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June 10, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Cherry Jam

I just love the way the word “jam” sounds. Jam. Sam. I’m on the lam. We had a discussion this past week in my culinary tour group on the difference between preserves, jams and jellies. According to an expert in our group, preserves are made with whole fruit, jams are cut up fruit, and jellies are just the juice. I cook a lot of fruit in season, combining the whole or halved fruit with sugar and lemon and cooking it until it’s thick. Some might call what I do “preserves, but I like to call it jam.

In Tuscany the middle of June means cherries and it is a season all to short for me. We have several different varieties, some are almost black when ripe and all of them are plump and juicy. They’re the perfect snack, a slight crunch as your teeth break the skin, then a burst of sweet tart juice that explodes in your mouth. I love cherries too.

Since today was my first day off in a month and tomorrow begins another week before I’ll be able to call any time my own, I thought it would be a good idea to make cherry jam. My sister Mary, who is in Italy working with me this month, looked at me like I was nuts and said “Are you sure you have time to do that?” I replied, “If not now, when?” I can’t imagine cherry season ending before I’m able to capture the deliciousness of them into jars. We can enjoy them months later on vanilla ice cream and I’m sure my culinary group this week will appreciate them on toast for breakfast!

So here’s how you make cherry jam: Pit your cherries, weigh them and use half that amount of sugar. I had a kilo of cherries so I used half a kilo of sugar. Put the fruit and sugar in a large pot with a heavy bottom. Peel half a lemon into strips and put the peel in the fruit, then squeeze the juice of a whole lemon over all. Stir and place on a low fire. As it heats, the fruit gives up juice and it becomes very liquidy. Bring to a slow boil and allow it to cook until the liquid becomes thicker. Be careful not to burn it or allow it to boil over, that’s a mess to clean up.

You know it’s done when a small amount of the juice on a plate is thick and sticky after you’ve blown on it to cool it off. Then just spoon it into jelly jars that have lids with good seals on the inside. You don’t need to process the jars, the sugar and acidity of the fruit preserve it. Put the lid on tight and as the jam cools it forms a vacuum seal and you’re good to go.

Our season for fruit is underway. The strawberries finished in May, making way for cherries and mulberries in June followed quickly by apricots. We look forward to lots of peaches and plums all summer long, finishing with figs in September. Rest assured. I’ll be making my whole-fruit jam for a while.

May 31, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Lasagna al Zafferano (saffron lasagna)

Over the past twenty years, Tuscany has seen a resurgence of saffron production. In the Middle Ages, Italy was a huge producer of saffron. After the black plague swept thru in the 1300’s and wiped out two thirds of the population in many towns, saffron growing fell off, taken up by North Africa and Spain. Only in Abruzzo, in the province of Aquila, have they been harvesting saffron continually for the past 800 years. When the Tuscan town of San Gimignano decided twenty years ago to start producing saffron again, after a 600 year hiatus, they turned to Aquila to get their bulbs. [Read more…]

May 19, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Whole food vs. kosher salt

You can’t open a magazine or newspaper these days without seeing an article about natural and organic foods. The focus on eating wholesome food runs the gamut from shopping at farmers markets to keeping chickens in the yard for eggs. It’s all about wholesome ingredients.

Yet when we get all that beautiful, expensive, organic food in the kitchen we are told that our best option for seasoning it is industrially processed kosher salt. For years, kosher salt was considered purer than iodized table salt, but in fact, kosher salt is just as processed. A better choice, one that honors our desire for wholesome food, is natural sea salt. It has better flavor and it is better for you.

Recently two on-line articles comparing kosher salt to sea salt were brought to my attention, one in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/kosher-salt_n_1471099.html , the other on the Food Network site http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes-and-cooking/kosher-vs-table-vs-sea-salts/index.html. Making a pretense of discussing the issue, both articles concluded the same: salt is salt so the choices of sodium chloride are equal, and as sea salt is more expensive and its flavor qualities are lost in cooking, cheaper kosher salt is the better alternative. This is an important discussion that we must help to a different conclusion.

Salt is the most important ingredient we cook with and we can’t survive without it. Salt helps our taste buds to experience all the nuances of flavor. All salt is originally from the sea, whether harvested today on the coast or mined from a mountain with a 10 million year old sea at its heart; the difference is what we do to it before it hits our plate.

Kosher salt is made by processing out all the naturally occurring minerals and moisture that is inherent in sea salt, and then fabricating it into flakes. Usually an anti-caking chemical is added. More than 99% sodium chloride, it is a dead white color with an acrid and bitter taste.

Natural, unprocessed sea salt has been harvested and used by mankind for thousands of years. As a whole food it contains all the minerals of the sea; not just sodium but also potassium, magnesium and calcium, as well as dozens of trace minerals such as boron, selenium and iodide, all of which the body needs to survive. Its balance of minerals helps the human body to maintain its own balance when it is ingested.

Whole, unprocessed and unrefined sea salt is easy to find in health and natural food stores. I don’t mean the artisan sea salts available on the market that are used to accent cooked foods, though they are endlessly beautiful and evocative and important in their own right. I’m proposing the use of whole, natural sea salt that is affordable to use in bulk to salt pasta water, soups or stews, one that costs little more than the processed salt we use now but is infinitely healthier to eat.

When we choose an artificial, processed salt, we let go of everything we’ve embraced about natural and healthy food. As Mark Bitterman states in his book Salted, “When we cook with kosher salt we sanctify the artificial.”

Frankly, it astounds me that so many educated and experienced food professionals, who spend their days thinking about and making food, still extol the virtues of kosher salt. It is not a natural product, it is not healthy and it’s definitely not gourmet.

Why do chefs and professionals like to use kosher salt? Because it’s easier to handle and it costs less. True, sea salt costs a little more. But since when in this whole national discussion of eating natural vs. processed, organic vs. chemical, harvested locally vs. shipped from China, have the words “it costs less” been the most important factor?

Health benefits and cost aside, the gentle taste of natural sea salt and the sweet, soft, complex flavor it imparts to your food is the biggest reason to stop using kosher and start using whole sea salt. After many years of eating and cooking in a country where kosher salt doesn’t exist, my palate has become accustomed to the pleasantly rounded saltiness that sea salt imparts to a dish. I notice the acridity of kosher when I return to America and eat in restaurants, even great ones. That is what has convinced me.

Saying you choose kosher is like saying you’d rather eat fruit roll ups than an apple. Whole natural sea salt is a fitting and respectful companion for the fresh food we pursue, healthier for you and better tasting.

May 18, 2012 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 favorite farmer, Fabrizio, closed his dairy in the late autumn. He 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!