Puglia Archives - Page 2 of 2 - attheitaliantable.com

September 12, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Taralli – the pretzel of southern Italy

We called them “Grandma’s pretzels” and they were little rings of fennel flavor dough, alternately crunchy and chewy. But the official name is “taralli”, and if you go to southern Italy you see them everywhere. Flavored with fennel or pepper and occasionally almonds, they are great with a glass of wine and sliced salami. Often taralli are made with lard which makes them flakey, or olive oil which gives them more of a crunch, taralli are gaining popularity in Tuscany and regions up north.

Grandma’s pretzels were both chewy and crunchy, which you don’t get in store bought versions. Shaped into small rings or knots, she made bags of them and brought them out for cocktail hour, which was taken seriously in my grandfather’s home.

I recently decided to pull out her recipe when my niece, Nastasia, was visiting and we had a nice little salami we were going to slice for dinner. It gave me the chance to pass it on to the next generation. We had so much fun making them that she carefully wrote the recipe to replicate them at home.

They’re easy to make. You begin with a simple bread dough, give it minimal time to raise and then roll them out and shape them. Thirty seconds in boiling salted water and then 20 minutes in a hot oven and you have a lovely, homemade pretzel.

Taralli – southern Italian pretzels

6 cups flour

1 envelope yeast, dissolved in 1 cup water

2 teas salt

¼ cup fennel seed (or 2 tbsp black pepper)

¾ cup olive oil

Combine flour, salt and fennel seed, make a well and add the water and yeast and oil. Mix together until it forms a stiff dough, then knead until smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes. Cover and let it rest 15 minutes.

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil.

Take a quarter of the dough and roll it flat with a rolling pin. Cut ropes and roll them thin, less than 1/4” and 3” long; form each piece into a ring and secure. When you have your work surface filled, pick them up and plunge them into the boiling water for 30-60 seconds. Pull them out with a spider or slotted spoon onto paper, then place them on parchment paper on a baking sheet and bake at 400’ until lightly browned.

Allow them to cool before putting them in plastic bags to save. Serve with any Italian cured pork product. Buon Appetito!

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 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!