All taste so good to this travelling fella
Fresh bread to dip in an E-V-O-O
These are just some of the reasons to go.
Umbricelli: Until we sat down to dinner at the la Palomba restaurant in Orvieto, I’d never even heard of umbricelli. And once I returned home, I was flabbergasted when even no one on staff at an Ottawa Nicastro’s Specialty Italian food store had ever heard of it either.
For non-Italians, it’s probably best described as “fat spaghetti”, but that’s more of a simple physical description. Taste and texturewise, it comes across not so much as pasta as something more akin to spaetzle, the eggy side dish of noodles or mini-dumplings that you often find in German-themed restaurants.
Oddly enough, the two times I had it in Italy, it was similar in length to traditional spaghetti, despite the fact that most websites illustrate a much more truncated, almost elbow macaroni-length version, for example this one.
And you might recall my earlier description of our day with The Zeppelin’s Chef Lorenzo Polegri in Orvieto and his book, in which he describes to a somewhat abashed woman TV host the traditional process of making it, where women rolled it by working it back and forth on their thighs. I can’t vouch for whether or not the la Palomba has a kitchen full of women furiously rolling out endless orders of the stuff (because it was a popular specialty of the house), but I can vouch for its deliciousness.
At the la Palomba, they serve it with a buttery, creamy, mildly peppery sauce that acts as the foundation for its intended topping. Hot on the heels of your plate’s arrival, a waiter shows up with a hand grater and what looks like a giant whole, large dried nutmeg. In fact, it’s a truffle (which I only knew because the menu described it as “topped with freshly grated truffle”) and it elevated the buttery pepperiness to an earthy state of the sublime. Having the luxury of receiving however much of the fungus you wish was an especially nice treat because it enabled me to actually taste it for the first time in my life.
I could go on, but a flood blogger named Elizabeth Minchilli has also been there and in this entry captures perfectly not only the gustatory experience, she has included a gorgeous photo of exactly how my own plate looked after the waiter had grated pretty much the entire truffle onto my order.
= =
I’ve done Limoncello in glowing terms an earlier update, but we also discovered another wonderful after-drink liqueur – and also in the la Palomba, on the recommendation of a waiter who named it first when I asked what after-dinner sipper he might recommend: Amaro.
Amaro is an “herbal liqueur” that is relatively new to the world of drink, with most commercial distillers using recipes that date back to the 19thC. It is a significantly fortified beverage that rings in at about 35% A.B.V. (Alcohol by Volume), probably three times what a typical bottle of wine will radiate. And it is unique. The LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) shelves it with Alpenbitters, Jagermeister and other similar products.
Here’s a brief description of what’s inside the bottle. It starts with grappa, which – depending on the brand – is then infused with any from a list of herbal ingredients a mile long that can include lemon balm, lemon verbena, juniper, anise, fennel, ginger, mint, thyme, sage, bay laurel, citrus peels, licorice, cinnamon, menthol, cardamom, saffron, elderflowers and some stuff I’ve never even heard of: gentian, angelica, cinchona, zedoary, wormwood. In a quest for flavour descriptions, you likely will run into words such as “medicinal” and “bitter”, neither of which is surprising since its earliest versions were sourced to monasteries and pharmacies.
In a better Amaro, the bitterness is very much there, but doesn’t overpower the taste and it is worth paying a few extra dollars for a well-balanced one. Which is not to condemn the less expensive, rawer ones. Like Calvados, Normandy’s apple-based tipple of choice, some people prefer the harsher and more pronounced characteristics of a less mature distillate.
Since our trip, I’ve never been without a bottle of Amaro in the household bar. I enjoy it best either neat or on the rocks, depending on my mood, and usually about an hour after dinner, which is about where a digestif works best.
Taking the much more widely available Campari as your benchmark, if you like it, chances are you’ll enjoy Amaro. But if Campari’s bitterness doesn’t sit well on your tastebuds, then likely neither will Amaro’s.
= =
A couple footnotes to things I’ve already mentioned. You know how when you’re car shopping and you finally select a car and one of the reasons you liked it because it is painted a “really unique colour that I don’t think I’ve ever seen on more than one or two other cars today!...” and as you’re driving it home from the dealership you notice that just about every other car on the frickin’ road is painted the same colour! ??
Yeah well, since I’ve returned from Italy and have several times raved about Buffalo (“Accept no substitutes!”) Mozzarella, it seems like every time I open a website or newspaper recipe page these days, especially when the feature is about salads and sides, I see my much loved caprese salad being offered as an extra special-tasting alternative to the traditional bowl of greens we customarily serve in this country.
The visual appeal of the plate notwithstanding, I draw the line somewhere north of the accompanying recipe’s instruction: “If you cannot get your hand on buffalo mozzarella then use ordinary fresh mozzarella / bocconcino.”
NOOOOOOooooooooooooo! Neither “ordinary” mozzarella, however fresh, nor bocconcino – unless it is in a container labelled “Bocconcino di Bufala Campana DOP” – is a substitute for the real thing.
You might also remember I spoke in glowing terms of a couple pizzas – the deceptively simple Pizza Margherita, made up of tomato sauce, buffalo mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves, but which actually requires a meticulous adherence to Italy’s codes of food authenticity to earn the name, and the Pizza Quattro Stagioni (Four seasons pizza).
Again, its success will depend on the quality of your ingredients. Don’t, for example, use canned black olives, because they tend to be immersed in a watery brine rather than olive oil. Use Mediterranean olives (Kalamata, for example), which these days are pretty much a permanent part of any large grocery store’s deli section inventory. Loblaws and Farm Boy stores both have sectioned olive carts in their stores that offer an amazing variety of high quality olives, both black and green.
= =
Speaking of olive oil, nutritionists tend to be unanimous that it is a “good” oil, especially its EVOO form (Extra Virgin Olive Oil). If the label also says “cold-pressed”… that’s recommended. Apparently, temperatures over 86 degrees F enable more oil to be extracted during the crushing process, stretching and thinning it and making, therefore, an inferior product. Cold-pressing, when done right (and apparently it can be done wrong) renders less oil, but of a far superior quality. Or so say the olive experts at Californiaoliveranch.com.
= =
Just so you don’t get to thinking the only fluids we drank over there were alcoholic ones, well… you’re not far wrong. (Hey… Italy… Vino, birra, Limoncello, Amaro. It’s horse and carriage; fish and chips; Laurel and Hardy. One doesn’t work without the other.)
But when it was a quick, sugary thirst quencher I wanted, I usually turned to Italy’s own take on what is best known in North America as Orange Crush or Fanta. Italy’s take on the orangey goodness, however, is fantastic. Even their Fanta has been slightly less sugared than the way you get it over here. But far and away the best I was served was the one I was served first on the Rome to Venice train last Fall during our first trip to the country.
= =
“Salami” is an Italian word so it’s hardly surprising that they are unbelievably good at making it. (In fact, grammatically, it’s the plural of the correct singular, “salame”, so to my librarian and editor readers, don’t go editing the chalkboards outside restaurants when you see it spelled with the “e” at the end.)
Here in Canada, the Maestro company makes several of the classic regional types and they’re sold in most major grocery stores. And the only other thing you need to know is that not only are they all excellent, in Italy almost all of them are breakfast foods! Watch for the “Hot / Piquante” qualifier, though (or an almost artificial red / pinkish tint to the salami), because when Italians say their salami is hot, they mean it!
= =
Rum Baba: On the face of it, rum baba seems pretty straightforward – a yeast pastry with a rum flavour. Well if the rum baba we were served in Pompeii is any indication, it’s a pretty safe bet that, had it been available two millennia earlier, any of the town’s residents who were well into the dessert course of their lunch when Vesuvius blew would have been feeling no pain at all. None.
But it was our first bite that suddenly made us realize that this wasn’t simply an artificial rum-flavoured dessert. It was absolutely drenched in the stuff! Rum, that is. One or two of our hard-liquor-eschewing co-tourists hastily abandoned theirs after their first bites but I had no such qualms (in part because I quite like the stuff and my domestic bar is home to at least one amber and one black rum that both are so good they can be imbibed neat or on the rocks in much the same way as one might enjoy an after-dinner liqueur.)
Interestingly, despite finding a very happy place these days on almost every southern Italy bakery’s dessert trays, rum baba has nothing, it seems, Italian in its origins. Several culinary histories trace its roots to the late 17th C in the Alsace – Lorraine region of France but how it got into the wider Europe from there is, you’ll pardon the pun, all over the map. (Although its appearance in Naples in the mid 18thC – possibly created by visiting French chefs – cemented its permanent place in the “dolce” cuisine in that part of the country.)
But on one thing no one disagrees – including our little band of intrepid travellers. A great rum baba is literally “saturated in hard liquor”. (Wikipedia) And so were we by the time we sloshed back aboard our tour bus.
= =
A few random pointers: If you’re feeling somewhat peckish but maybe not up to a whole meal, try dropping into a café and ordering a bottle of wine. Italians generally believe that food is a necessary accompaniment to the leisurely consumption of a bottle of wine and will wheel out what is often a surprisingly generous array of complimentary munchies when all you’ve ordered is a bottle. In Orvieto, for example, we found ourselves with unordered platters of bruschetta, three or four different kinds of meat and vegetable spreads, focaccia and crisp breads. Occasionally, we received the more traditional salty bar snacks. (Although at Harry’s Bar in Rome the potato chips were so incredible we figure they must actually be made on site because nothing like that in our experience has ever come out of a bag.)
= =
In Italy, lemon gelato is the earthly preview of what awaits you in heaven. No matter where you order it. So behave yourselves, because in hell all they serve is month-old pie crust. With no water.
= =
One thing Chef Lorenzo taught us is that making homemade pasta is not only ridiculously simple, it’s fun. On a large wooden cutting board, you “make a Colosseum”, i.e. a closed circular wall of the dry ingredients. Then in the middle you place your wet ingredients (typically just eggs, water and oil in whatever proportion / quantity the recipe calls for). Then you gradually draw your dry ingredients down from your Colosseum wall, mixing them with the wet until the pasta or dough’s consistency gets to where you want it to be. And let it rest for about 20 - 30 minutes before cutting it into pasta. Using a hand-cranked pasta maker also gives you more control over the final shape / cut of the pasta, like driving a car with a standard vs an automatic transmission on an icy street.
Oh: for pasta, you have to use a “00” semolina flour. It’s an ultrafine grind (think Arabic coffee) and is another Italian food store staple. For some reason, it’s not readily available in major grocery stores, at least not in Ottawa (something that surprised me when I went looking for it, given that our “Little Italy” is a community large enough that they publish their own telephone book every year). Not surprising, however, is the fact that Nicastro’s has about ten different brands.
= =
Pork belly in Italy is a staple, because porchetta is a staple. But finding it in Canada requires making a special order from a specialty butcher. That’s why most North American porchetta recipes begin by telling you to have your butcher de-bone a pork butt roast. Because it’s just too damned difficult to glue all those strips of bacon together and then lard a layer of skin over the top.
= =
Well, I get to this point with mixed emotions. Writing this year’s Italy trip diary has been a heck of a lot of fun but I’m now staring at a blank page in my notebook.
So I guess there’s nothing left for us to do but plan another trip. In the meantime, I’m thinking of maybe returning to the regular bleats and whines that have marked both “Baby Duck” and its current successor, “TriumphAnt”.
Brace yourself.
See you next time.