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May 27, 2017 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Summer grilling the Tuscan Way

Memorial Day means filling the pool, cleaning off lawn furniture for al fresco dining and getting the barbeque or grill ready for a season of cooking outdoors. Welcome summer!

Grilling outdoors is generally a warmer seasonal activity. But in Tuscany, we grill inside as well. Show a Tuscan a fire and he’s at the ready with some meat to throw on a grill over the live coals – inside or out!

There is no comparison to the flavor that a wood or charcoal fire gives to anything you put on it. The recent article by Sam Sifton in the food section of the NYTimes attests to that. Gas may be more convenient, but nothing matches the flavor of grilling over live coals. I’m of the opinion that the reason we feel the need to use so many rubs and marinades in our gas grilling is to either to add some flavor that gas doesn’t provide or to mask the bad flavor that gas so often imparts to food.

At my restaurant in Louisville, we only grill outdoors over live coals. Using a Weber grill, and a special grilling chimney to start the natural hardwood charcoal, I can have a fire ready in 20 minutes. Sea salt, meat and live coals is all you need. My guests frequently ask “What did you put on this meat? It’s so delicious!” Sea salt and a real fire. That’s it!

In Tuscany, any indoor fireplace means an opportunity to grill dinner. In the dead of winter, in the smallest fireplace with a fire started with a small amount of wood and allowed to burn down to a bed of coals, the portable grill with little legs come out and dinner is grilled right in the living room! Nothing is more surprising but nothing beats it!

Next up I’ll give you a few tips on grilling meat over live coals.

Buon Appetito and Happy Memorial Day!

May 19, 2017 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Nebbiolo grape and the wines of Piedmont

Wine has been made in Italy since before the Romans, who were responsible for spreading viticulture and wine-making throughout their empire. Due to political and social isolation, many grape varieties that make excellent wines have remained isolated in their specific regions and are rarely found outside of it. One excellent example is wine made in Piedmont and Lombardy from the Nebbiolo grape. Long considered the king of Italian grapes, with a deep and rich history, nebbiolo is high in both acid and tannins and makes wines that are delicious when drunk young but also have immense potential for aging. Barolo and Barbaresco, both made of 100% nebbiolo, are two well-known wines that carry a hefty price tag. But nebbiolo is also in other wines of the region such as Nebbiolo d’Alba or d’Asti, Gattinara, Ghemme, Roero and Nebbiolo Langhe. Valtellina Superiore is an excellent 100% nebbiolo wine made around Lake Como in the neighboring region of Lombardy. All these wines take their names from the towns or geographic area where the nebbiolo is grown, aged and bottled.

Nebbiolo is notoriously picky about where it grows, which is a big reason it’s not common in other wine regions around the world. The main flavor components are described as “tar and roses” and the nose will have hints of cherries, violets, sometimes truffles in an aged wine. Its color is purple ruby when young and tends to show orange tones as it ages.

Floral: rose, violet	Terroir: coffee, earth, truffle
Fruity: blackberry, cherry	Oak: oak, smoke, toast, tar, vanilla
Spicy: anise, cocoa, licorice, nutmeg, white pepper	Bottle Age: leather, cedar, cigar box
Mouth feel / Texture:	heavy, rich, tannic, chewy, alcoholic

Nebbiolo wines pair well with the elegant cuisine of Piedmont and stand up to wild game and truffles, but also pair well with the pastas and meat dishes of the area, such as rabbit or meat filled ravioli in sage butter. I hope you’ll try them and expand your Italian wine knowledge!

April 27, 2017 by Gina Stipo 1 Comment

The case for using whole sea salt and not kosher

Why does every food writer and recipe I read in the US call for kosher salt? It’s so prevalent I find myself wondering who is behind the big push for Americans to be better cooks by using kosher salt? I was reading the recent NYTimes article “The Single Most Important Ingredient” by Samin Nosrat who wrote “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”, and was super excited to hear what she said about salt. Because it truly IS the single most important ingredient you can use! And there it was – she advocated kosher salt. I was crushed.

Allow me to clarify a few things:

Kosher salt, used exclusively in the US, does not equal whole sea salt. Sea salt is made up of sodium choride (about 85%), as well as dozens of naturally-occurring minerals that help to temper and balance the sodium, both on the palate and in the body. Kosher salt goes through a process that strips all these minerals, denaturing it, leaving 99% sodium to which a chemical is added as an anti-caking agent. It renders a product far inferior to natural, whole sea salt. I call it a “dead salt”.

By the way, it’s called “kosher” because when koshering meat you needed to use a large kernel of salt, not the fine stuff that would melt. So, kosher salt has large kernels, what they call “grosso” in Italian or “gros” in French.

I lived in Italy for 13 years, long enough for my palate to change. After a few years, when I would return to the US for a visit, I was struck by how the addition of kosher salt adds acrid and bitter notes to any dish. The Culinary Institute of America did a study a number of years ago looking for the taste difference that various esoteric and finishing salts bring to food, and to their surprise they found that kosher salt was harsh and bitter, while all the other whole salts were not. I’m on the hunt for that study and will post it as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Kosher salt certainly should not be used in trying to reproduce authentic world cuisine, as suggested by the majority of current US food magazines. The Saveur magazine article on arab influences on the Italian island of Sicily I find especially egregious. The article cites a recipe from the city of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, where they’ve been continuously farming salt since the ancient Phoenicians 5000 years ago, and yet the Saveur recipe calls for kosher salt! Why? Salt from Trapani is a main export from Sicily and it’s available in the US – in grocery stores (Alessi brand), at TJMAXX, Home Goods and Italian specialty shops near you!

There is farmed whole sea salt available in the US from around the world: France, Spain, Brazil. But even salt mined from a mountain, such as beautiful Himalayan pink salt from the mountains of Pakistan, was once a sea 10-100 million years ago.

Well I for one have had enough and am on a crusade to fight kosher salt and help whole sea salt find its place in America’s kitchen. Join me! You can use your box of kosher salt on the sidewalks next winter! As always, Buon Appetito!

April 11, 2017 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Fresh pecorino cheese & new fava beans are heralds of Spring

In Italy, many things are done in old-fashioned ways – growing vegetables, caring for animals, cooking traditional dishes – that inevitably tie the people to the seasons. Spring is a time of renewal and many spring dishes reflect the season. Egg-rich dishes and desserts are a result of an abundance of eggs the chickens lay as the days get warmer and longer. Lamb shows up on menus more often, often with fried spring artichokes. In Tuscany, one of my favorite spring pairings is fresh pecorino, or sheep’s milk cheese, and fresh fava beans – cacio e bacelli in Tuscan dialect – that is the perfect example of how the simplicity of a seasonal dish belies the complexity of nature.

Most of us are far removed from the farm and little nuances of life tied to the land frequently escape and astound us when we learn of them. In the second year I lived in Italy, it came as a revelation to me that in order for a sheep, or any animal, to give milk, it has to have a baby every year. Tuscany is a big producer of pecorino, or sheep’s milk cheese, and I learned the facts of natural cheese making when my friend, Silvana, closed her dairy in the late autumn. She explained to me, as if I was a small child, that in late summer a ram is put in with the sheep to impregnate them; once the ram’s job is done, he’s put back out to pasture until the next year. (When a Tuscan is up to his ears in work he’ll say “I’m busier than a billy goat in September!”) The pregnant sheep are then slowly weaned off of milking, ending altogether in late October or early November, and the dairy is closed for the winter.

In the late winter, the sheep give birth to little white lambs and it’s another harbinger of spring when you see them frolicking in the fields. As you can’t keep every lamb born, many of them are butchered, and the mammas go to milking again.

In a natural setting, where the farmer allows his animals to live as nature intended, fresh cheese – aged less than 30 days – is available only so long as fresh milk can be obtained. The industrial food complex has developed to give us fresh cheese all year round, the natural process is controlled with hormones and a sheep never even sees a billy goat.

When they begin milking the sheep in the spring, the first cheeses made are fresh pecorino – soft, buttery yellow and aged less than a month. Its arrival is welcome after a long winter of eating only aged cheeses. It coincides with the season of new fava beans. Sold still in their furry pods, they were planted in the fall and have ripened with the spring warmth. Cacio e bacelli, the classic pairing that is a perfect example of Tuscans honoring the seasonings.

At the Italian Table we’ve been thrilled to get our hands on both imported fresh pecorino and cases of fresh fava beans and have been making little baked custards with the cheese and serving them with blanched fava beans and fresh thyme from our herb garden!

Happy Spring, a blessed Easter and Buon Appetito!