish pies are always baked in deeper plates with a top but without a bottom crust.  What I appreciate the most about this book are the author's detailed instructions on pie making, from pastry-making techniques to how to make different types of pastry dough by using a variety of flours and fats, or by adding to the dough other ingredients such as nuts and chocolate.  I equally appreciate that each recipe even highlights what can be prepared in advance and that through the book Susan Purdy provides tips and hints on how to deal with problems commonly encountered in pie making.  In sum, it’s a book I can’t do without when I want to bake a pie. 

That’s why I found myself flipping through its pages when I wanted to make a pie to bring to a friend’s party.  I wanted to use ricotta as the main ingredient for its filling because I had some in the house that needed to be used.  Her recipe for Italian Ricotta Cheese Pie (Torta di Ricotta) suggests using one of four different types of crust: Basic All-Purpose Flaky Pastry, Sherry Pastry Variation, Nut Pastry Variation, or Cream Cheese Pastry.  I went for the basic recipe because I still have a lot to learn and wanted to check how using vegetable shortening (Crisco) affected the texture of the crust to compare with my recollection of the oil pastry I had made for the rice and mushroom pie (September).   I put no sugar in the crust dough to limit the level of sweetness of the pie.  Even though I don’t think this is an Italian crust (in Italy we don’t have Crisco), the result was good and interesting.  In any case, this is not a traditional Italian cheese cake because a traditional Italian cake would use mascarpone or some other creamy Italian cheese or some cream, and not processed, American cream cheese.

One common problem in making cheese cake is the development of surface cracks, and my cake was not immune to it.  Surface cracks can develop by over-beating the eggs that traps additional air in the batter which tries to escape when it expands while baking in the oven.  They can also be due to sudden changes in temperature.I think that in my case the latter was the cause of the deep slash in the middle of the top of the pie because it only developed after I removed the cake from the oven.  (For interesting and useful tips on making cheese cake, read http://www.dianasdesserts.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/bakingtips.cheesecakes/Cheesecakes.cfm) Probably, I should have turned the oven off few minutes earlier and at that point let it finish baking for few more minutes before cooling at room temperature.  This is another lesson learned.  Nevertheless, the ricotta pie tasted good and was proclaimed by everybody “blog-worthy”.  

Ingredients (for 11-inch pie):

For the pastry:

1 ½ cups all purpose flour

½ tsp salt

6 Tbs unsalted butter, chilled

3 Tbs Crisco

1 teaspoon lemon juice

3 Tbs ice water

1 egg yoke (optional)

Filling:

1 ¾ lb whole or reduced fat ricotta

3 eggs

1 cup granulated sugar

1 package (8 ounce) cream cheese, cut up in small chunks

1 tsp almond extract

1 ½ dark chocolate chips

To make the pastry:

1. Combine flour and saltin the bowl of the mixer or a large bowl. If using a mixer, beat the butter and Crisco together with the dry ingredients at low speed until the mixture looks like dry rice.  If you use your hands to combine the ingredients, incorporate the fats into the dry ingredients using only your finger tips or a pastry blender to limit warming the mixture and melting the fats. (You may want to put the bowl in the refrigerator for ½ before starting making the pastry to help keeping the mixture cool while you work it).
2. Add the liquid ingredients to the mixture a little at a time to control the amount of liquid you add to the pastry.  The amount of liquid you need will vary according to the humidity in the environment.  If you use a mixer, beat the ingredients at low-medium speed until the dough clumps around the paddle.  If you mix the ingredients by hand, work the dough until it clumps together but before it forms a ball to avoid overworking it.
3. Put the dough on a sheet of wax paper and form a ball.  Wrap it and put in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. 
4. After the dough is chilled, set the ball of dough on a lightly floured, large piece of wax paper, and pat it down to a disk.  Using a lightly floured rolling pin and moving from the center to the side, create a disk about 1/8 inch thick and 13 inches in diameter. 
5. Put the baking dish over the dough and flip the latter over it.  Press the dough down against the bottom and wall of the baking dish.  The dough should hang about ¾  to 1 inch over the border of the pie dish. Cut off the excessive dough. Fold the dough around the rim and pinch it with your fingertips to flute the border of the pie shell.
6. Pre-heat the oven at 425 F degrees.  With the tines of a fork, prick the pastry all over the bottom, and chill it until firm, 15-20 minutes.  Then put the pie crust in the oven for about 10 minutes to partially blind bake it. Cool it on a wire rack and lower the oven temperature to 350 F degrees.

To make the filling:

1. If using freshly made ricotta, or if it looks like it has some liquid (the one I used being low fat and commercial did not have any liquid!), press it in a strainer over a bowl to remove extra fluid.
2. In a mixing bowl beat the eggs well.  Brush some of the beaten eggs over the pie shell to seal it against the moisture of the filling. Add the sugar into the eggs and beat them for 2-3 minutes.  Add ricotta, cream cheese, and almond extract, to the eggs and sugar mixture and beat it until smooth.  Stir into it the chocolate chips.

Baking the pie:

1. Pour the filling into the pie shell making sure not to overflow it.  Bake it in the center of the preheated oven for 45 minutes.  Turn the oven off and remove the pie from the oven after about 10 minutes.  Cool it on a wire rack.  Serve it either warm or at room temperature.

A Savory Pie with Rice and Mushroom Filling

I love pies, savory and not.  For me, they are almost a synonymous of wholesomeness and bring back images of a simpler life connected to the land.  Savory pies have also the great advantage that when they contain both protein and vegetables they are almost a full meal.  It was a long time since I had made a savory pie and thus this Labor Day weekend was the right time for one. 

I decided to look for a recipe from Liguria, the northern Italian region that counts several savory pies (torte salate) among its traditional dishes.  What makes Ligurian pies especially interesting is that no butter is used in their dough even though butter is what the cuisine of Liguria’s neighbor, France, prescribes for pie crust making.    Pies from this part of Italy use olive oil.  I’m wondering whether recipes from Provence, the region of France with which Liguria borders, also use olive oil.  More research is needed.  However, one should not be surprise that olive oil is used to make pie crust in Liguria.  This is not a land of pasture and cattle whereas olive oil is one of the major agricultural products of the region.

I’m not sure I have ever had pie crusts made with olive oil before.  They always had either butter or lard, or, in this country, shortening (e.g., Crisco).  Using olive oil instead of either saturated (butter, lard) fat or Trans fat (e.g. Crisco) seemed to make my notion of pie wholesomeness more real.  Unfortunately, I think that the healthiness of this recipe might stop at the crust, but it is a first step in the right direction.  The filling is made of rice cooked in milk (low fat in my case), then mixed with onion, mushroom, and cheese.  The original recipe in Ricette di Osterie e Genti di Liguria (Slow Food Editore, 1995) calls also for two tablespoons of cream. I did not have cream in the house and I added a tablespoon of butter instead to give more richness to the filling.  

Pie crusts made with olive oil don’t have the flakiness of crusts made with shortening or even butter.  However, by using multiple layers of dough as this recipe does, the crust is not one-dimensional and at the same time it is lighter than a butter crust, which is a point in its favor when you have a rich pie filling.  The final result got strong nods of approval by all those who had the opportunity of tasting it. I’m sure you’re going to see more pie recipes on this blog in the near future.

Please note that I have used an electric mixer to make the dough.  I like using the electric mixer  because it leaves your hands free and clean to handle the other ingredients. Of course you can make the dough by shaping the flour into a well on the table or in a large bowl and slowly incorporating the other ingredients.

Savory Rice Pie (Torta di riso) – makes 8 servings

For the dough:

2 ½ cups (about 10 ounces) unbleached, all purpose flour

4 Tbs olive oil

½ cup water

¼ tbs salt

For the filling:

1 quart milk

1 tbs salt

1 ½ cup (about 10 once) Arborio, or other short grain, rice

3 Tbs olive oil

1 onion, chopped

½ once dry porcini mushroom, soaked in warm water

1 cup parsley, chopped

½ cup grated Parmigiano cheese

1 egg, beaten

1 Tbs butter

½ tbs pepper

¼ tbs salt

1. In a mixer, add to the flour at slow speed 4 tablespoons of olive oil, one by one.  Add also the water a little bit at a time.  As you add more liquid to the flour, the latter will change from powder to crumbs until finally it holds together.  If the dough is too dry, add a teaspoon of water one at a time.  If it is too wet, add some flour, a little bit at a time, until it holds nicely together.
2. Take the dough out of the mixer and shape into a ball. Wrap it into a piece a saran wrap and let it rest for one hour.
3. Bring 4 cups of milk with 1 teaspoon of salt to a boil in a 2 quarter pot.
4. Add the rice in the milk making sure to separate all the grains, occasionally mixing.  Cook the rice until it has still a byte.  Then remove the pot form the stove and let it cool for about 10 minutes.
5. In the meantime, strain the dry mushroom that you had previously soaked in warm water. Warm the olive oil in a pan. Sauté the chopped onion in the olive oil until it is translucent.  Stir in the mushroom and the parsley, and cook the mixture for about 10 minutes.
6. Mix the onion and mushrooms into the rice.  Add the grated cheese and quickly stir in the egg so that it does not scramble.  Finally, add the butter and season the filling with salt and pepper.  Set it aside.
7. Pre-heat the oven at 350F.
8. Oil a 10 inch pie dish.  Sprinkle some flour on a clean table surface.  Cut the dough into four parts.  Take one section of dough and, with a rolling pin, stretch it to a thin disk large enough to cover the bottom and the sides of the pie dish. 
9. With the help of the rolling pin move the disk of dough from the table surface to the pie dish.  Brush some oil on the dough.  Lay another disk of dough over the first.  Pour the rice mixture in the pie dish and press it to cover all the dough in the pie dish.  Cover the filling with another disk of dough, brush it with some olive oil, and repeat the same steps again with the last disk of dough. 
10. Make sure the top two disks of dough fully cover the pie dish.  Stretch the dough if necessary and seal the pie by pressing the dough against the brim of the dish.  Cut the dough that hangs out of the pie dish.  Hold a fork with the point of its tines up and press it on the brim of the pie dish.   With the same fork pierce to dough several times to allow for steam out of the pie while it is baking.
11. Bake it at 350F until the top crust starts browning, or about 40-50 minutes. When it is cooked, remove it from the oven, let it cool for about 10 minutes, then slice it and serve it.

BUON APPETITO!

Roman or not Roman?

I always wondered how all the fresh pasta stores in Piedmont sold baked pillows of semolina flour cooked with milk, butter, egg yolks, and cheese which are called Gnocchi alla Romana.  Italians are known to be very insular in their cooking and that they consider dishes from even few miles away as foreign.  So how is it that all these shops in the most provincial towns in Piedmont display this dish in their windows every day? How is it that even my mother made them and that it was one of the dishes most favored by my father, a man definitely not know for having an adventurous palate?  The mystery got solved during my research on this dish.  It looks like the people of Rome don’t recognize this dish as their own.  For them, as for most Italians, gnocchi are made with potatoes and they believe that Gnocchi alla Romana actually originated in Piedmont.  Now the mystery of their popularity in Piedmont is solved for me.  My guess is that they are called “alla Romana” because they are made with semolina flour, just like pasta for which Romans are know of - think of Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe e Spaghetti all’Amatriciana, for example - and not made with potatoes like the gnocchi that are a staple of traditional Alpine cuisine.    

Gnocchi alla Romana are generally round.  However, when you cut disks of pasta you also get with a lot of waste.  Thus I decided to make them squared. If you rather shape them round, you can add some lemon zest and sugar to the leftover trimmings and fry them in a pan with some hot oil. You will get a simple, tasty treat!    

 

Gnocchi alla Romana – makes 6 servings

Ingredients

4 cups of milk

1 ½ cup of semolina flour

3 egg yolks, beaten

1 ½ cup of grated parmigiano cheese

1/3 nutmeg, grated

½ tbs salt

6 Tbs butter

1. Bring 4 cups of milk to a boil.
2. Slowly whisk in the semolina flour and cook it at low heat for 5-8 minutes.  Remove it from the stove.
3. Fast incorporate the egg yolks so that they don’t scramble.  Then add 1 cup of the grated parmigiano cheese, the nutmeg, salt, and 4 tablespoons of butter.
4. Pour the semolina mixture in a baking sheet and flatten it out.  Let it cool for at least 45 minutes.
5. When the semolina mixture is cool, cut it into 2 inch squares. Butter a 9x13 baking dish and lay the squares slightly juxtaposing one layer over the other.  Then sprinkle the gnocchi with the remaining parmigiano cheese and dot them with the remaining butter.
6. Bake the gnocchi for about 15 minutes at 450F degrees or until golden.
7. Remove them from the oven and let them rest for 5 minutes.  Serve hot.

 

BUON APPETITO!

A Different Type of Fruit Salad

Last week I bought a cantaloupe that was not very sweet.  I did not want to eat it by itself but I did not want to let it rot in the fridge either.  Make a fruit salad? Boring! While searching on the web, I came across a recipe from Bon Appétit of a salad using watermelon and ricotta salata (http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2005/08/watermelon_ricotta_salata_basil_and_pine_nut_salad).  It was a variation of a recipe by the Iron Chef Cat Cora who uses feta instead of ricotta.  Both the recipes had basil leaves among their ingredients.  I decided to give the recipe my own spin: cantaloupe instead of watermelon and mint instead of basil leaves.  The result is a very refreshing, tasty summer salad you can serve by itself as an appetizer, as a side dish, or as a light end to a rich meal.  Bon appétit!

Cantaloupe and Ricotta Salata Salad  - makes 4 servings

Ingredients

½ large or 1 small cantaloupe, cut in small cubes

½ lb ricotta salata, chopped

½ cup of mint leaves

Juice of 2 limes

3 Tbs of extra-virgin olive oil

½ tbs freshly, ground black pepper

1.      Put the cantaloupe, the ricotta salata, and the mint leaves in a bowl

2.      Add the lime juice, the olive oil and the pepper.

3.      Toss the ingredients together and serve

Cappelletti with Eggplant Filling

One of my culinary goal is to perfect my pasta making, especially stuffed pasta like ravioli and cappelletti.  Those are dishes that have a special place in my heart: they appeared at the family table in Italy only for holidays and celebrations.    Ravioli and cappelletti had always meat fillings: roasted or braised beef for ravioli, and pork (roast and prosciutto) for cappelletti.  While I still do love them, I’m now actually intrigued by the infinite possibilities that stuffed pasta has to surprise you.  You can find a vast variety of fillings in traditional recipes but you can also let your imagination guide you in creating new, exciting ones.

Cappelletti, torterllini, and tortelloni, are all types of filled pasta and their names are more due to in what area of Italy they are made and their size rather than their shape.  My mother used to make cappelletti using flat rounds of dough.  That’s why I was very excited the other day when at Fante’s (http://fantes.com/) , a fabulous kitchen supply store in South Philadelphia, I found a tool that is exactly like the one my mother had. 

 It is easy to use it: You just press and drag the round blade on a sheet of pasta, and voila’, you get your disks ready to be filled.  If you don’t have such a tool, you can use round cookie cutters or small glasses or coffee cups to shape the dough into circles.  Regardless of how you cut the disks of dough, you need to put a small amount of filling in the middle of each disks of pasta and then seal the edges by folding them into a half-moon shape. Then wrap the half-moon shaped pasta around one of your fingers and unit the two extreme points.  Or you can cut the dough into squares that you then fold into triangles and press together the angles at its basis to form the traditional cappelletto shape.

                

With this new gadget in my hands, I had to make cappelletti but with a lighter and more seasonally appropriate filling than the one my mother used to make.  After consulting several cookbooks, I opted for stuffing them with a mixture of eggplant, ricotta, grated parmigiano cheese, eggs, mint and basil.  I found the recipe for the filling in Ricette di Sua Maesta’ Il Raviolo (Slow Food Editore, 1993), a collection of traditional and contemporary ravioli recipes. 

My major challenge was making the right dough.  I had made the dough for fresh pasta several times before by using just all purpose or “00” flour (depending on what I had available) and eggs, but I was never satisfied with it because it never appeared to be elastic enough.  Some but not all of the recipes in Sua Maesta’ Il Raviolo provide instructions for making the dough. In most cases the recipes call also for some olive oil and water.  I decided to give it a try.  It was a good idea because the quality of my dough improved tremendously.  Another lesson I learned was not to be shy with salt and pepper in the filling because the latter has to be able to stand up to the dough.  My cappelletti could have been improved a lot with a little bit more of both.

We had them for dinner accompanied with a bottle of Pecorino, a white wine from Marche, Italy, I have come to love.  It has a yellow straw color that just reminds me of summer and it goes perfectly with this dish.

Cappelletti with Eggplant Filling (Cappelletti alle melanzane) – 4 servings or about 72 cappelletti

Ingredients:

For the filling

2 large eggplants

2 Tbs of olive oil

¼ lb fresh ricotta

¼ + 1 Tbs of grated parmigiano cheese

¼ cup chopped mint and basil leaves (another ¼ cup to be used in the sauce)

½ clove of garlic, chopped (the other half to be used in the sauce)

1 egg + 2 egg yokes

Salt

Pepper

For the dough

2 ½ cups of ‘00’ or unbleached all purpose flour

3 eggs

1 Tbs olive oil

2 Tbs of water

For the sauce

5 large plum tomatoes

3 Tbs olive oil

½ clove of garlic, chopped

¼ cup chopped mint and basil leaves

¼ tbs spoon salt

½ Tbs butter

 Making the filling

1. Chopped garlic and herbs and set aside.
2. Peel the eggplants and slice them in round.  Lay them on a cutting board, salt them, and let them purge some of their water for about 30 minutes.  Then squeeze as much water out of them as you can and dry them with a paper towel.
3. Blanch the eggplant for about 3 minutes. Remove the eggplant slices promptly and as soon as they are cool enough to be handled with your hands, press each slice with your hand to squeeze out as much water as possible.
4. Warm out 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and sauté the eggplant for about 2-3 minutes.
5. Remove the eggplant form the pan and chop it finely.  In a bowl mix thoroughly the ricotta, the parmigiano cheese, the ¼ cup mixture of chopped mint and the basil leaves, ½ clove of chopped garlic, and the eggs.  Add pepper and salt to taste.  Set aside.

Making the pasta

1. Put in a large bowl the flour and create a small well.  Put the the three eggs into the well and with a fork incorporate them slowly in the flour.  Then add the olive oil and water to the flour and dough mixture and incorporate all the ingredients using your hands.
2. Move the dough to a slightly floured surface and continue working it for about 10 minutes.  You should be able to form a ball of dough which bounces back when you press it with your fingers.  Cover it and let it rest for about 15-20 minutes.
3. Take a baking sheet and cover it with parchment paper and set aside.
4. After the dough has rested, cut a quarter of it and start flatting it with a rolling pin.  If you use the manual pasta machine as I do, pass the dough several times in the same setting starting from #1 and going through #5.  Each time that the dough goes through the machine, fold it over itself.  (N.B.: When the dough is ready for a tighter setting, the pasta should product a popping sound.  It generally does that but it did not happen this time to me possibly because I had added olive oil and water.  The dough was nevertheless good.)
5. When you have obtain a long sheet of pasta using the setting #5, lay down on a slightly floured surface and cut the disks of pasta.
6. With the help of a demitasse spoon, place at the center of each disk some of the filling.  Fold the disk into a half-moon shape and seal it (Some wet the borders slightly before pressing them, to facilitate sealing).  Then shape the filled half-moon onto one of your fingers and press the two angles at the bottom onto each other.  Put the cappelletti standing up on the baking pan covered with parchment paper.
7. Repeat from step 4 to step 6 until you have used all the dough including scraps of dough left over from cutting the disks which can be put together to create more flat sheets of pasta.

Making the sauce and serving

1. Start preparing the sauce by blanching and peeling 5 plum tomatoes.  Cut them in half, remove all of the seed and the water, and chop them.
2. In a large pan, warm up two tablespoons of olive oil.  When the oil is warm add the chopped tomatoes, the remaining ½ clove of garlic, ¼ cup of fresh herb mixture, and 1/4 tbs salt. Cook for about 5 minutes. 
3. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and add the cappelletti.  When the water comes back to a boil, remove them from the pot suing a large, skimming spoon.  Mix the cappelletti with the sauce in the pan with ½ tablespoon of butter over a live flame for a couple of minutes.   
4. Plate the cappelletti and shave some aged pecorino cheese (about ½ tablespoon) on each plate and serve.

You may have some extra filling, but don’t worry, it does not have to go to waste.  What I did was making a flan by adding the egg whites that had been left over from the recipe, another egg, some milk, some extra cheese, and baking the filling at bain-marie in a couple of large ramekins.  I felt very resourceful!

BUON APPETITO!