Apple and Sidra Risotto recipe

Today we bring you a delicious risotto recipe, with a different and delicate taste. We mixed it up making a sort of Italian-Spanish fusion, with italian rice and apples with the typical Spanish Sidra de Asturias.

The Apple is an extraordinary fruit whose origins are to be find in Central Asia in the Neolithic era. There are more than 7,000 known varieties of apples, and the apples literally followed Mankind while conquering the World. One could say that the apple is the Men's best friend.

Unluckily, of this endless variety we can find in our grocery store only seven-eight kinds of apples, that covers more than 90% of the whole market. That's a pity for instance that one of our favourite kinds of apple, the Melannurca, known in Italy as the queen of apples, sweet and tasty, is impossible to find elsewhere.

Since ancient times, the apples were used to obtain delicious drinks, even alcoholic ones. The cider, nowadays, is a ligthly alcoholic drinks whose alcoholic volume range from 3% to 8%, until 12% in some case. The production of apple drinks is known for instance in the ancient Egypt, in ancient Greece and Rome. The cider is very popular in the European Atlantic coast, in countries like Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, England and Ireland. 

The english name cider and the spanish name "Sidra" derivates from the latin word Sicera, that comes from the Hebrew word "Shekar", or "drink that makes you feel dizzy". Already in the high middle ages, the sidra was very popular in all the Cantabrian Mountains, and we have some information about the cultivations of apples there already in the VIII century, during the Asturian Kingdoms. During the Carolingian empire, under Charlemagne, in the IX century, we can find the very first mention of the production of what we intend as cider in commercial documents.

Taking a huge leap forward, in the XIX century, spanish regions of Asturias and Guipuzcoa-Basque Country becomes the propulsory center of the spanish sidra. In the region of Asturias, the consumption of sidra reach the 54 liter per capita per year. An astonishing volume and probably a Guinness World record!

Today the Sidra de Asturias is the most important traditional drink of that spanish region, and it is widely used in the whole Spain to celebrate events like bithdays, Christmas and New Year's Eve.
The 12 of November 2002, the Sidra de Asturias has become a D.O.P. protected label (denominación de origen protegida). Today the production of the sidra is also a touristical appeal for Asturias, for instance there is a county called the "Mancomunidad de la sidra" (the county of the sidra) that offers to the visitor many activities related to this delicious sparkling drink.

With the apples you can literally do anything you want: desserts, drinks, purees, creams, ice creams and, even if we associate the apples with sweet dishes more than with savoury ones, there's a quite a list of main courses using apple too, like the dish that we'll show you today!

Ingredients:

- Carnaroli or Arborio rice 

- 1 liter of vegetables stock

- 1 onion 

- 1 or 2 apples (to taste)

- 1 spoon of butter 

- Parmigiano Reggiano cheese 

- 1 (abundant) glass of Sidra de Asturias 

- 2 spoonful of extra virgin olive oil

- a pinch of salt

Preparation: 

The preparation for our risotto is just like any other risotto, for instance you can see the steps to follow looking at our "Saffron risotto" recipe, but in this case remember to use the Sidra de Asturias instead of the white wine.

1- Put the pan on medium-high heat, drizzle a little bit of olive oil and put inside the pan the diced onions (à là brunoise), and let it cook for some seconds. Then add the rice and let it toast for a little bit. This step, as we said in other occasions, is very crucial to obtain a good risotto. And here goes the change with the traditional risotto recipe: at this point you would add the wine, but in this recipe you'll add the Sidra de Asturias. Stir it until the liquid has completely evaporated.

Note: We already explained how to calculate the quantity of rice to add into the pan in a traditional way, but we'll repeat here just in case you've missed it.

I've learned to cook risotto from the mothers and the grandmas, and they used to tell me to use "un pugnetto per ognuno e uno in più per la padella", that is a fistful of rice for each one and one extra for the pan. Clearly it depends also on the size of the hands, in my case it would be two fistful for each one, since I've got very small hands hehehe! This is a very efficent way to calculate the quantities needed, but we also love to cook a little bit more of rice in order to have an extra portion to prepare later our beloved supplìs, crocchès and so on...you can do great things with you risotto leftovers!

2- Now little by little we'll add our hot vegetable stock to the pan and we'll keep stirring the rice, in order to help the risotto to release the starch and so obtain the typical creamy texture. We'll add a little bit of stock at time and we'll keep on stirring until we see the liquid totally absorbed. We'll continue doing so for about 18 minutes, and we'll add the chopped apples halfway through the cooking.

3- When our risotto is realy (after about 18 minutes) we turn off the heat and we'll add a spoonful of butter and the grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and we stir energetically. This step is known as "mantecatura" in italian. And there you have it!

Serve it freshly cooked.

Buon appetito! 

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!

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!

Risotto part I : how to choose the right rice

Talk about rice for us is talking about a product we've always seen at home, we literally grew up surrounded by rice fields and rice was of course at the very base of our gastronomy. One of us (Tom) grew up in the area where Europe's biggest rice fields are located. Even if it's Italy, around Milan they tend to eat more rice than pasta as a "primo piatto". It's known that rice is the main food for more than the half of the population of the World, and it's a key ingredient in the fight against hunger in the developing countries.

The king of the rices produced around Milan is the Carnaroli, the kind of rice that many consider to be perfect to make one of the most celebrated dish of Italian cuisine: the risotto. The risotto is a complicate dish if you don't know exactly what ingredients you need, you just can use few varieties of rice in order to get a proper risotto. You need one of these three varieties: the Arborio, the Vialone Nano or the Carnaroli rice. These kinds of rices have an interesting interior structure that let them cook for a while without becoming a glue. The rice is creamy yet al dente.

The rice seems to have been cultivated as a food for some 12,000 years now, at the beginning just in Asia, maybe in the area around the Himalaya mountains. A food that has seen the rise and the fall of every great historical civilty of the World. That's pretty impressive!  Inside the chinese cultivar, we can appreciate a kind of rice that's known as Japonica. The Arborio rice, perfect for risotti, belongs to this variety. many loves the Arborio rice because of its quality and its cheaper price than the Carnaroli. The Arborio has been the rice used in the past centuries to cook great risotti, until it was developed its great rival, the Carnaroli.

Sack of Carnaroli rice straight from a mill at Abbiategrasso

After the birth in China, it seems to have moved southwards, arriving in India. Here it will be discovered by Greece through the adventurous campaign of Alexander the Great, and after some centuries, the Romans will know somewhat about rice through confused travel tales. With the implosion of the Roman empire every sector of the Western world collapsed, and that happened to commerce too. The economical exchanges between the East and the West ceased and many product from Asia fell into oblivion. We have to wait the Arab conquest in the Mediterranean sea to see the rice back in Europe. 

Arabs imported the cultivation of rice first in the Iberian peninsula (Valencia) and then into southern Italy, around year 1000. Slowly crawling up the boot, we can observe the first cultivation of rice in northern Italy at the end of XV century. It was a late but intense love between the flat and wet landscape of northern Italy and rice. A great sponsor of rice in Lombardy was Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan in the great season of Leonardo da Vinci's Milan. Let us tell ya that Duke Gian Galeazzo was born at the castle of Abbiategrasso, the borough of Milan where one of us (Tom) was born. We can pridely say that we've rice in our veins!



By the will of duke Gian Galeazzo's father, Galeazzo Maria, the first modern rice fields in Lombardy were created in 1468.
Gian Galeazzo also gave as a most precious gift a sack of rice to the duke of Ferrara in 1475, sign of how the rice was considered a very expensive exotic spice.  In the following centuries, the cultivation of rice grew in all Europe, and overall southern european countries like Spain and Italy. Between Lombardy and Piedmont we can see now the biggest rice fields in the whole Old Continent

Abbiategrasso castle, Milan, built in XIV century

When you fly above Milan, you will be amazed by the sight of the paddy fields shining in the whole southern Milan, a Pekin Express-like sort of experience. The Milan you don't expect is just some 7-8 kms away from the Duomo cathedral!

Paddy Fields between Milan and Pavia

In 1937 we assist to a great innovation, the birth of the Vialone Nano, from the rices varieties called Vialone and Nano, which it is still nowadays very appreciated by the risotto lovers.
In 1945 we assist to the birth of the king of European rices: mixing the Vialone and the Lencino varieties they obtained an unique kind of rice, the world famous Carnaroli rice. The third variety perfect for the risotto is of course the Arborio rice and there is also a fourth kind of rice fit for a creamy risotto, the Maratelli rice. This kind was created in 1914 through an hybridization starting from the Japonica variety.

The Carnaroli rice has quite characteristic features, like a sort of nail present in one extremity, making it easy to recognise the Carnaroli between the other kinds of rice. The rice grains is longer and bigger than the rest of rice grains. Its strenght is that has a bigger amount of amylose than other kinds of rice, fact that prevent the rice from overcooking. The grains of Carnaroli rice, when cooked along with broth, release the amid, making the rice creamy, but thanks to the amylose they remains somewhat "al dente", and they do not become a glue like the other kinds of rice. Technically, we can say that the Carnaroli rice belongs to the "superfine" rices, and it is different from his rival Arborio because the latter is smaller and has less amid.

Now that we've learned to know the history and the characteristics of this dear friend of us, let's see how to use it to create a great risotto!

See you soon!

The Gorgonzola cheese

When you talk about Gorgonzola, you immediately think about one of the most important cheeses in every italian kitchen. It is frequently confused with other kinds of blue cheeses, like the english Blue Stilton or the french Roquefort. But behind this delicious cheese there is a whole lot of history with capitular h, and also many legends and myths. One would think it would be an alchemical product, rather than a cheese, whose secret has been told generation after generation until recent times, when it finally seems to start getting the international fame it surely deserves. But the way until the complete rediscovery of Gorgonzola has a very long way to go, since you can still find in shops around the World just the soft and sweetend version of it. Trust us, to eat the real thing, the spicy tough Gorgonzola cheese, when authentic and produced like 1000s years ago, is a true legendary culinary experience you won't never forget!

When we start hearing about Gorgonzola cheese first? This is one of the oldest cheese still in commerce now ever, so we gotta go back and back and back. And back again! The first document talking about a cheese having all the main feature of Gorgonzola is from year 881 a.C., when the Archbishop of Milan, Anspertus from Biassono, in his last will described this kind of cheese. But legends put the turning point in the history of Gorgonzola even earlier. According a legend, in the year 879 a.C., the blue cheese would have been invented in the Gorgonzola borough of Milan, explaining the name of this cheese. Another legend wants that the cheese would have been invented in the VIII century a.C., when some sheperds, coming back from the Alps with their sheeps, would have stopped overnight and there, without the instruments to make their typical Lombard creamy cheeses like Crescenza or Quartirolo (we'll talk about these ancient cheeses too, do not worry) would have mixed the curdle of the previous night with the fresh one of the morning. That "error" would have eventually lead to the creation of the Gorgonzola cheese.

The Gorgonzola cheese is know also as the "Grandpa's cheese"

The "Zola" cheese, as is informally known here in Northern Italy, had huge success from the XIX century, when it was discovered in the kitchens of the European high aristocracies by merit of its taste, just so original and unmarchable (if you tried the original Gorgonzola, you'll know what I mean).
It is just so different from other blue cheese, like what Guinness is to other beers.
In the other blue cheeses, the milky part prevail over the aromatic part, instead with the Gorgonzola the strong spicy and  aromatic part dominates the milky part, but without being too much in your face. It is an incredibly culinary controlled risk the Gorgonzola, but when you'll eat it, you'll just go "whoa!" like you've just had a rollercoaster experience. 
There are lots of curiosities too, for example the Gorgonzola was the only italian cheese present in the first class dinner in the menù of the Titanic. Not even the Pecorino nero di Pienza or the 36-months-old Parmigiano Reggiano was there!
Some decades later, we can add that Churchill himself, in the heavy Milan bombings by Royal Air Force, forbid the planes to hit the city of Gorgonzola, so to not damage the production of the cheese he was very fond of.
What makes its taste so different and unique? It is because of the higher number of different types of bacterical cultivations inside the cheese. Other blue cheese have only the pennicillium roqueforti, that gives light blue veins, but the green veins of the Gorgonzola comes from another kind of bactery, the pennicillium glaucum, enriching the flavour.

The gourmet food lovers just adore the original Gorgonzola Piccante!

Even if today you can find in many supermarkets worldwide the sweet version of the Gorgonzola cheese, there is a different version, realized exactly as it was produced 1200 years ago: the Gorgonzola Piccante, or the spicy Gorgonzola. The differences are overall in the consistence of the cheese, the sweet one being creamy and somewhat melted, with fewer blueish veins with a delicate colour. The Gorgonzola Piccante is tough in consistence and taste, and the veins are much more evident. The Zola Dolce needs a ripening of two months maximum, while the Piccante needs a ripening of three months at least. Because of the very traditional way of making it, the Gorgonzola Piccante is very complicate to find it outside of Italy, so if you get the chance to see it, don't hesitate and buy it! You'll be rewarded with a strong and involving taste, ideal to drink with strong red wines like the Piedmont's Barolo (isn't it the king of wines? Drink it with the king of cheeses then!), the Brunello di Montalcino, the Amarone or the Barbaresco.
Try it with some rustic crunchy bread, and you'll understand the full range of the Gorgonzola cheese taste. Both the Gorgonzolas, the Dolce and the Piccante, are a real secret weapon in the kitchen, you can use it to do white sauces (for example our gorgonzola bechamel sauce), or as an ingredient in your pizzas, or even with meat or gourmet hamburgers. In the risottos the Gorgonzola is the ideal match, maybe with some red radicchio salad.

What are you waiting for? Go and find this gorgeous blue cheese, but be careful of the countless imitations, only the original has the "g" for Gorgonzola!

Only the real one has the "g" symbol for Gorgonzola!

Greetings!

Tom