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!