Gina Stipo, Author at attheitaliantable.com

July 25, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Gurguglione or ciambotto – ratatouille by any other name…

Last month when I was on the island of Elba, one of the Tuscan archipelago of islands, I came across a dish on a menu I’d never seen before: gurguglione. Excited to find a new dish with such an unusual name, I called the waiter over. It was, he informed me, a typical Tuscan dish of slow cooked vegetables. Well that’s interesting, I said, because I’ve been studying food in Tuscany for 12 years and have never heard of this “typical” dish! In Siena when they cook a bunch of vegetables together they call it “verdure in umido”, cooked vegetables. (Turned out he was from Sardegna and had been working in Germany for 30 years, what does he know of “typical Tuscan!” )

This is a good example of how incredibly diverse regional Italian food can be: you can live in a region for years and new dishes keep popping up. Like I always say, it’s like peeling an onion.

So he starts calling people over and the discussion ensues. Pretty soon we have two waiters, the chef, two cooks, a bus boy and the man sitting at the next table all discussing gurguglione, where it came from, why it’s called that and what it means.

I was comforted to know that the chef was the most informed. According to him, “gurgugliare” is an old Tuscan verb that means “to gurgle”, but the name for this dish is typical to Elba . As the vegetables cook, they gurgle. It can be any combination of seasonal vegetables, but the night I had it in June, it was made with zucchini, peppers, eggplant and tomatoes, much like ratatouille in France.

My grandmother used to make something similar, a lovely medley of summer vegetables to which she added cooked slices of Italian sausage. She used to call it “gimbot”, and I’ve spent years trying to find out the real name. One summer evening a couple of years ago, I made a big pot to share with my friends, Oriana and family. I told them my grandma called it “gimbot”, but I didn’t know what the real name was or where it came from. They looked at it and said “Oh, ratatouille!”

The next afternoon, Oriana called me in a state of excitement to say that a good friend from Basilicata had stopped by for an impromptu lunch and she served the leftover gimbot. After tasting it her friend asked where she learned to make ciambotto from Basilicata, it was just like her grandmother used to make! That’s how those dialects go in the south: make the “c” a “g” and cut off the end of the word.

Call it what you will, this is the perfect time of year for a big pot of stewed summer vegetables. Head to your farmers market, get out your largest pot and chop some fresh herbs. It’s delicious with Italian sausages and good bread with herbed butter.

Buon Appetito! Gina

Ciambotto con Salsicce (vegetable stew & sausage)

This hearty dish is best in the summer when every ingredient but the sausage comes fresh out of the garden. It can be served without the sausage for a filling vegetarian dinner and is excellent with a slice of good country bread spread with herb butter.

4 cloves garlic, chopped

2 onions, chopped

2-3 bell peppers, red or yellow

4 zucchini or summer squash

1 medium eggplant

6 fresh tomatoes, seeded and chopped

extra virgin olive oil

2 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped

2 tbsp fresh basil

1 teas fresh thyme

1 tbsp fresh tarragon

Sea salt, fresh ground black pepper

6 sweet or hot Italian sausages

Wash and cut all the vegetables into large cubes. The stew will cook for up to an hour and the vegetables should be large enough to maintain their shape and not disintegrate.

In a large pot, brown the sausages and set aside. Add olive oil to the pot and sauté the onion and garlic 2 minutes. Add the bell peppers, stir to coat with oil and sauté 5 minutes. Follow with the zucchini and then the eggplant, 1 teas each salt and pepper, stir to coat and sauté 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes, parsley and thyme and allow to cook for 30 minutes or more. Adjust salt to taste. Before serving stir in the basil and tarragon. You may either serve the stew with the sausages on the side or slice them and reheat them in the ciambotto.

Herb butter:

Fresh butter

Parsley, basil, chives, thyme, tarragon in any combination

Sea salt

Soften the butter and mix in the chopped herbs and salt.

July 25, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Calming Edible Lavender

This is my favorite time of year, the month of July. The days are long and hot under intense blue skies and brilliant, scorching sun. The peaches, plums, apricots and pears are ripening and we’ll have a bumper crop of blackberries in a few weeks. Most of the flowers of spring like poppies, peonies and roses have given way to the flowers of summer: fields of yellow sunflowers, hedges of butterfly bush and banks of purple lavender.

Lavender is widely used as a border in gardens and, being a perennial, gets bigger and fuller every year. No garden or yard is complete without a lavender hedge, buzzing with bees and butterflies while it’s flowering and perfuming the garden all summer. In Tuscany, beekeepers will move their hives next to lavender hedges so the bees will make the most delicious lavender scented honey. It’s hard to find and worth every penny you’ll spend if you do.

Lavender is an edible flower and its perfume has a calming effect on both the mind and body. It’s widely used in aroma therapy, bath and body treatments, and sleep aids. I like to pick some of the flowers, tie them in a small cloth and toss them in the bath.

Lavender also goes well with summer fruits, giving a deeper complexity to the simplicity of peaches, apricots and berries. Toss a flower or two into a marinade of peaches with white wine; mix them with simple syrup while it’s still hot and use that to make an interesting sorbet of blackberries or raspberries. Its high concentration of oil goes well in creamy desserts and you need just one of two flowers to flavor a dish. To make lavender ice cream, start with a basic ice cream base of cream, eggs and sugar and toss a flower or two into the milk or cream while it’s heating.

The most elegant dessert though is lavender pannacotta with diced peaches. Light, rich and beautiful, the lavender oil delicately scents the cooked cream and the fresh peaches lightly seasoned with sugar and lemon juice, bring the summer garden onto your plate.

Buon Appetito! Gina

Lavender Pannacotta w/ Peaches

1 quart heavy cream

1 cup sugar

3 gelatin sheets (available at specialty food shops)

2 lavender flowers (two stems)

3 peaches, peeled and diced

1 teas fresh lemon juice

1 tbsp sugar

If you can find ripe white peaches, they’re the best. Their delicate rose scent goes beautifully with the lavender.

Soak gelatin sheets in tap water until soft. Combine cream with sugar and lavender; bring to a boil in a medium sauce pan. As soon as cream begins to boil, remove from the heat, take the gelatin out of water and whisk into cream. Pour into a large bowl and cool over an ice bath, stirring until it’s room temperature or cooler. Strain out the flowers. Ladle into cups or bowls and refrigerate until cold and firm. Mix the peaches with the lemon juice and sugar and let macerate an hour. Turn the pannacotta out onto individual plates, serve the peaches on top and around the pannacotta.

July 19, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Apricot Redux

I thought I was finished with apricots but the season just won’t quit. In the midwest they call it a “bumper crop.” I didn’t even know there WAS an apricot tree right outside my bedroom window, and I’ve lived in this house for 10 years. It’s never had so much fruit on it before, but this year it beams bright orange from the moment I open my eyes in the morning. It makes me nervous to see so much free fruit I can’t reach. So I found a way into the garden…

After two disappointing attempts at apricot jam, one of which burned and the other which rendered a deep orange apricot sauce, that I’m sure will be lovely on vanilla ice cream, I started talking to the natives and I finally learned the secret to preserving this fruit.

Not as easy and straight forward as other fruits, the apricot when cooked and stirred will dissolve into a texture-less puree that burns extremely easily. As I mentioned in a previous blog, after burning several pounds of apricots, I began to talk to the women in my village and ask how they made their “marmelata di albicocche” (jellies and jams are all lumped under the term “marmelata”, which we translate as marmalade.)

The secret is never to stir the apricots. Never. You put them in a heavy pot on a low to medium fire, put the sugar and pectin on top and you let them cook. You must never put spoon to mixture. Eventually the sugar melts into the syrup. As the syrup boils and bubbles, you test it every now and then by putting a small amount on a plate and when it cools to a jelly-like consistency, you put it in jars.

What I find so hysterical is that everyone in this village knows you don’t stir apricots! From the cashier at the grocery store to the bank teller to the guy who pumps gas, it’s common knowledge! I would casually mention how I had a humongous sack of apricots and didn’t want to attempt jam again because I’d burned it and they all said “E’ perche l’hai girato!” It’s because you stirred it!

Apparently when they raise kids here they teach them: Don’t talk to strangers, Look both ways before crossing the street, and Don’t stir the apricot jam.

So I got the big pot out again and nervously tried it, resisting the urge to stir or push the apricots down, and they were right: not stirring the apricots renders them whole and plump, swimming in a lovely clear apricot flavored gel. I scooped the jam into jars, eagerly anticipating the bottom of the pan and to my surprise, it was perfectly clean! I’m going to try the same thing with plums next month.

I wonder what else these Tuscans know that they’re not telling me….

July 9, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Apricot Jam and my long day’s journey into night

I passed the tree loaded with bright orange apricots for two weeks before I rang the bell to inquire. When I saw that the fruit was starting to drop to the ground, I could hold back no longer. In the wide open on a main street, just at the end of my road, I wasn’t going to be able to steal them, I was going to have to ask.

The young man who rents the house had no interest in the apricots and was more than happy to allow me to pick them. I promised him a jar of jam in exchange for the tons of apricots I was planning to take away. The fruit this year has been exceptional and this particular tree had more apricots than leaves.

I borrowed a ladder and picked until my sack broke. Then I went home and got a sturdier sack. And a basket. By the end of an hour I had more than I could carry home. I was going to need more jars. In anticipation of all the beautiful orange jam I was going to give as gifts, I loaded up on jars and lids, sugar and lemons, got out the big jam pot and started halving the fruit.

Actually making that jam turned out to be more difficult than I imagined. With fruit jam I normally just weigh the fruit and mix it with half that amount of sugar, then add the juice of a lemon. Most fruit has at least a small amount of pectin, which helps it to gel, but usually I’ll add strips of lemon and wild apple peel, both of which are loaded with pectin.

I don’t like using industrial pectin that you buy in the store, I like the fruit to cook until the natural pectin in the fruit and sugar causes it to set up and the water in the fruit cooks off. This often entails cooking the jam for 30-60 minutes until the juices are thick enough to set.

But apricots have no natural pectin of their own and the lemon peel I added had no effect. Then the apricots stuck to the bottom of the pot and burned; the whole batch tasted scorched and had to be thrown out. I scrubbed the pot and started over, stirring the second batch more frequently. It seemed that no matter how long it cooked, it was still too watery to be called jam. The constant stirring seemed to keep the temperature down, which wasn’t good, but if I stopped stirring even for a minute it started to stick. It tasted good so I eventually put it in jars and labeled it “apricot sauce”.

It was late when I finished, but I wasn’t satisfied and wanted to know what I’d done wrong. I got online and saw that other people had the same problem with scorching. I read Harold McGee’s Food and Cooking book to better understand the science of pectin. Then I turned to my Tuscan friends to get the real scoop on the best way to make jam from apricots. What I learned was astounding.

The secret is never to stir the mixture.

In the evening, clean and half the apricots. Weigh them, put them in a large pot with half their weight in sugar poured on top, cover them and put them aside. No stirring. The next morning put the pot on the stove on a medium heat, uncover them and let them cook until the juice gels when cool. You must walk away from it and allow it to do its thing, adding a little lemon juice towards the end. And never stir it.

That tree is still half covered with apricots. I think I see another duel with the jam pot, but this time I’m ready.