working in italy

[elakin]

hi all.... i'm from chicago, but am currently living in italy, working in restaurants and travelling around, trying to see and taste and eat and experience as much as i can. i posted a thread about chicago, but everyone just wanted to ask me about italy, so i thought i'd start something of an on-line journal. i'm keeping a journal for myself, so i'll just cut and paste some of it. i'll try to be sparse though, as i can get wordy (as any of you who've read some of my other postings may know).


i'm living in bologna, but am planning on doing a lot of travelling to learn as much about the various regional cusines as i can.


i did a week-long stage at a michelin one-star place in piacenza, and now i'm working at a place here in bologna called da francesco. francesco, the chef, is sicilian and the food is very very different from what we did in piacenza, and from what i've been eating here in bologna. what follows is a recent menu from da francesco along with notes that i wrote to myself so i can remember all this stuff.


Antipasti £7000


Bruschetta con Alicette Marinate
-this is just the basic marinated anchovies, the white good ones of course, served as a bruschetta. He marinates the fresh anchovies in white wine vinegar for four hours or so, rinses them off, them preserves them under oil with some herbs. Then just toasts bread and serves them with some grilled cippoline onions that are also preserved under oil.

Bruschetta con Bottarga
-this is just a basic bruschetta, toasted bread topped with chopped cherry tomatoes and herbs in oil, but then topped with some grated bottarga, which is salted dried pressed tuna roe. Very salty, it's grated over the bruschetta like cheese, and then topped with a couple arrugula leaves.

Insalatina di Finocchi con Piccantino, Olive, e Ciliegino Sott'olio
-this is terrifically tasty and really, i think, is tipical of francesco's southern, sicilian food. Very simple, it's a mixture of pickled chiles (pepperoncini), big fat green olives, and small, incredibly sweet sundried cherry tomatoes (these are the ciliegino, which means little cherries, even though they're tomatoes) that's all perserved together in oil with herbs. Then he just chops up some fresh fennel and mixes it together with more olive oil. So much olive oil....man, he garnishes like every dish with a few streams of the pale green olive oil we use. This is everything that this food is....spicy, sweet, very boldly flavored, salty....yum.


Primi Piatti £11000


Linguine al Nero
-this is pretty basic. I haven't made it yet, but i cleaned the squids and we saved the ink sacs separate. Basically, i think marco sautees the ink sac with a little garlic, oil, and then adds the pasta. Maybe a little squid goes in there, but i'm not really sure. More on this one after i make it.

Pasta con Alici
-this is another dish that i think says it all about this type of food. Garlic, a dried red chile crumbled, and some sardo go into the pan, sauteed in olive oil, with a few anchovies (fresh). The garlic is a couple whole cloves which will be removed before the pasta goes in. Sardo is this paste made of sardines that are salted and then cooked down and pureed...it's used in many of these dishes to give an extra jolt of salty fishiness. The pasta here is just spaghetti, and we basically sautee the sardo, garlic, and fresh alici, remove the garlic, adds a good shot of chopped parsley, and salt, then adds the al dente pasta to heat for a minute or so. After it's plated, it's topped with toasted breadcrumbs, which are a nice touch...a tip of the hat to the fact that this is cocina povera, where people who didn't have enough money for parmegiano would toast breadcrumbs and use them in that way.

Tortelloni di Ricotta con Uvetta e Balsamico.
-Very good, and very sophisticated, something you'd see on an ambitious restaurant menu in the U.S. the tortelloni are frozen, unfortunately, all the fresh pasta here is bought and kept frozen. They have a lot of freezer space, and honestly, i can't tell the difference. The balsamic sauce is made by reducing balsamic by probably about half, with lots of whole herbs, rosemary, sage, thyme.... then for an order, we just add a little of it to the pan, reduce it again, maybe by about a third, then add a few drops of cream and golden raisins (uvetta). When the tortelloni are cooked, add them to heat them through, and that's it.

Spaghetti con Cozze e Bottarga
-havent seen this one too much yet, but pretty basic, i think. More later.

Maccheroncini con Melanzane e Pecorino
-the maccheroncini is thin penne rigate that's a frozen fresh pasta. The eggplant is cooked very long and slow, in the skins, baked at a low temp, then skinned and chopped roughly. For pickup, we put oil, garlic, eggplant, and a little red chile, sautee a bit....cooks the pasta, removes the garlic clove (whole again) adds a few ladles of tomato sauce, then the pasta. It's topped with grated pecorino when plated, the pecorino is that stuff you see with the whole black peppercorns like embedded in it.

Orecchiette con Anduja e Spinaci
-anduja is a fat, wierd-looking fresh sausage. Closest thing i can liken it to is mexican chorizo, but it-s less spicy, less orange, and not as flavorful. We use a little blob of it, which we mix with hot water out of the pasta unit until we get like a liquidy paste, which we sautee with some tomato sauce. Its pretty spicy and you can really smell how spicy it is when it's sauteeing. The rest is basic.....the spinach is steamed in the steamer, added with the cooked pasta and it all gets mixed together and heated and served with some pecorino over the top. One thing about francesco's is that people don't get cheese at the table. If a dish gets cheese, we put it on in the kitchen and usually pretty generously, but some don't get any, and i guess that's the way he wants it. I think the prevailing school of thought is that fish dishes don't go with cheese well, so he wants to control that.....i'm thinking.

Ravioli di Pesce con Erbette al Timo
-this one's really basic. The ravioli are bought, stuffed with fish...i don't know what kind. We melt a good few ounces of butter in a skillet on a turned-off burner...just using the heat of the pilot or nearby pans to melt it while the pasta cooks. A little water is added to the melting butter. Once the pasta is cooked, it's tossed in the butter with fresh thyme. That's it.
Tortelli di Ricotta con Carciofi'haven't seen this one much....more later.


Secondi Piatti £15000


Salmone alla Piastra con Finocchi Saltati
Cotolettine di Sarde
-this is one of francesco's specialties. The sardines are fresh, fileted, and opened, but kept together, so you have two connected filets. The name is a take on cotolete milanese. Basicially, they're sardines done in the same style. Francesco flours them, then dunks them in water (he doesn't use egg, which he says makes the breading too heavy), then in breadcrumbs, and then into the deep fryer. They're served six fish to an order on a piece of brown paper on the plate with just a lemon and salt. This is what i had the first time i went there to eat, and loved it.

Frittura di Birichini e Sogliole
-...also very simple and classic. Birichini are small little fish and the sogliole are little soles. They are simply dunked in water, then flour, then deep-fried, and served the same way as above. That's it. Both fish are whole, heads and all. The sole are so small you get 2 or 3 per plate and you have to kind of pull the meat of the rack of bones with your fork, or as phillipo, a friend of mine did when i ate with him, put it in your mouth and drag it out, leaving the clean rack of bones. Francesco serves a big pile of fish for this one....maybe 2 or 3 little soles and like 15-20 or so of the other fishies.

Tonno Affumicato con Insalatina d'Arance
-this is a cold dish. Thin-sliced sheets of tuna cured and smoked like smoked salmon or swordfish, cut to order on the slicer. We cut up a blood orange and a regular one into wheels, make a little pile of them in the middle of the plate and sprinkle salt and pepper, and a little crushed red chiles, then drape the sheets of tuna around the outside. Garnished with a few drizzles of olive oil and a fat green olive in the middle.

Zuppetta di Cozze
-the mussels we get are so disgusting, i can't believe it. They come in black mesh bags and are all still connected together in big clumps with seaweed and whatever all grows on them as they hang in the ocean. I have to rip them apart to debeard them, and they're covered with light brown mud. I pull the beards off first, then wash them in the sink, scrubbing them together to scrape all the gross green hairy stuff off their shells, tossing the 25% or so of the ones that are open, empty or smashed up. I have found lots of alive bugs and weird-looking crawly sea-worms in them too. Last night i was scrubbing them one by one in the sink and i was a little daunted at the prospect of doing like all 200 of them like this. Francesco walked by and just gave me a look, like... 'that's fine...don't go nuts,' and i was kind of surprised, so i asked him, 'it's ok'' 'paganno poco,' he said. Meaning....it's cheap and we give a big order, so don't worry about it too much. We do give a huge order...like 20 or 30 mussels which we fry/steam in olive oil and tomato sauce, covered, in a pan, then piling them perilously in a small bowl, pouring the juice over it, and balancing a piece of toasted bread on top.

Parmigiana di Melanzane
-haven't seen him make this one yet, but it looks pretty basic.

Triglie All'Acquapazza
-i've seen this one with triglie, which is like red mullet, and also with gallinella (chicken fish) which is what we call scorpionfish or sometimes, i think, razorfish. It's nicer with the gallinella, where we use the whole fish, with the filets kind of half-sliced off the sides so they're kind of butterflied off the sides and opened up. The triglie are just filets. The acquapazza is a sautee of garlic, a little hot chile, olive oil, then deglazed with white wine. In goes the fish, some fume, a handful of chopped cherry tomatoes, choppped parsely, salt, pepper. The pan is covered as it cooks. The fish is simply plated and the sauce poured over and around, leaving the garlic clove behind.

Frittelle di Neonata
-these next two are the same, basically, and are very strange. Neonata are teeny tiny little baby fishes. Like maybe half an inch to an inch long, and so small and skinny. They are like translucent and all you can really see of them are eyes and spines. Francesco has a mix of egg yolks, breadcrumbs and grated cheese and to this he adds a rammekin full of the neonate and a handful of chopped parsely. He uses a fork to mix it all up, breaking up the fish and kind of mushing them all together. The end result is kind of a rough mix, which then gets fried in a pan for the fritelle, in like little burger shapes....baby fishburgers, mmmm.... or into little quennelle type shapes on the flatgrill, for the bocconcini. Basically they're the same. Not bad....kind of weird, though.

Bocconcini di Neonata alla Piastra
-see above.

ok....i guess this is now a very long post....sorry


anyone who's got some good knowledge of italian regional food, i'd love to hear from you about the differences/similarities. i need to learn more about sicilian food. one of the cooks i work with is sardinian and he's teaching me a lot about that, too....they seem pretty similar.


anyway...that's that....hopefully, i'll keep this up , pasting a post from my personal journal here a couple times a week or so...


thanks for reading

This posted was edited by Nicko. I think it is such a great post and I just wanted to make it a little easier to read by putting things in bold. Hope that is ok. Thank you for such an excellent post

[ 02-16-2001: Message edited by: Nicko ]

[ 02-16-2001: Message edited by: elakin ]

Elakin:

Wow! Quite a post. Thanks for leaving the Frittelle di Neonata to last. I was getting hungry, but that stopped my hunger right in its tracks. I just can't get used to the idea of eating mushed up little fishies heads, eyeballs and all, though I love oyster on the half shell. Tough to explain, I guess.

Anyway thanks for your post. Very interesting and it sounds like you are getting a thorough education in REAL Italian cooking.

[Mezzaluna]

Thank you SO much Elakin! My husband and I are hoping to visit Italy in the next year or so, and this will definitely add to my culinary dictionary (besides picking up a few basic words of Italian). I'll drool until the next installment.

[cape chef]

Elakin,

Thanks for sharing your experences with us.
There is always so much to learn.
I look forward to your next post
cc

[momoreg]

Sounds like you're learning a lot. Thank you for passing it on. I have never heard of neonata (doesn't that translate into newborns?), but I guess I'd try it. The cuisine in Bologna is so different from Florence, where I spent 6 months. Please keep us posted on desserts, too!

[Isa]

Elakin,

Wow that was wonderful. So nice of you to share all that information. I was wondering if at some point you could talk about Italian breads and pastry?

Thanks again!

[elakin]

hi...thanks to everyone for all the responses...i'm glad you're liking it. hope i didn't go overboard with too much reading material.

nicko, thanks for cleaning up the text....i thought about doing that myself, but it seemed like too much of hassle, so i'm glad you did. i'm cutting and pasting from word, so i lose all my own formatting.

momoreg...this food is very different from that of florence (tuscan, i guess) and also from that of bologna. this is very southern italian food. the chef here is from sicily, and most of the bolognese people that eat at ths restaurant are somewhat perplexed by this food and not sure what to make of it. it's new for them too. the typical bolognese food is much richer...lots of meat, cheese, cream sauces. what is the food in florence like? besides the bistecca fiorentina (which is, incidentally, is currently outlawed in italy because of mad-cow) i don't know much about it.

iza...we make all our own desserts at the restaurant (which is pretty rare around here, i think) and i've actually made a bunch of them in the last couple days. i'll talk about some of them in more detail in my next post. today we made the dough for canoli, though, and i'll let you know how we finish the project tomorrow.

again, thanks to everyone for reading and for your great positive responses.

[cape chef]

Eddie,

How are you finding the culture relating to wine...Is it looked at as a beverage? what I mean by that is in this country so much can be made out of the pomp and cercomstance (I know I spelled that wrong)when my parents toured Italy a few years ago they comented on how at every meal there was wine on the table (breakfast excluded)and just enjoyed with the food.The wine was all local..no "super tuscans" Do you find that wine is part of the flesh of the culture?
Are you being tought about the wines? How doe's it fit in with your travels? If at all.

Eddie thanks agian for your chronicals
cc

[elakin]

cape chef....

first of all let me say that i've enjoyed reading your posts and you seem really knowledgeable and it's a pleasure to read stuff from someone who's as obviously passionate and into food and cooking as you are.

wine...yes, it's totally as you said. no big deal. only the fanciest restaurants bother with a wine list. most people just opt for the house white or red, which i think is usually very good. most places have them "on tap" where they come out of like a dispenser system and they use these little ceramic pitchers to serve you either a quarter, half, or a full liter. there's usually a few local wines availiable in bottles. here, in bologna, we have the fizzy red lambruscos, some chiantis from tuscany usually, and maybe a sangiovese. pingnolettos are popular whites, along with the fizzy malvasia from parma, and a few from up in the alto adige, which are gervurtztraminer-types. and that's about it. you probably couldn't find a french or american or other country's wine if you tried. i'd say on average, most restaurants have like maybe 10 wines availiable between what bottles they have and then the two on tap. when people order a bottle of wine, they don't get too particular. they usually just say bring me a nice....whatever. they'll specify like if they want sweeter or dryer, white or red....and then trust that the restaurant will bring them what they want.

and yes, it's very much a part of the meal. when we have staff meal at the restaurant i'm working at, there's always a pitcher of wine on the table, even at lunch, which is unheard of in the states. one thing i've noticed is people here don't like chase down their food with whatever they're drinking. they chew, swallow, eat....then eventually take just a sip of wine or water, not gulps...which i tend to do...kind of washing out my mouth with the drink.

another thing i've noticed both here and in spain, where i lived for a while, is that people will often pour a little water into their glass of red wine, cutting it a little. this, i think, would be seen as like a mortal sin in the wine-worshipping restaurant world of the u.s.....but i've seen it fairly often.

i'm trying to educate myself about wine by going to enotecas and just buying bottles and trying them. it's not too hard when you can get d.o.c. wines for like 2-5 dollars a bottle. so i'm dutifully doing my research for the sake of educating myself....what sacrifices we in the industry make for the sake of learning!

[cape chef]

Eddie,

thank you for your kind words.
It is also obviouse to me that you are driven by passion. I wish I had the chance to do what you are doing.
I have never been to Europe, but hope to one day. I would like to sit under a shaddy tree with some fresh grilled vegetables,local cheese and a hunk of bread..And sip,not gulp a fizzy,fruity,friendly wine
cc

[momoreg]

Eddie,

That's what I remember too about Italians and wine. It is simply the beverage of choice. It's not revered the way it is here. And I also noticed that the stigma of alcoholism really doesn't exist the way it does here. Here, if you drink every day, you have a problem. Not so there. It's just a more laid back society.

The foods I remember most from Tuscany were Pappa al Pomodoro (light but filling), Panzanella, all the grilled veg on the antipasti tables, those amazing thin crust pizze without cheese (especially the seafood pizza), the Florentine specialty, spinach, which is sold in "delis", as it were, in baseball-sized balls, just like that. It's steamed and ready to go, for whatever you want to cook. I dined a lot in people's homes, and almost always, I got served enormous amounts of food, which I was expected to finish. A common home cooked dish was farfalle with salmon and caviar, and also gnocchi with a gorgonzola cream sauce. Also in Florence, I recall The olive oil soaked focaccia, and other breads which I found bland and very ordinary. The only time I was impressed by the breads were in places that sold atypical types.

Naturally, the gelati were not to be believed. It's hard to find anything that good here. And I got a great recipe for biscotti di Prato, which I use to this day.

One time I was dining at the home of a friend, and his mother served a wonderful pasta dish, which she piled so high on my plate, I could barely eat half of it. I ate what I could, thanking her graciously, and apologizing. The following day, Fabrizio told me that my girlfriend and I had insulted his mother, and we were not invited back, because we didn't finish the pasta. All I could do to thank her was to bake a huge assortment of cookies with a nice note, and then she forgave us. It's really a different culture.

[elakin]

worked today after having yesterday off. Lunch was pretty uneventful and slow. We had a kind of a nice staff meal today before we opened and francesco actually sat down and ate with us, which is rare. He and marco were talking a lot about doing something in the campagna....and i didn’t really catch the jist of it, but then he turned and asked me in english what i was doing sunday morning. I wasn’t really sure what he was asking me, and wasn’t really too eager to volunteer for something work-related, but i said i wasn’t doing anything and he asked me if i would like to come to his house in the country. He said we’d all go and just eat and lay in the sun and hang around and drink wine and “fare niente,” which sounded very good to me, so i quickly accepted. Marco bristled a bit, asking what francesco was planning to make to eat, telling aside in english that “this geezer (he always calls everyone geezer) never has anything to eat in his house, so i’ve got to ride him a bit.” So marco and i are supposedly going shopping tomorrow between shifts and getting some supplies for sunday, if we can get francesco to bankroll us....we’ll see.

Dinner was more eventful. We had a new server who i hadn’t met and she’s like a 45 or 50 year old woman and right from the get-go i could kind of tell that she didn’t have it all together real well and that there might be some problems. We were fully booked, as we are tomorrow, and marco and i were working pastas and francesco was doing secondi. the very first ticket we had was for a couple antipasti and then two pastas. The server, i think her name was like lorena or something, brought the ticket back and clipped it to the board (servers handwrite tickets here and come back into the kitchen to put them up for us. There’s no pass or anything, the servers just walk into the kitchen and take the plates off the counter where we plate.) Anyway, we make her antipasti, they go out, then she comes in, moves the ticket for the pastas over to “vai,” (which is like “fire,” if you’re working with an “order, fire” system. We have “segue, vai.”) so we make the two pastas, put them up, ring the bell, put the ticket next to them, she comes in....looks at the ticket like it’s written in a foreign language (which for me it is, and for her, it’s not) and looks at us like as if to ask.... “where’s this supposed to go?” i hate this. servers always do this. you just took the order....you wrote the ticket....don’t you remember? I haven’t even met these people or seen them, but i know it’s table six, so why don’t you? So right away Marco and i give each other a look, like it’s gonna be a long nite.

And it was. She had a lot of problems. First of all, she took a lot of special orders, which francesco doesn’t like a bit, especially on a friday. She kept writing things wrong, so we’d make them, and then they’d come back and she’d need the right thing on the fly (subito). At one point francesco flung a large cleaver to the ground. He has quite a huge collection of knives and cleavers, among which is the single very biggest chef knife i’ve ever seen. It must be like 16” long, i can’t even believe it. Anyway, the cleaver bounced a little, but we just ignored him and kept working. The worst thing she did was for a big party, they ordered a bunch of bruschettas, so instead of giving them like 6 little plates, we made them like two very large plates for everyone to share...kind of like appetizer sampler platter kind of deals. Marco told her to let them know that this was the 6 antipasti they had ordered, but just on two plates. But she didn’t, and then in a bit she came back and said that they wanted to know if the rest of their aps were coming. There was quite a lot of yelling and swearing in italian, they argued back and forth for a while, and francesco just eventually ended up emptying his prep for the bruschetta onto a big plate and telling her that we should maybe sell it by the kilo like they do at the market. For me this was all kind of fun, cause i wasn’t the one who was getting yelled at, and it was nice to see that the same problems are universal. I had a laugh with francesco afterwards, telling him, once again, that it’s all the same in every restaurant in the whole world, and that we always have the same problems with servers too. He seemed to like this.

So, what did i do, foodwise today? Well, i concentrated on doing the primis during dinner, and am starting to get them pretty well down. I think i’m fine to go solo on pastas on a weeknight....i’m sure i’d be slow and awkward, but i think i’d get it done. I prepped the linguini nero this morning, cleaning the octopus and using the ink sacs from the squid. We chopped shallots fine, sauteed them in olive oil, then added the smallish pieces of cut-up octopus to sautee with also some garlic. Then, when they were cooked, we deglazed it with white wine and added the ink sacs, breaking them all up with a fork in a rammekin first, then mixing them in. Then when we have a ticket for it, we just heat this mix in a sautee pan, add the cooked linguini, and that’s it.

The menu’s changed a bit...but not much. Seems to be mainly twists on the same theme. Today the orecchiette with anduja also had carciofi and ricotta al forno. For that, we just took two fairly large forms of fresh ricotto and baked them slowly in the oven until they were very dry and browned on the outside. For an order, we just broke off a few chunks of this and mixed it into the pasta. It’s much dryer and firmer and saltier, but still kind of spongy, not at all like a hard cheese. This is a new technique for me.

One of the things the server messed up today was an order for neonata, which she wrote, but then she really didn’t need. So we had an extra and francesco divvied it up for everyone. i had some and it has quite a little crunch to it. Kind of like a “pop” when you chew. I asked marco if that was like the bones, or what....and he said he thought it was the eyeballs. Francesco was chewing, telling us that he loves this dish, and it’s one of his favorites, and i asked him what was croccante, and he said “la testa,” like all enthusiastically.

I’ve done quite a few of the desserts the last couple days, so wanted to document those....

Dessert £5000

Semifreddo al croccante di sesamo
—this one i made and have eaten when i ate there. Delicious. We make a basic semifreddo, by mixing 10 egg yolks and a cup or so of sugar, whisking well, then heating while whisking until the yolks are cooked and it all starts to firm up pretty well. We whip cream to stiff peaks and fold it into the cooked, cooled yolk-sugar mix. This is the basic semifreddo. To this, we add chopped croccante di sesamo, which is like a sesame praline, which francesco brings back from sicily. It’s really good....the caramel is very dark tasting, just shy of tasting burnt, but pleasantly so, and very strongly flavored like toasted sesame. We fold this into the semifreddo mix and then pour it all into a loaf pan. to serve, it’s sliced and dusted with cocoa.
Dolce di Mascarpone
—This is the classic bolognese dessert which you pretty much see in every restaurant. Most places, i think, use pasteurized egg yolks out of a container which they basically just whip with sugar and then mascarpone, but we use fresh eggs which we treat pretty much the same way as in the semifreddo. Ours is less sweet than most that i’ve tasted.
Torta al cioccolato con panna fresca
—this is a pretty basic flourless chocolate cake with walnuts and it’s one of the richest desserts (chocoloate-wise) that i’ve had in bologna. Very basic...served alternately with whipped cream (unsweetened) or like a creme anglaise kind of sauce.
Budino di semolino con salsa di mardarino
—budino is a cake that’s made with semolino which is kind of like a mush that’s made in the same way as polenta, but with semolina (wheat flour) instead of polenta (corn). We cook first the semolina, pouring it gradually into boiling milk while whisking until it starts to thicken. When they were trying to explain this one to me, marco and giovanna were saying “you know, like you ate when you were a baby.” I was thinking....no, i didn’t eat this.....but i guess you did. It’s like mush. Baby food. So, anyway, we make that, cool it, pass it through a kind of a food-mill kind of device that we have that has a very fine mesh chinois-type strainer on it, and then fold it into egg yolks that are beaten with sugar. A little flour is folded in very gently, but not much. Then baked. We also did some little small versions of this, but instead of sugar they were flavored with pecorino and we served them as a side dish for an entree.
Cantucci e Zibibbo
—not sure yet. I think these are little almond biscottis that are then served with grappa or somthing, but the servers just put them together and we don’t really do anything for them, so i'm not positive.

That's it for now...we made the dough also for canoli, mixing it like pasta on the counter, making a well with flour, but then cutting in some butter, adding eggs, sugar, white wine, and marsala. We kneaded it forever until it was smooth "come un culo di bambino," as francesco put it, then wrapped it to rest in the fridge overnight.

[ 02-17-2001: Message edited by: elakin ]

[Isa]

Elakin,

I must have gained 10 pounds just reading about all those desserts. Thank you so much for taking the time to write about your experience and those fabulous desserts. Now all I can think of is that I want to go to Italy!

So what will happend to the waitress? I feel like I am reading a roman feuilleton, and will have to come back tommorow to see how it ends...

[momoreg]

Keep it comin', Eddie!

[shroomgirl]

Oh Eddie, what a treat! Thank you for sharing.