Tag Archives: Venice

Eggplants “in tecia” with baked ricotta – with love from Francesco

Posted on December 1, 2012 | 9 Comments

I’ve got a bit of a crush on Francesco da Mosto. Do you know him? He is a chatty Venetian architect and host of several BBC tv shows. He looks like an eternal boy, with his great mop of greying hair and a huge smile. He tells a story with typical Italian drama, in delightfully accented English, emphasizing salient points, talking with his hands and holding a cigarette, as a prop to show his serious pensive side.

Some time back I discovered he had also written a cookbook, Francesco’s kitchen. Francesco can cook as well?! Is there anything the man can’t do? The book is not new (published 2007) but it has lots of interesting historical facts about why Venetians eat the way they do. It also has some terrific photos of the Rialto Market, which is one of my favorite markets in the world.

I don’t think for a minute that Francesco cooks all the meals in the book, however he does provide a vast number of recipes with occasional photos of himself as a cheeky young man in Venice, and photos of his ancestors, who were quite a prominent Venetian family. The book is written in a conversational style that makes it a very easy read. I have made several recipes from the book, including the recipe for zaleti biscotti in a previous blog post and my Christmas favorite, sarde in saor is based on the recipe in Francesco’s book.

I was at the Rialto market in July, it was summer and the reds, yellows and greens of all the beautiful fresh produce from local producers was incredible. Peppers, tomatoes, chillies, zucchini, eggplants, peaches – what an amazing feeling to be seeing and photographing these right next to the Grand Canal.

In memory of my wonderful day in Venezia at the Rialto Market, I would like to share with you Francesco’s recipe for eggplant with a tomato sauce (melanzane in tecia). The eggplant is cut into thin rounds, fried and then topped with a rich tomato and parsley sauce made from fresh tomatoes. This simple summer dish is perfect with some baked ricotta (my recipe below), a slice of crusty bread and a glass of crisp white wine, such as the La Zona Pinot Grigio that I have been enjoying since my visit to the King Valley.

sq diag eggplant ricotta

Melanzane in tecia (Stewed eggplants with tomatoes)
2 large eggplants (about 700g)
Plain flour
plenty of olive oil for frying
Sauce:
50 g butter, unsalted
50ml olive oil
Parsley, small bunch, leaves picked and chopped
1 garlic clove
500 g tomatoes, skins and seeds removed and chopped
Sea salt

Wash the eggplants and cut the eggplant into thin slices. Sprinkle salt over them and place on a wooden board to drain.

In the meantime, prepare the tomato sauce. Plunge whole tomatoes in boiling water for a minute and then drain and remove the outer skin. Roughly chop and remove as many seeds as possible. Heat up 50 ml oil and butter in a medium saucepan and add the parsley and the garlic. When the garlic has become golden and flavored the oil, remove it and discard. Add the tomato and cook on low to moderate heat until all the liquid has evaporated. Add salt to taste.

Whilst the tomato sauce is cooking, you can prepare the eggplants. Once they have sweated their excess moisture, toss the slices in flour. Heat the 200ml oil in a heavy bottomed saucepan and fry the eggplant slices. When cooked, pat on absorbent paper to remove excess oil. If you are worried about using so much oil, you can also cook them in a 200 degree oven (brush with oil before placing them in there) – just keep checking on them frequently.

Arrange the eggplants on individual plates or a serving platter, and spoon over the dense tomato sauce. I like to scatter on a bit more parsley to serve.

Baked ricotta
600g ricotta
100g italian parmigiano cheese, grated
3 eggs, lightly beaten
Zest of half a medium sized lemon, finely grated
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oven to 160 degrees and line a 20cm round baking tin (mine has a removable base). Place all the ingredients in a bowl and mix until well combined and place in the tin. Brush the top with a bit of olive oil. bake for 60 minutes until firm (it will puff up a bit then flatten when you remove it from the oven). Allow to cool in the tin. Remove from the tin and serve wedges cold with melanzane in tecia and some crusty bread. It will keep up to a week covered in the fridge.

sq eggplant with baked ricotta

When I am in Venezia and I want to feel like a local, I rent an apartment. It is by far the best way of enjoying the city if you want to stay a couple of nights. Venice Apartments has a great selection of places to stay and that way I have a kitchen in which I can cook all the beautiful produce I have bought at the Rialto market. For me this is far better than a tiny hotel room!

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Posted in Antipasti, Places, Vegetarian

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Fritole with zabaglione – memories of Venice

Posted on September 7, 2012 | 2 Comments

My dear friend Ben reminds me often of the first time he tried fritole. We were 20 years old and traveling in Europe together during a break from university. We were in Venice, looking in the window of a cake shop.

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There were all kinds of delightful pastries, cakes and biscotti; there were also fritole (also known as frittole or frittelle). For me they were just these Italian tasting tiny fried balls with sultanas that mamma made at home and had made since I could remember. The ones we saw in the window that day were a bit different – they were filled with zabaglione. They were like small donuts filled with Marsala laden custard, with sugar scattered on top. I had never tried this combination of flavors so while the tastes were not new to me, the combination was. I recently asked Ben to describe his memories of the first time he tasted fritole with zabaglione and this is what he said: “crispy, soft, sweet….completely divine”.

Ben and I sometimes cook together and this weekend we decided to finally try our hand at recreating the fritole we had tasted in Venice all those years ago. We decided not to use my mother’s delicious fritole recipe (which my niece Claire put up on her blog some time back) as these ones are not meant to be filled with a cream. So I searched for a recipe that might allow the fritole to puff up a bit more and make space for the zabaglione to be piped in. I found a recipe written in Italian, and with that translated, we were set.

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Ben made the fritole mixture and I made the zabaglione. I fried the fritole and he piped the zabaglione. We gave each other suggestions as we worked on our separate components. The deep fryer that Ben had was a bonus. It was ideal for controlling the temperature for frying though you can get by without one (my mother had a bit of a laugh when I told her – “who needs special equipment like that”, she said, ” the fritole turn over on their own once they are cooked”).

Once cooked, let them cool slightly, pipe in the thick sweet zabaglione and then dust them with icing sugar. As an alternative, you can make smaller fritole, roll them in caster sugar when they are still hot and then dip them into the zabaglione just prior to eating as I did in the photo below when I made them again at home. Whichever way you decide to construct the flavors, the result is the same – a completely divine taste sensation.

Fritole with zabaglione
makes about 40 medium sized fritole
Fritole:
280 g plain flour
20g fresh yeast (or 7g dried yeast)
4 egg yolks
20g butter
250 ml whole milk
rind of one lemon, grated
25g pine nuts
40g sultanas
3 tablespoons grappa
Vegetable oil for cooking
Icing sugar for dusting
Zabaglione:
4 very fresh egg yolks
4 half egg shells caster sugar
4 half egg shells Marsala

Prepare the yeast by dissolving it in a bit of warm milk, a tablespoon of sugar and one of flour (exact quantities are not important here). Set to one side.

In a large mixing bowl, place the rest of the flour, butter, egg yolks, sugar, grated lemon rind and a pinch of salt. Mix with a large wooden spoon until the ingredients are well incorporated. The mixture should be quite runny. Add a bit more milk if it is not. Add the yeast mixture and mix well. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and allow to rest for about 30 minutes. It should almost double in size.

Add the raisins (which you have soaked in grappa/rum for the last half hour) and pine nuts. Mix well. You are now ready to fry the fritole. Heat the oil to 160 degrees. Drop spoonfuls of mixture into the hot oil (dip the spoon in hot oil before use as it helps prevent the mixture sticking). Turn them over once one side is cooked (though they sometimes flip over as my mother said they would). Once browned, drain them on absorbent paper.

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Whilst the fritole dough is resting, make the zabaglione. Beat the egg yolks and sugar until pale and creamy – at least 5 minutes using an electric beater. Place the mixture carefully in a double boiler. As it is warming up, slowly pour the Marsala in a thin stream, whisking gently the whole time. Keep stirring the zabaglione over the double boiler gently until it thickens (it took me about 15 minutes). Do not allow the mixture to boil.

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Pipe the zabaglione into the fritole using a piping bag and a small nozzle. Dust them with icing sugar. These are best eaten the same day.

Here are a few memories of Venice, in case you need more inspiration.

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Posted in Sweets and cakes

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Zucchini flowers in Venezia

Posted on January 17, 2012 | 6 Comments

We travelled to Italy for a month in late 2010. One of the highlights was to be a full week in Venezia. After a few days with family near Trieste, we caught the train to Venezia and stayed in a little first floor apartment above a tiny Calle (lane) in San Marco. On the first day I went to an inspiring class run by Enrica Rocca who runs a cooking school in her beautiful house in the heart of Venezia. The next day, she met us at the Rialto Market and took us to where she buys her fresh ingredients. The market is hundreds of years old and right on the Grand Canal. So it is a pretty inspiring place, full of history and tales of Venetian glory. I was surrounded by gorgeous colourful produce and was particularly thrilled to find mountains of zucchini flowers. I had never seen so many in one place.

Back in Melbourne, the Victoria Market has zucchini flowers when they are in season though not in mounds like you would find at the Rialto Market! I bought some in late December and they were in little plastic boxes that held 6 perfect flowers. We think of zucchini (or courgettes if you want to call it by its French name) as vegetables but they are fruit in botanical terms. The part that we generally eat is the swollen ovary of the flower. My husband Mark tells me to keep such stories out of the kitchen, but having a medical background, I find this sort of thing really fun!

You can also eat the flower of the zucchini, either the female or the male (just the flower). I prefer the female flower as it does have a tiny zucchino attached. It doesn’t need much cooking as it is a delight on its own. You can make a simple batter and fry it, or else stuff the flowers with cream cheese or ricotta and then batter and fry it. Fried zucchini flowers with a dipping sauce such as aioli (garlic mayonnaise) make a beautiful, quick and impressive entree. You don’t need to cook them much either, they are so delicate.

The season for zucchini flowers is very short. If you see any, snap them up! I bought those pictured on plates at the end of December (they look a bit sad and lonely compared to the mounds at the Rialto Market in Venezia). If you can’t find any at the market and really have your heart set on cooking them, you can substitute other vegetables such as pieces of a large zucchino, strips of capsicum or asparagus spears in the recipe below. It won’t quite be the same but they will still taste amazing with some creamy garlic mayonnaise (aioli).

Zucchini flowers in batter with aioli

As an entree, 3 zucchini flowers per person are perfect. We were a bit greedy when we had them on New Year’s Eve – we scoffed 6 of them each. Before using, make sure you wash the zucchini flowers under running water and then pat them dry. To make the batter for the 12 zucchini flowers, you need 40 g of plain flour and 125 ml water. Put the water in a soup plate and add the flour a little at a time, beating continuously with a fork until all the flour is incorporated and you have the consistency you like. Stop before adding all the flour if you like a thin mixture. Mine was like thickened cream.

Dip the zucchini flowers in the batter until they are coated on all sides. To fry them, put about 2cm of olive oil in a frypan and when it is hot, add the zucchini flowers one at a time, gently turning them over with tongs when golden. Drain on some absorbent paper, sprinkle some sea salt. Dip in aioli (see below) and enjoy!

To make an extra creamy aioli, roast 2 cloves of garlic on a bed of 150g of rock salt at 200 degrees for about 30 minutes. Then squeeze the garlic out of its shell when it has cooled down a bit – it will be in the form of a paste. However I used fresh garlic and minced it really finely – this is a lot quicker. It is not quite as smooth as the roasted version, but you can make it in 5 minutes. If you decide not to roast the garlic, use 2 fresh cloves (they don’t need to be giant ones – tiny flavoursome ones are better, like the ones I grew on my terrace a few months back). I made whole-egg mayonnaise, which is very simple and I find it easier than trying to buy one from a shop. Blend a whole fresh egg, the garlic, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a teaspoon of lemon juice (or white wine vinegar) and a teaspoon of salt with a stick blender. Slowly dribble in the olive oil, a drop at a time to start with, then a slow steady stream. When it is creamy, adjust salt to taste. Buon appetito!

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Posted in Pasta, rice and gnocchi, Places

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