Invisible followers

My followers have cause to be a bit miffed. For technical reasons, you've become invisible if you are using google to enter this site. Try Firefox instead and you are restored to your rightful place.

Lasagnetta al ragù di faraona – Guinea fowl lasagne

-a speciality of Vicolo Colombina, Bologna

We were so taken by this dish when we ate it last month in Bologna that we had to have the recipe immediately. Gianni Fruzzetti, the co-owner and sommelier, complied explaining,

‘We wanted to test the frontiers of the traditional approach, and this dish does that. For a start, it uses guinea fowl instead of beef or pork; there are just three layers, so it’s very flat compared with traditional lasagne. And it doesn’t use béchamel sauce. It’s an express dish, that takes just ten minutes, and it’s more digestible than the traditional version.’

Gianni Fruzetti - departing from tradition

Basically, you roast the bird, take it off the bone and shred it, and add it to a traditional ragu base – the battuto – of onion, carrot, celery, garlic – and then cook the sauce long and slow. In the restaurant kitchen, when the order comes through, they cook the lasagne sheets quickly, add sauce, grated parmesan and a kind of sauce made by mixing finely grated parmesan and water. The dish is placed under the grill to brown and then it’s ready. The recipe below is adapted for home cooking.

Another bird that could stand up to the long slow cook is duck, but don’t substitute chicken.

Enough for 4

Ingredients

1 guinea fowl

5tbl olive oil

30g butter

salt and pepper

6 bay leaves

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

3 sticks celery

2 carrots

4 slices smoked bacon

150ml passata

125ml white wine

100g grated parmesan

175ml warm water

16 sheets of lasagne


Method

1. Season the guinea fowl all over with salt and pepper and place in a roasting bag along with half the butter and half the olive oil plus the bay leaves. Put the roasting bag in a roasting tray and place in a re-heated oven at 170 degrees for 45 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil and butter in a large heavy-based saucepan. Add the onion finely chopped and gently fry over medium heat for about 7 minutes until soft and beginning to brown.

3. Add the finely chopped celery, carrots and garlic, and cook for another couple of minutes.

4. Add the bacon cut into small cubes and cook until it begins to brown.

5. Pour in the wine, raise the heat to drive off the alcohol, then add the passata and stir thoroughly.

6. Remove the guinea fowl from the roasting bag, conserving the juices and adding them to the saucepan. Remove the flesh, discarding skin, ligaments and bone, and chop it into small cubes. Add it to the saucepan

7. Bring the saucepan to the boil, and then lower the heat and cook, uncovered, at a lazy simmer, with just an intermittent bubble breaking through the surface, for 3 hours or more.

8. Prepare the parmesan ‘sauce’ by processing 50g of parmesan and the water to create a creamy consistency.

9. Cook the lasagne until it is al dente, strain and lay out on a clean tea towel.

10. Grease an oven-proof dish with a spot of olive oil then place a layer of lasagne in the bottom. Spread over this some sauce then some of the parmesan. Create three layers of pasta and sauce, finishing by spreading the parmesan cream across the top together with some of the grated parmesan.

11. Place in the oven at 180 degrees for 30 minutes until it is browning and bubbling.

Tortellone ai piselli e fave con burro e menta - Broad bean and pea tortellone with mint butter

Peas, broad beans and mint mark the beginning of July in our garden. There is something irresistible about the combination which draws me back to it, in different forms.  I’ve used the two vegetables before to make a sauce for pappardelle (see the recipe on this blog), and here they are again as the filling – with ricotta – for tortellone. A couple of tips:

1. when you make the pasta, ensure that you knead it until stickiness becomes elasticity – that will make rolling out much easier

2. skin the broad beans before you process them.

Enough for 8 (or freeze a batch)

Ingredients

400g OO pasta flour

4 medium eggs

1tsp salt

150g skinned, podded broad beans

100g podded peas – or frozen peas

100g ricotta

1tsp salt

75g butter

75g grated parmesan

12 leaves mint shredded



Method

1. Combine flour, eggs and salt to create a ball of dough.

2. Knead until the dough loses its stickiness and becomes elastic. Wrap in cling film and rest in the fridge.

3. Cook all but a handful of beans and peas, reserving the rest.

4. Skin the beans.

5. Process the beans, peas, ricotta and salt until a smooth mixture. Load into a piping bag with a 0.75cm nozzle.

6. Roll out the pasta dough until it is thin enough to see the shape of your fingers through it.

7. Cut out 5cm squares. Pipe a squirt of filling about the size of a broad bean on each square.

8. Close the pasta to create a triangle, at the same time pressing down the filling away from the apex.

9. Wrap the tortellone around your finger and press the ends together. Aim for about 10 per person but you may as well make more if there is enough pasta and filling. The extras will keep for a day in the fridge or you can freeze them in a single layer.

10. Heat a large pan of water and when it is boiling tip in the tortellone plus the reserved peas and beans. Check after 5 minutes – they need to be al dente but not too much so. Strain.

11. Heat the butter in a frying pan large enough to hold all the tortellone, or use two pans, or do two batches.

12. Toss the tortellone in the butter, adding the shredded mint and the parmesan. Serve.

Federico Aicardi – food loving musician and pharmacist

Federico Aicardi - singing pharmicist

The day job of Federico Aicardi,  a singer song-writer with a growing reputation in Italy,   is running a pharmacy in Bologna city centre. The previous time we met he supplied me with a few sachets of his famous Aicardi baking powder which I used to explosive effect to bake a giant focaccia. This time we met for lunch across the road at Olivo. Federico knows everyone including another diner who he introduced as one of the most famous singers in Italy.

I began by asking him about his earliest   memories of being brought up in a Bolognese household.  ‘I was very small and it was Christmas, and my grandmother and my mother and all the women were gathered around the big kitchen table that I used to play with my soldiers on. They were all making tortellini as if the whole of Bologna was coming to dinner.’

Apart from tortellini and lasagne, Federico has fond memories of those other Bolognese winter classics, ciambelli, a ring shaped cake and certosino, the richly fruited Christmas cake. But from holidays in the mountains in the north east he picked up a liking for polenta, and from trips to the seaside, he came to love piadina, a flatbread that is traditionally eaten filled with spinach or with mozzarella.

'It's all they ever talk about.'

Federico married into a food loving family. ‘It’s all they ever talk about when we get together – their last great meal or a favourite dish’.  He promised to send me his wife’s recipe for roast guinea fowl. But why is that the Bolognese love to talk about food, I asked.

‘Well, it is a centuries old tradition here,  food culture was an integral part of the every day experience in the big houses that once  ruled the city. Poets would write about food and wine. We’ve always admired the skills of great cooks, and women have always been prized for their skill in the kitchen. Nowadays, our love of food goes along with  our pleasure in socialising. We love to get together to eat and talk (as I’d noticed)’.

But is that any different from anywhere else?

‘People still stop for lunch in Bologna whether they’re lawyers or factory workers. They don’t in Milan. They just have a quick sandwich there. Bologna is known throughout Italy for the quality of the food you can eat and for the reputation of its university, whereas Rome is known for being the centre of government and for its monuments and Milan for fashion and the pace of life’.

We moved on to talk about favourite places for aperitivi. ‘Somewhere very traditional is the Osteria Olindo Faccioli or Drogheria Calzolari. Young people prefer the Nu Lounge in San Petronio’. And eating out? ‘ I like della Santa and Cesare Maretti’s place in via Senzanome. I also like da Vito for the atmosphere and the fact that you’re likely to be rubbing shoulders with writers and artists’.

But what about his dislikes. ‘The worst meal I’ve ever eaten was in Santa Barbara, in California, fettucine alfredo, a dish that doesn’t exist here. The pasta was overcooked and swamped in water and cream. Ugh. I can’t stand the fact that MacDonalds is right in the centre of Bologna opposite the statue of Neptune. I’ve got nothing against America or American food but this is sacrilege. Oh, and I can’t stand mostarda di cremona’. At this point I explained the well known English concept of Marmite food – you either love it or hate it.

Finally, his ideal dining companions?  Every year, he gets together with 25 of his mates from high school for a meal. ‘This year it was at Anna Maria’s. I don’t know where we’ll go next year, but we are a big bunch of foodies, as you might expect’.



Highlights of a month in Bologna?

Piazza Maggiore - late night

Hard to choose. But top of the list are the city itself, with its never ending vistas of medieval buildings and the porticos, fascinating shops and workshops, and the people who we have met who have been so generous with their time. Above all,

• Gianni at Vicolo Colombina and their gorgeous recipe for lasagne with a guinea fowl ragu

• Giacomo the chef at Trattoria della Santa and his recipe for tortellone

• excellent recommendations for places to eat from Giorgia Zabbini, Mimy Tavormina and Davide, the chef-tutor at the Cookery School on via Pratello

Mimy Tavormina - local where to eat specialist

• charming memories of Bolognese food from Massimo Maracci and Federico Aicardi

• Alessandra Spisne and the team at La Vecchia Scuola for their enthusiasm and hospitality

• Marcello dall’Aglio at Locanda del Castello who provided us with one of our most memorable dinners (and where we ran into Donna and Alistair, two of our blog followers)

• Davide Simoni who took time out to introduce us to Pasquini, the only artisan mortadella maker left in Bologna

• the Bergonzis at Al Vedel and Podere Cadassa near Parma who put on a special display of culatello production just for us and Marcello

• Trattorie La Montonara, Olivo and Leonida for beautiful food and lovely recipes

• two simple ideas: Almond pesto at Eataly and zuccine pesto at Al Vedel.

More of these on the blog over the coming weeks – and also in the forthcoming book.

Bologna's porticos: feast for the eye, protection from the elements

Learning to make pasta – the proper way

Alessandra Spisne and her daughter Stefania

A morning in La Vecchia Scuola, Alessandra Spisne’s celebrated cookery school (writes Liz). There we met Tim and Janet, two Canadians from Toronto with a passion for pasta. That’s why they are spending five days of their holiday learning how to make pasta.



Breaking the eggs into the flour 'nest'



After donning the school’s t-shirt and yellow cap, they do what they do every day here: they create a 500g nest of flour and break five eggs into it. No olive oil, no semolina (‘that’s not traditional Bolognese’), no extra yolks, just flour and eggs.


Breaking the eggs with a fork, they gradually work in the flour until they have a ball of dough.

Looking for San  Luca

Over at the next table, Massimo, who is doing the three month professional course, is rolling out his 500g and five eggs into a intensely yellow, incredibly thin oval. That’s what Tim and Jackie hope to achieve by the end of the week, a sheet or sfoglio of pasta so delicate that they can see San Luca – the church on the hill overlooking Bologna - through it.

Even though they are only here for a short time, they are taught to professional standards and learn how a real Bolognese kitchen works, with its separate spaces for the pasta maker and the sauce makers. In fact, many restaurants have a pasta workshop in another building where the sfoglina – the pasta maker – toils alone making tagliatelle and gramigna (a kind of curly macaroni that accompanies a sausage sauce), as well as the filled pastas.

The next step for Tim and Jackie is to knead the dough they have made. For this you need clean dry hands and just a little flour on the rolling board – just how much  you need to knead depends  on the season and the humidity. Today is hot and clammy, tough conditions for apprentice pasta makers.

Kneading the dough

Their task is to make tortellone, pasta filled (in this case) with a mixture of potato, parmesan and finely chopped parsley. Luckily you don’t have to roll the pasta as thin for tortellone as you do for the smaller, finer meat filled tortellini or  for tagliatelle.

As the students cut the sfoglio into small squares, they are told not to waste any of the pasta. ‘You’ve worked hard to make it’, says their teacher Simone, ‘so you want to use every scrap of it’. They work the off cuts into the squares, which makes the pasta thicker but for tortellone this is less critical. Another clever tip is about preparing the potatoes for the filling: they put them once cold through a ricer, skins and all, and what comes out is just the potato. To this they add parmesan, parsley and an egg, and then mix well before putting the stuffing into a piping bag.

End result

Learning to use the piping bag is an art in itself. But once mastered it takes no time to pipe a blob of filling onto every square. Folding over the pasta and then forming the distinctive tortellone shape takes a bit longer. Watching the students grappling with the pasta and the filling you can see why it took Nonna years to perfect hers.

Surprise meeting

Last night we dined at Locanda del Castello at Palazzo Rossi, Sasso Marconi. And so did Donna and Alistair. So what? Well, funnily enough they were there because they read this blog and decided they liked the sound of the Locanda. And they spotted me from the photo on the blog and introduced themselves. We' d sat at adjacent tables and hearing their accent, I wondered how they'd found out about this slightly off the beaten track restaurant. Anyway, it was an unexpected pleasure to meet some blog followers out of the blue.

In the excitement of the moment, I forgot to ask how they found it. I look forward to reading your comments, Donna and Alastair, about the Locanda and the other places you've tried on your eating tour.

As usual, we loved it. Especially, the lasagnette with aubergine and pesto, the pork chops, and a mille feuille with mascarpone and chocolate (look out for recipe later). The food is classically Bolognese but always with a slight twist of creativity. Incidentally, we got there on the 92 bus, getting off at Pontecchio, walking down the lane to the train station, and crossing over. But we needed a taxi home at 1130.