Salt Archives - attheitaliantable.com

July 26, 2022 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Anchovies & colatura, ancient Italian umami

putting anchovies in jars They eat a lot of anchovies in Italy. In fact, anchovies are the base of Italian umami. As diverse as each regions’ cuisine is, anchovies are one of the things that pulls a diverse cuisine together into a whole. Delicious and versatile, the anchovy is an abundant fish high in omegas and essential fatty acids. They are easy to cook, whether batter dip and fried, served with a salsa of capers and parsley, or quick “cooked” in vinegar and dressed with olive oil and parsley. They are also widely preserved, salted and canned to use in a variety of ways, on pizza, on bread, and in pasta sauces. Following an ancient Roman recipe for garum, modern Italians along the southern coasts brine anchovies and allow them to age in wooden barrels. The resulting liquid gold is the definition of umami: savoriness.

Don’t discount anchovies because you had a bad experience with a pizza. There really is nothing like them to add depth and flavor to a dish, which is exactly why they’re referred to as Italian umami. One of our favorite new summer recipes we picked up in Piedmont this past June is summer tomatoes stuffed with a salsa verde of parsley, anchovies, bell pepper, hard boiled egg and bread, with olive oil to meld the whole thing together. Recipe to follow! Also, toasted french bread spread with cold butter and topped with an anchovy fillet is a favorite cocktail nibble. It must be tried to be believed!

Anchovy by any other name…

There are two separate words in Italian for anchovy: alici refers to the fresh fish, while acciughe means the preserved fish. Anchovies are preserved by gutting and removing the head then salting the fish, pressing it down with a weight for 4 or 5 months, then washing them with brine and either salt- or oil- packing them until ready to be eaten. The best place to buy them is when you’re in Italy, they last forever covered with olive oil in their jar in the fridge. Several jars in my fridge are proof to that. Or buy them in the US at a specialty store or good grocery store. It’s best to purchase the fillets rather than the paste in a tube. That’s more reminiscent of cat food, frankly.

Roman Garum reborn

Roman garum The ancient Roman condiment garum was the liquid resulting from fermenting anchovies in salt and was used to flavor most of their foods, the original Italian umami. Today, they make a similar product, called colatura, on the Amalfi coast in the tiny towns of Cetara and Vietri. This amber colored liquid is the essense of anchovy and is used sparingly to flavor a variety of dishes. The colatura is made in the summer by layering the anchovies with sea salt in a wooden barrel, then weighting and pressing them until the winter. When the colatura is ready they open a hole in the barrel and let the liquid drip out. It has a strong odor, as you can imagine, like asian fish sauce, but it delicious in seafood dishes, giving it an extra savoriness that is essential. Add it to spaghetti tossed with extra virgin olive oil, minced garlic, parsley and anchovy fillets.

Ordering colatura

Gustiamo is an import company out of New York which imports and sells it on line, check it out.

The photos on this page are from a visit a few years ago to the Delfino production facility in Cetara. At Ecco La Cucina, our culinary tours to Italy, we like to get down to the nitty gritty of how food and wine are made in Italy, tasting our way through each region. Unfortunately, they no longer allow visitors to enter where the women are cleaning and packing the salted anchovies, so these photos are cherished!

boats on the beach

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!

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 19, 2016 by Gina Stipo 3 Comments

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 see 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, leaving 99% sodium to which a chemical is added as an anti-caking agent. 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 that reflected this surprising development in their quest for taste differences in various whole sea salts; I’m on the hunt for that study and will post it as soon as I can get my hands on it.

This denatured salt is then chemically laced to reduce clumping. It renders a product far inferior to natural, whole sea salt. I call it a “dead salt”. Kosher salt certainly should not be used in trying to reproduce authentic world cuisine, such as the Saveur magazine article on arab influences on the Italian island of Sicily. Here is a recipe from the city of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, where they’ve been 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!

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! Buon Appetito!

https://www.attheitaliantable.com/kosher-salt-us/