Gina Stipo, Author at attheitaliantable.com

August 22, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

August heat and al fresco living

It was over 100 degrees in Siena today. The usual precautions of closing the shutters during the day against the hot sun, then opening them later in the evening to get a breeze, did nothing to keep the house cool. At 8 p.m. it still registered 101 degrees.

When it gets this hot, Americans disappear into their air conditioned houses and cars, but Italians come out to live on the street, in their gardens, on their terraces, under their neighbors’ noses. All the windows are open to the warm night and the still air is filled with voices of the neighborhood chatting about the days’ events, silverware clinking on plates as the evening meal is shared al fresco. Normally private conversations are open to everyone. Nothing is concealed in the still heat. Clothes come off, people come out and the entire town becomes your living room.

The simplest of meals is served. Tomatoes tossed with fresh basil, olive oil and salt. Sliced salami and cheese. Cold tuna and white beans, maybe a slice of frittata from lunch. Glasses of chilled white wine. Nothing that requires turning on the stove or oven. It’s too hot for heat.

An ice cream is suggested and we walk to the crowded bar to see what might be left in the freezer case.

August 20, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Summer Eggplants and Fried Peppers

Even though eggplants can be found all year long, they’re actually a summer vegetable and August is when they’re the most abundant. I remember when the only eggplant you could find was dark purple, oblong and pear-shaped. Then suddenly a wide variety of eggplants started appearing in the stores and range from small, white eggs, to mottled green and white balls, to long, thin fingers. Whether pale or dark purple, round and fat or long and skinny, the diversity of shape, size and color is truly astounding.

Originally from India, eggplant is a member of the nightshade family, along with tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and tobacco. The raw seeds are bitter and contain a form of nicotine.

Make sure you pick eggplants that are firm to the touch; the long,thin ones tend to have less seeds. Eggplant is like a sponge, made of cells filled with water and air. Salting eggplant causes the cells to release the water which collapses them, making the eggplant less of a sponge to absorb oil.

Eggplant is more commonly used in southern Italy where it seems almost to be used as a meat replacement. They have a myriad of ways to incorporate eggplant into a dish and they all seem to begin with frying it.

One of my favorite antipasti in the dog days of summer is fried eggplant and sweet Italian peppers, served with fresh mozzarella. If you have some nice cherry tomatoes, you can toss those in the hot oil as well. Then serve the whole thing with some fresh mozzarella, a good loaf of bread and a bottle of Primitivo or Negroamaro from Southern Italy. Buon Appetito!

Fried Summer Peppers, Eggplant & Tomatoes

2 lbs sweet Italian peppers, tops broken off & seeded

2 small eggplants, rectangular cut w/ skin on

1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved

Extra virgin olive oil

2 cups peanut oil

1/4 cup olive oil

Salt

Mozzarella

Heat the oils in a large sauté pan, about 1 inch deep and fry the peppers in batches until they are cooked and their skins are lightly browned, tossing and stirring every so often to cook evenly. If you can’t find the long sweet Italian peppers, you can use red bell peppers cut into thick slices. After you’ve fried all the peppers and placed them to drain on paper towels, add the eggplant in batches and cook until nicely browned, removing them to paper towel. Make sure the oil is very hot before adding the eggplant, you want them to seal and fry, not absorb oil. Be careful to drain the vegetables over paper, not on top of other pieces of eggplant or pepper. Add the tomatoes to the oil and fry for a few minutes, until their skin starts to crinkle, then drain on paper. Toss all the vegetables together, sprinkle with sea salt. A flaky salt like Maldon or Cyprus is really good and gives a nice salty crunch that pair well with the oily vegetables. Serve as an antipasto with the freshest, best mozzarella you can find.

A note on frying: it’s important for this recipe that the oil is very hot when you put the vegetables in, but not to the smoking point. Adding the vegetables lowers the temperature so you may need to allow the temperature to come back up before continuing with other batches.

August 10, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Eggplant Parmigiano Exposed

While eggplant has never been one of my favorite vegetables, I’ve been eating so much of it in Southern Italy that it’s really grown on me. My current favorite is eggplant parmigiano, especially the way my friend, Concetta, makes it.

Concetta and Sabato — Concetta & her husband Sabato

There is an ongoing discussion in Campania about the correct way to make eggplant parmigiano and like any good food discussion in Italy, it frequently becomes to heated you expect at any moment it will come to blows, dissolving into a real food fight. While Concetta’s mother makes it one way, her mother-in-law makes it another, and that is a difficult position to be in! The two older women are from neighboring towns prompting me to think “Can’t we all just get along?!”

The biggest bone of contention appears to be just how the eggplant should be prepared before assembling. One side says to dip the slices in beaten eggs and then dredge with flour or breadcrumbs, while the opposing camp believes just frying them naked is best. I think breadcrumbs are too heavy and naked is too light and prefer to dip them in egg and then dredge them with a little flour. As you wish.

Salting is also apparently an option. If you are using the big, spongy eggplants, you’ll want to slice them and then salt them well. Put them in a colander in the sink with a heavy weight on top for at least 5 hours if not overnight. Once they’ve given up their water, you’ll want to rinse the salt off and dry them on paper towels. Then you can continue with the frying stage.

The point of salting the eggplant is this: an eggplant is made up of tiny cells or chambers, like a sponge. When you salt it, the chambers collapse, releasing water; thus the chambers are prevented from filling again with oil when frying.

Some cooks in Campania say that you don’t need to salt the long, skinny and firm variety, like in the picture above. Just slice them thin and proceed with the frying stage.

Of course, a third option is to blanch the slices in boiling, salted water. While this may be a healthier alternative, boiling anything is never as delicious as frying it. Buon Appetito e grazie Concetta!

Eggplant Parmigiano

15-25 slices of eggplant

Peanut oil for frying

3 eggs, beaten

2 cups flour

Simple tomato sauce

Fresh basil leaves

1-2 lbs whole milk mozzarella, sliced

Heat the peanut oil until 350 degrees, dip each slice into the beaten eggs and then dredge in flour and fry each slice until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Prepare a large baking dish with a drizzle of olive oil and a light coating of tomato sauce. Place a layer of fried eggplant in the pan, pressing down well. Add a light coat of tomato sauce, some whole basil leaves and a layer of mozzarella. Continue to layer in this way, making sure that you consistently press the eggplant slices firmly into the pan. In this way, once it’s baked you will be able to slice it and it will maintain its shape.

Top the last layer with sauce then bake it at 400” until bubbling. Allow it to sit 10 minutes before serving.

Southern Italian tomato sauce

1 small onion, chopped finely

2 garlic cloves, minced

32 oz tomato puree or crushed tomatoes, preferably San Marzano

Sea salt

ground pepper

Sauté onion and garlic in a good quality extra virgin olive oil until soft. Add crushed or pureed San Marzano tomatoes. Cook 20 minutes, seasoning with salt and pepper.

August 1, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Salty seas in Puglia

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” Isak Dinesan

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to visit the largest salt flats in Europe, second biggest in the world, located on the east coast of southern Italy at Margherita di Savoia in Puglia. More than 3000 years old and located on the very salty Adriatic sea, these privately owned salt flats cover 4000 hectares, which is almost 10,000 acres.

The Adriatic is noticeably saltier than the Mediterannean, which is saltier than the Atlantic Ocean. You taste it when you swim and see it on your skin after you dry off, a fine dusting of white salt. That may be the reason there are so many places on the Adriatic coastline here where they make salt by evaporating sea water. In addition to Puglia, there are salt flats farther north in Slovenia as well as in Cervia, just south of the Italian city of Ravenna, both on the Adriatic Sea. read that blog here

margherita di savoia — salt drying in the sun

The salt flats on the east coast of Italy aren’t nearly as beautiful as those in Trapani, Sicily, but then again not much is as gorgeous as the island of Sicily itself. Location, location.

I’m fond of sea salt and love to visit the places where they make it, picking up momentos of the visit that I can use later in the kitchen. So when I planned a visit to Puglia, an incredibly beautiful region in southern Italy that you really must consider for your next Italian vacation, I knew my trip would center around getting to the salt flats.

sea salt in puglia — just pick it up and use it…

Even though Margherita di Savoia is a beach resort area, I found the salt flats rather deserted, which gave me license to walk around and take pictures. Finally coming across some men who worked there, I asked where one could purchase the salt, thinking perhaps there was a small store on site. They looked at me like it was a trick question and answered “at the grocery store?” In fact, the excellent salt they produce is widely available all over the region. You find it in any grocery store or food shop. It doesn’t come in a fancy expensive package, no one buys it as a momento or gift. It comes in a 1 kilo, brown cardboard box with one ingredient listed: whole sea salt.

So much that is incredibly good and delicious and wholesome in Italy is such a natural part of life that it almost seems taken for granted. Excellent wine, bread and olive oil are all found for relatively little money and wholesome natural sea salt is no exception. Whereas in America whole sea salt has become a gourmet product which sells for considerably more than processed, adulterated table and kosher salt, in Italy regionally produced, unprocessed sea salt retails for as little as 40 cents a kilo. That’s less than 50 cents on the US dollar for over 2 lbs of sea salt.

Now tell me you can’t afford to salt everything you eat with that!

In a store the other day I saw three different boxes of salt, all unprocessed sea salt from Margherita di Savoia. One box was sale grosso, or big kernels for tossing in pasta water; another sale fino, fine for regular use; and the third sale iodato, where they’d added iodine. The most expensive was the one with iodine. In America it’s just the reverse.

I’m working on getting some of this excellent inexpensive salt imported to a store near you and will keep you posted!