The Panzanella, tuscan salad

Don't panic! We're officially still in Summer, and even if many may think that salads are for the hot Summer, we usually eat them all year round, but the one we bring you today is especially fresh and ideal for the summer: it the Panzanella!

The Panzanella is a typical Tuscan salad, and its recipe is very versatile, and may vary from household to household, like every traditional recipe. But there are three ingredients that you just cannot skip: the Tuscan hard bread, ripen tomatoes and basil.

In the Tuscan families' recipes you can easily find other ingredients (that you can skip if you want) like cucumber, capers, onion and a large etc...

At the end of the day, it's a different kind of salad, and you can enrich the fundamental ingredients with what you find in your fridge. We love to add mozzarella fresh cheese to everything and of course to salads too! If you thought that only the Caprese salad had the "mozz exclusive" you were wrong!

As a trivia, we can tell you that even if this dish is nowadays an entree or a first course or the perfect tupperware sala to bring with you for a picnic, many decades ago the Panzanella was the typical summer breakfast! They use to change it with the polenta during the Winter. Breakfast of champions for the landworkers that modeled the beautiful fields of Tuscany.

If you want to have a more accurate historical background of the birth of Panzanella, keep reading down here, if you don't, just read the recipe below the historical section! :)

History: 

The Panzanella is a dish that belogs to the so-called "cucina povera", the "cuisine of the poors" (that, by the way is the best ever in our humble opinion), and it's a easy bread & olive oil salad. It is a cousin of others mediterranean soups or minestrones, for instance the typical "Ribollita toscana", made with the cavolo nero toscano, a key ingredient that you probably have already known as "kale". Well, in Tuscany this fashonable healthy food has been eaten for century as a traditional dish. The Panzanella is also related with the "pappa al pomodoro", a tomato & bread soup very similar to the delicious Salmorejo Cordobes from Spain.

That said, the history of the Panzanella is quite large, and even if it's a simple dish, it has a lots of centuries on its shoulders. For instance, we find the Panzanella mentioned also in a XIV century masterpiece of European literature by Giovanni Boccaccio: the Decameron, which is believed to have inspired nothing less than Geoffrey Chaucers' "The Canterbury Tales", an all-time classic of english literature. You can find mentioned the Panzanella in the Decameron of Boccaccio in the Novel VII, day VIII, as a "washed bread", that is, wet.

Many others wrote about this delicious kind of salad, for instance an Old Master artist like the florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino, a true heavyweight of the Renaissance art. He during the 1500s was one of the main exponent of the so-called Manierismo, and he alternated his duty as a painter at the court of the Medicis with poetry, and he dedicated some beautiful verses to the Panzanella, that we write down here (in italian):

"chi vuol trapassar sopra le stelle di melodia v’aggiunga olio e aceto en’tinga il pane e mangi a crepapelle. Una insalata di cipolla trita colla porcellana e cetriuoli vince ogni altro piacer di questa vita, considerate un po’ s’aggiungessi bassilico e ruchetta."

"Those who wants to reach the melody of the stars above, add the olive oil and vinegar to the wet bread and gorge yourself with it. A salad made with minced onions and cucumbers is the highest pleasure in life, and think what would happen if to this salad I add also basil and arugula..."

It's worth to notice that in the Bronzino's lyrics there are no mentions of the tomato, and this is due to the fact that the tomato arrived in Europe just after the discover of America by Cristopher Columbus (thanks God for letting us living in the era of the tomatoes! What would be of us otherwise?)

Notice that Bronzino used the word "ruchetta", that how is called the arugula in many northern italian dialects, that later on become "ruquette" and then the standard british "rocket salad". Here is an interesting article of "Bon Appetit magazine" about the origin of the names of rocket salad/arugula.

The name "panzanella" maybe derivates to the word "panzana" that means something weak, soft, mushy, false, untrustworthy like a lie, for instance the word "panzana" in italian today means "hoax"
In this case, anyway, is not an hoax, the term refers to the mushy soft wet bread

Recipe: (for some 5 people)

- 300 or 400 gr. aprox. of Tuscan hard bread*
- 4 or 5 of ripen tomatoes
- 1 onion (in our case a red onion)
- 2 mozzarellas
- Basil
- Salt
- Extra virgin Olive oil
- White wine vinegar

*Tuscan hard bread: We can use almost every kind of rustic large loaf of bread. The main feature of the Tuscan bread is the complete lack of salt, and it's used mainly for recipes like the traditional bruschettas or minestrones, where the salty element is given by the topping or the other ingredients. Is frequently known as "pane sciocco", that is "fool bread", dumb, because of its unsalty, insipid taste.

Preparation:

1- Cut the bread into slices, we need hard, stale bread, not chewy bread from the day before. Put the slices of bread in a bowl with some water. It's not necessary to cover the bread with the water, just let it hydrate little by little, during a few minutes.

2- While hydrating the bread, mince all the ingredients. Many wet the onions with cold water, in order to let it lose its stinging flavour, but we love this trademark feature of the red onions. Of course, you can use also white or golden onions, the one you love best. Cut into slices also the tomatoes and the mozzarella.

3- Drain the bread and crumble it with hands, then add it all to the bowl. The basil and the mozzarella are excellent too if tore apart with hands, y'know, in the kitchen everything's better if made with hands! Add the salt to taste, and dress it with olive oil and vinegar (better if it's not the red wine vinegar, because otherwise it will colour the bread). Enjoy it!

It's the kind of salad just perfect for picnics, as a side dish for some protein meal, to put into a tupperware and bring it to the shore. And as we mentioned before, it's not just for the Summer, the panzanella can be a really complete food, very easy and quick to prepare during our everyday working routine.

The Neapolitan Graffe, a Carnival Sweet

The Graffe are a typical neapolitan sweet dish typical of the Carnival, a sort of southern italian version of the german recipe of the Krapfen or Berliner, as it is known in English. The Graffe are shaped like doughnuts, while the Krapfen does not shows the typical hole at the center. According to a legend, the Krapfen would have been invented by a pastry chef from Vienna, called Cecilia Krapf, at the end of the 1600s. They are actually one of the most enjoyed sweet streetfood in the central Europe, from Germany to Austria, from Hungary to Northern Italy (where they are called Bomboloni). A different hypotesis about their name suggest that their name derivates from the ancient germanic language, where the word Krafo means finger or claw, maybe because their shape at that time wasn't spherical but stretched.

That may explain the evolution of their name: in the Gothic language this sweet dish would have eventually trasformed and inflated becoming the today's Berliner, while in Southern Italy the original stretched, open shaped sweet would eventually have been closed into a sort of a knot, creating a dounghtnut-shaped sweet called Graffe.

The Austrians, while dominating in northern Italy, introduced the Krapfen there. For instance, in the German-speaking regions of Italy like Sudtirol-Alto Adige these sweets are called Faschingkrapfen, or Carnival Krapfen. Yes, they are related with Carnival too, just like the Graffe.

The Austrian regime, we dare to say, it is responsible of the introdution of the krapfen to Naples too, since the Austrian Habsburg gained the Crown of Naples with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 and remained there until 1734. At that time, the Krapfen was still stretched, and we have to wait until the 1830s to see it closed like a donut and made with a potato dough. They surely have been created after the Zeppole of San Giuseppe, another Neapolitan sweet dish typical of the festivity of Saint Joseph that have been mentioned for the first time in the Bible of the history of Neapolitan cuisine: the "Cucina Teorico-Pratica" of Ippolito Cavalcanti.

Today the Graffe are frequently eaten in Sicily too, but they're filled with goat ricotta cheese and chocolate dips instead of the cream patissiere. But let's talk about the Graffe's recipe! Ready? Let's go! We usually serve them as they are, with no filling, but the day after you may need a filling, so in that case we use creme patissiere or gianduja cream to fill them or even to dip the Graffe!

RECIPE:

Ingredients for some 20 Graffas:

- 500 grams of flour

- 250 grams of potatoes

- 50 grams of sugar

-50 grams of unsalted butter

- 3 eggs

- a pinch of salt

- lemon zest to taste

- 25 grams of fresh yeast

- 70 grams of mild milk

- frying oil

Preparation:

1- Peel the potatoes and boil them until you notice that they're soft when you pick them with a fork. Put them aside.

2- Beat the eggs in a bowl, then add the warm butter, the sugar, the salt, the lemon zest, and the milk, where we previously have poured the yeast to activate. Beat it all with a fork or with a whisk and add the mashed or the shredded mashed potatoes to the bowl, and at the end we add the flour too. Mix it all well until you obtain a beautiful ball of dough (usually very fluffy), and we let it rest for about 30 minutes covered with a kitchen cloth. 

3- After that, we start shaping out our Graffe, cut pieces of the dough and roll them into a sort of "churros", or fingers, and then close them just as you would do to create a donut. You can also create a little ball, push your finger through it to create in it a hole of the dimension that you want. After that they're shaped, we let them rest above some parchment paper or above the worktop (always covered with flour in order to prevent the doughs to stick to the surface). We cover the Graffe and we let them rest for about an hour.

4- We prepare a frying pan with enough oil in it. Please remember that you want the Graffe to float in the oil, not to touch the bottom of the pan. Once that the oil is boiling, with the help of a spatula we introduce the Graffe into the oil little by little. They only need to fry for few minutes for each side, until we see them golden brown. We take them out of the frying pan and we let them dry above some kitchen towel, then we sprinkle above them some sugar above them. 

You can eat them even the day after, but they will loose something of their unique fluffy texture given by the potatoes. We would advice you to eat them as soon as you've cooked them, or at least we love them that way because the just made Graffe are sooo rich and tasty that they really do not need no filling at all!

We hope that you all will enjoy a great Carnival with lots and lots of Graffe! Buon appetito!

Eggplant Parmigiana

The Eggplant Parmigiana is a most famous southern italian dish, and we're sure that once you've tried it, it'll become a classic in your kitchen too!

Many are the places that claims to have created this simple yet delicious dish, as always happens with the great things, everyone's interested in demonstrating his "paternity" to it. The Eggplant Parmigiana is typical in many Italian regional cuisines, and even if many thinks that this kid was born in the Campania region, the only region that actually obtained an official title to demonstrate it is Sicily.

Two are the main ingredients of the Parmigiana (no, neither of the two is the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, curiously). We're talking of the Tomato and the Eggplant or Aubergine if you're London-based. These two ingredients are just marvellous together, they are a match made in food heaven, they always seems to have been around together since forever. Today, they are two of the most representative ingredients of the Mediterranean cuisine, but they're really not mediterranean at all. Shocked? Keep reading!


Mr. Tomato and miss Aubergine agreed to have a blind date that they decided to occur in Sicily, somewhat halfway between America (Tomato) and Asia (Eggplant-aubergine).
The first one to reach the meeting point was miss Aubergine, around year 827, brought there by the hands of the Moors. The poor pretty lady had to wait a long long time for her pretender, but miss Aubergine in Sicily found a second house, and she even called her friends to reach her in that beautiful island. In a little while, Sicily was filled, packed of miss Aubergines, all of these waiting for the "Caravan of love" to come from America with many, many Mr. Tomatoes.

miss Aubergine went to Sicily for tourism but decided to remain there.

They say that in that year Cristopher Columbus discovered America, but we all know that it was just an excuse: come on, let's be realistic, Columbus went there just to pick up the Tomato that were horribly late for their blind date! (knowing Mr. Tomato pretty well, we dare to say that he was too much nervous because he wanted to give an excellent first impression). What would it be of Italian gastronomy without the tomato!? It would be really unthinkable! The variety of dishes made with tomatoes is just countless: pasta, salads, meals, pizza...and a million of other dishes useless without that gorgeous fruit dressed up like it was a veggie. One may be allowed to think that if it were not for the discover of the tomato, many dishes wouldn't even exist nowadays! But shush! Let's not say this aloud, we don't want the tomato to talk big.


Finally, it was Hernan Cortes who brought tomatoes to Europe, around year 1500 (men seems to be never in a hurry!). Before reaching Sicily, actually, they call at Madrid, Spain (if we close our eyes we can imagine the tomatoes running from a Terminal to another in Madrid's labyrintic Barajas Intercontinental Airport!). Mr. Tomato, just arrived in the Old World, was considered to be just a non edible ornamental plant: we guess that he spent way too much time getting himself all dolled up! Shall we agree that this is one of the World's first examples of Metrosexuality in the history of mankind, shall we?

The meeting of Mr. Tomato and miss Aubergine

When he finally managed to reach Sicily and he met miss Aubergine, it was more than just love at first sight: it was a premeditated love, a love written in the skies by destiny. A love that is very strong still today, if we judge by the number of dishes where they appears to be gloriously married together. It's like an artistic duo: when they appears together, magical things happens! We had to wait many centuries to see them shining together, but they definitely worth all the time spent! To be completely sincere with you, there are also other dishes that came before the Parmigiana and had miss Aubergine as a starring actress: we're talking about the Sicilian "Caponata", but don't worry, we'll talk about it in another occasion!


We can find the Eggplant Parmigiana (Parmigiana di Melanzane in Italian) recipe for the first time in a cookbook published in Naples in year 1778, titled "Il cuoco elegante" (the elegant cook) and written by Vincenzo Corrado. In the 1839 book "Cucina teorico-pratica" ("practical-theoretical cuisine") by Ippolito Cavalcanti (from Naples too) we can read the Parmigiana recipe almost as we know it today.

Parmigiana di Melanzane, or in english Eggplant Parmigiana

Pretty as much as it happens with its birth, even the origin of the name of the Parmigiana is surrounded by many hypotesis and uncertainities. We can think the Parmigiana to be somewhat linked with the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, or in the beautiful city of Parma, in north of Italy. Actually, in Parma, a very high end gastronomical city, there was a tradition in cutting veggies into slices and presenting them cooked one above the other, just like Parmigiana. We tend not to agree much with this option, since there are no immediate links between Parma and Sicily at the time of the supposed birth of the Parmigiana, even if many excellent food historians and food scholars like Luciano Pignataro do support this hypotesis and think that the Eggplant Parmigiana means "eggplant cooked as they do in Parma".


The other hypotesis comes straight from the Sicily itself, where the vernacular word "parmiciana" means louver, therefore indicating a structure composed of different slats one above the other, just like what happens with the Parmigiana. We are more convinced by this option, since we know that the Moors had windows similar to our jealousie windows and they brought them wherever they went, as it happened with the eggplant. It mustn't surprise then that there might have been a Moorish dish with sliced fried eggplants in the Arab Sicily that was the grandma of our Parmigiana recipe.

What it seems to be sure is that the Parmigiana less or nothing have to share with the "King of Cheeses", the unique and only Parmigiano Reggiano, even if in modern-days Parmigiana that marvellous northern Italian cheese is used gratinated above the dish. On the other hand, what dish does not enjoy some gratinated Parmigiano? In different regional version of this recipe we can see that are used Pecorino or Caciocavallo cheeses.

But now it's time to put something under our teeth! Let's go with the very simple and delicious recipe!

Recipe:

Ingredients: (As always, the quantities written above are just an indication: with three middle sized eggplant you can obtain four portions of Parmigiana, and according to this ratio, modify the quantity of eggplant needed)

- 3 middle sized eggplant
- 500 - 800 g aprox. of tomato sauce (preferably home made)
- Breadcrumbs
- Flour
- 2 or 3 eggs
- 100 g. of authentic Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (only the original!)
- Olive oil
- Basil
- 2 fresh Mozzarella (better if it's "fior di latte")

Preparation:

1- We start peeling our eggplants (the skin of the eggplant may result bitter in our palates), we wash them into slices somewhat less than half an inch wides, we put them in a colander and the sprinkle some salt above them. We let the eggplants to "sweat" to let them lose their water, for about an hour. After this, we wash the slices, we dry them and we bread them.

2- To bread our eggplants, we'll pass the slices through flour, then through beaten egg and last through breadcrumbs. We'll fry them in boiling oil until they become golden brown in both sides and we dry them using a kitchen paper to get rid of the excess of oil.

Flour, eggs and breadcrumbs

3- In a platter fit for the oven, we put the eggplant slices in the bottom of the dish, then we cover it with tomato sauce (ours is made with pepper and garlic), then add sliced or little pieces of mozzarella fresh cheese to taste, basil leaves and then we add another layer of eggplants, following the order, just like you would do cooking a lasagna.

  4- The last layer will end with tomato sauce, mozzarella and gratinated Parmigiano Reggiano. We'll pop it into the preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes at 180ºC. They say that the Parmigiana is to be left into the oven "finchè si asciuga", that in italian means  "until the sauce gets dry" and we can appreciate a golden brown crust above it.

It is a delicious dish that you can enjoy both warm or cold.


Last but not least, you can cook a light version of the Parmigiana using grilled eggplant instead of fried ones. You can also fry them only passing them through the beaten eggs or breading them only with flour and not with breadcrumbs...you choose how! Just try it, you'll fall in love with it in a matter of seconds!

Buon Appetito!

The Risotto allo zafferano recipe

As it happens for the vast majority of traditional dishes, the origins of the risotto allo zafferano recipe are not well known. Today is a very typical dish from Lombardy, one of the biggest regions of northern Italy. We know that the Sforza dynasty introduced a modern cultivation of rice in the Milanese area at the end of the XIV century, so we can establish a foundation date for the risotto after this epoch.


To discover the very origins of this fascinating dish we have 
to reach one of the Milan's historical risott giald". Hotspot: we're talking about the Castello Sforzesco, the main fortress of the Duchy of Milan, very interesting to visit if you wish to learn how Michelangelo created the modern art in 1500s (but this is not the right place to tell you this, go and google "pietà rondanini by Michelangelo" if you will). Well, where were we? Ah right! The Castello Sforzesco! Inside the Castle you can find an historical Library, the Biblioteca Trivulziana, that trasures many works from some of the greatest minds of humanity, like the Codex Trivulzianus by nothing less than Leonardo da Vinci. But since we're no Dan Brown at all, we'll focus in another work, from year 1574 that tell us a very interesting story, or a legend -who knows?-about the birth of the risotto allo zafferano, or, to say it in the milanese way, ". The legend tells us that a master stained glass artisan, called Valerius the Flander, that back then was working in one of Europe's most gigantic gothic project, the Duomo cathedral of Milan, was working on the stained glass windows, using a very expensive and exotic spice to create a brand new kind of shining yellow: Mr Valerius choosed to paint nothing less than the saffron!

One of Valerius' pupils was a painter that was so good at painting with saffron that was immediately nicknamed by his mates as "lo Zafferano", that is "the Saffron" in italian. At work, he was constantly mocked, and his detractors used to say that he would put saffron even in the rice that they used to eat at the cathedral yard. When the daughter of Master Valerius married another man, he -maybe for jealousy, maybe for a joke- put some saffron in the main dish at the marriage: the old times version of the risotto. The result was astonishing! Everybody loved it, an effect that surprised the Zafferano, Master Valerius' pupil.
So, the Duomo cathedral and the risotto allo zafferano, both symbol of Milan, are very closely related, how epical is that?

We don't know if things happened exactly like this, but this is for sure an interesting history dating back to 1500s! We know for example that there were Kosher dishes in medieval Jew cuisine that mixed the saffron with the rice, even if maybe is too much to affirm that they already knew the risotto or even the creamy rice. We know that after the Arab domination in Sicily, many Jew merchants reached southern Italy. Lombards and Jews were both knew (and feared) in the low Middle Ages as bankiers and tough businessmen, so they surely would have known each other and...maybe exchanged a recipe book, why not?

The first book when we can read a modern-days recipe for the risotto allo zafferano is the 1853 work by Felice Luraschi, titled "il Nuovo Cuoco Milanese" (the new milanese cook).
 
The risotto allo zafferano is usually confused with the risotto alla milanese, but it's not the same dish at all! The main difference is that the risotto alla milanese has no wine in its recipe but has bone marrow instead. These dish and many, many varieties of the risotto alla milanese and/or allo zafferano are to be found in the 1891 book from Pellegrino Artusi called "The science in the kitchen and the art of eating well".


Now, let's deal with the recipe. Ready?

Recipe : 

Ingredients: (for some 4 ppl)

• 250 - 300 g. approx. of Carnaroli or Arborio rice (you can find out which one to choose here) 
• 1 onion
• extra virgin olive oil (1 spoonful)
• 1 cup of white wine
• 1 liter of broth (in my case, veggie broth)
• 100 g. aprox. of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (recently grated if possible)
• 1 knob of butter
• Salt
• 1 spoonful of saffron (in threads) or 1 dried saffron pack

Preparation:

1º- We prepare the broth, or we heat it up in case we've already did it. Pour a big spoonful of warm broth in a cup and put the saffron threads in it, stir it and let is aside.

2º- Put on heat the pan or the pot you've choosen to cook your risotto. I  personally love the high pans, where the rice is easy to stir. Add the olive oil, and when it is very hot, you can add the minced onion that we've previously prepared. The onion shall be very golden brown, cook it for some 5 or 10 mins. You need the taste of the onion but you don't want the texture of it in your mouth.

3º- When the onion will be ready, add the rice. I told you some 300 grams, but I never do it this way. I do it in the same old way the taught to me in Italy:" un pugnetto per persona e uno in più per la padella", that is, a handful for each one and one for the pan. I'm usually put two handful per person because my fists are ridicolously smalls! It depends on your hands' size!

Keep on stirring the rice and the onion, with the help of a wooden spoon. This is a key step, since toasting the rice even for a couple of minutes impermeabilize the grain of rice, letting it cooking properly and still resulting al dente.

4º- After that, we add some white wine, a thing that will add some acidity to our risotto, something that will enhance the taste of our risotto. Stir it constantly, and when the wine will be evaporated, start adding the broth, little by little. Wait until each previous spoonful of broth has been absorbed by the rice before adding another spoonful, and do this as much is needed until the rice is ready. The cooking of the rice for the risotto usually takes around 18 minutes, starting from when we added the rice in our pan. So you know, this recipe needs calm and patience, never let your risotto alone on heat! keep on stirring, stir on, you'll see, it almost will become somewhat relaxing, nothern italian cuisine is a zen one!

5º- Some minutes before the 18 minutes we mentioned before, instead of pouring the broth, add the cup of saffron broth we put aside at the beginning. Our rice will immediately become golden yellow! Stir the rice once again and when the 18 minutes are over, turn off the heat and start the last phase, known as "mantecatura" of the risotto, that is, adding the butter and letting it become more and more creamy.

6º- With the heat turned off, add the butter and the grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, stir it to mix the rice and the new adding and let them melt well in the rice. Ready, Habemus risottum! It is usual to cover the pot or the pan with a cover to let it rest a little bit, but come on! Who can resist it?

P.s.: I usually don't add salt to my risotto because the broth and the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese already have it, even if sometimes a pinch of salt is not a bad add, but who loves it salty, surely can add more to it!

From the Caprese salad to Futurismo

Even if the calendar tells us that the Fall is just around the corner, no one can keep us from lengthen the summer in our kitchens, and for this reason we bring you an all time italian classic summer recipe: the caprese salad!

The Caprese salad is a fresh dish that's filled with mediterranean taste and light, a simple and genial recipe that's based upon a column of italian gastronomy: a dish is a good dish when you can't add or quit a single ingredient without altering the global aequilibrium. Said in another word: elegance, pure elegance. Few ingredients, but perfectly balances and choosen. It is said that nothing is more complex to obtain than simplicity, and it's really true. Simplest things may result obvious to us, because they've been created to stay with us forever with no stress at all. Simplest things are simply impossible to improve.

The history of the Insalata Caprese is not well known, but what's sure is that it appears for the first time in a 1920 menù at the Capri island's "Quisisana hotel".
It may be interesting to notice that the caprese in that occasion was a part of a so called "futurista dinner", that is a dinner based upon the principia of the artistical movement of the Futurismo. Beside painting, sculptures, etc.*, the Futurismo and its leading poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, wanted a radical reform of the traditional cuisine. Marinetti established the rules of the game in his "Manifesto della cucina futurista".

View from Monte Solaro at Capri 

In his manifesto, Marinetti called for a complete erase of the pasta from the traditional cuisine, and its substitution with modern, aerodynamical, fluid and concentrated dishes. "simultaneous and shimmering bites", as Marinetti said: in the Twenties, the Futuristi already saw the molecular cuisine and Ferran Adrià's "El Bulli". The Futuristi loved the fresh and light colours, that they thought to be perfect for the modern way of life. And the very italian colours of the Caprese dish were very interesting for the nationalist european society of the Twenties.

There are other version of the birth of the caprese salad, of course. For instance, it is said that after the World War II, a mason that worked in the charming Napolitan island loved to bring the "tricolore", or the Italian flag, at work in the panini sandwich he used to eat. His creation had such a success that was imitated by the restaurants of the island, and from there the international jet set started to know the caprese salad. For instance, it is said that in the Fifties, the King Farouk loved a panini sandwich filled with mozzarella, tomato and basil.

But let's talk about the recipe of the Caprese salad! Can't be any easier!

Ingredients:

- Tomato
- Fresh mozzarella
- Basil

We love our Caprese with the mozzarella di Bufala, but many sources says that the original version of the salad should be done with a fresh cow mozzarella. The original recipe should be done without adding olive on it, but we can't help but pouring a drizzle of olive oil on our Caprese! You can give your own touch to your salad adding black greek olives, different kinds of tomatoes and so on. You can use also the Modena balsamic vinegar to dress it (but be careful to choose the original one!).

Preparation:

For the classic version of this salad, you should cut the tomatoes and the fresh mozzarella in slicesand put them in a dish, a slice of tomato and a slice of mozzarella and so on, and add basil to taste.

You can have your own Caprese in a thousand of different version! Use your own imagination! Here we bring you some ideas, like for instance a Caprese sandwich, Caprese skewer, Caprese hasselback, Caprese panini and so on!

Buon appetito!

_____________________________________________________________

Note:

For those interested in the artistical movement called Futurismo, keep reading! (We know that this is a cuisine blog, but you know...we can't help but talking about art! We're totally artoholic!) 

* We wanted to share with you some notion about the Futurismo, a most important artistical avant garde of the early XX century. Infact, it was one of the first anti-traditional artistical movements in the Old Continent. They literally
started a frontal assault against tradition.

Giacomo Balla, "La costellazione del Genio", 1918,
Museo del 900, Milan

The Futurismo created a large number of artistical masterpieces by artists like Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. The last one was the creator of the Futurismo's most iconic work, represented today in the 20 eurocent coins. If you've been to Europe, you've had an artistical masterpiece in your pocket and you didn't know! The Futurismo was literally determinant in the aesthetics and in the pop culture of the XX century. We can see a lot of work of the Futurismo at the Milan's Museo del Novecento or at New York's Moma or 
- what else?- at the Met!

Umberto Boccioni, "Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio", 1913, Museo del 900, Milán

Greetings and have a great start of Fall! 

Cheese filled garlic dough ball recipe

Italians and Garlic, an history of love and...hate! This might be curious to hear to a northern american, but it is true. The garlic, an ingredient incredibly ancient and super healthy, is almost as loved in some region as it is hated in many others. Generally speaking, but with huge exceptions like Piedmont and Tuscany, in the central and overall in northern Italy is not so used. In Lombardy we have a paradoxical situation where is almost...well...how can I express it...is tolerated, let's say it in this way. In the southern Italy is incredibly loved and used in excellent recipes both for its flavour and its healthy properties. This is for sure an iconic indicator of how variegated Italy is in terms of both culture and traditions: what is beloved somewhere is not so well received in another. We can say that literally many Italies exists, unified in its charming and deeply humanistic culture. This will result self-evident to everyone who actually throughout the italian geography from north to south, and this is undoubtly one of the most charming feature of the Boot.

As for the use of the garlic and many other things, southern Italy may be considered more similar to Spain than to northern Italy. The emigration from the southern Italy to north America exported the culture of the garlic, and this is the reason that generated the equation: "italian cuisine equals garlic", generalizing a regional product as if it was used by the whole country with the same love.

Garlic cloves

But how was created garlic bread? It is considered to be an "americanized" version of an ancient "poor" traditional dish, the bruschetta, now a Tuscan typical antipasto. The bruschetta was consumed already in the roman era, and was made with old bread rubbed with garlic and drizzled with strong olive oil. Even if now the bruschetta is a gourmet antipasto to be eaten with the best italian extra vergin olive oil, originally it was rubbed with garlic and covered with strong oil in order to let the bread last longer in the poor cuisine of the ancient times.
European restaurants take the garlic bread back from the italo-american cuisine, and today it may be find in lots of Italian-inspired restaurants almost everywhere...north of the Alps. The main difference between the italo-american garlic bread and the bruschetta it's what is considered to be the main ingredient in terms of flavour: in garlic bread is the garlic and in the bruschetta is the olive oil, making it essential to be made with a very good olive oil. We have documents of menus in US with garlic bread in it as old as the second half of the Forties.

Recipe:

We wanted to give our own touch to the garlic bread, taking a little bit here and a little bit there, using instead of the usual bread the pizza dough and using a different sauce, inspired in the huge variety of canarian sauces known as "mojo", that will be sometime soon the topic of our post.

For this recipe you can use the typical pizza dough you usually use, the one you prefer best, every kind of pizza dough works for what we suggest you here. We usually use a very thin kind of pizza dough that we've mentioned in a previous post (if you want to read it, click here), because it's easy and quick to prepare.

It is the perfect recipe for a starter or an antipasto, it's better to eat it still warm, but cold are super tasty as well ;).
We can prepare the pizza dough and the garlic dough balls many days before our guests come to our house, since the rest of the preparation is pretty simple. Success is granted!

Ingredients:

• 1 pizza dough (recipe here)
• 3 garlic cloves (to taste)
• 30 g. of parsley
• 80 -100 ml of olive oil (better if it's extra virgin)
• Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (Always the original! To taste, but not less than 25-30 grams)
• Mozzarella filante cheese or any melting stringy cheese
• salt and black pepper to taste

Preparation:

1- With the pizza dough we make some little balls, trying to make them kinda uniform, we will fill them with the kind of cheese we've chosen. We put them in an oven tray separated each one from anothen, since they'll grow a little bit. We bake them in a preheated oven at 180º C for some 15 minutes or until we see them becoming golden brown.

Garlic dough balls ready for the oven!

2- While we're baking our garlic dough balls, we prepare our sauce (or "quasi mojo" he he!), very fast and easy to do. We can use a food processor, a mixer, a Thermomix...whatever you want, and here resides maybe the biggest difference between the mojo canario and this sauce, since the first one is traditionally made by hand and clearly has not cheese in it. Add all the ingredients of the sauce (garlic, parsley, olive oil, salt, pepper and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese) and process them together until you obtain a nice sauce.

...and garlic dough balls ready to be eaten in 3, 2, 1...

3- When our garlic dough balls are ready, we take them off of the oven and (when they're still hot) we immediately put them in a bowl together with the sauce. We stir them all together well in order to let all of the dough balls to wet well into the sauce and get all of the flavour. We can put a little bit more of grated cheese above the dough balls and...eat them as quick as you can, they literally will disappear in a matter of seconds!

The interior of our garlic dough ball...nom nom!

Buon appetito!

AnGie