Polenta-stuffed collard rolls

This is my Italianiated version of a grits-stuffed collards recipe from Southern Living's 1001 Ways to Cook Southern cookbook.

Step one is to soften the collard greens. I blanched them for one minute, but the original steamed them. That's probably a better idea as there's more steaming later and you don't end up with an extra potful of water to deal with.

Step two is to make a fairly stiff batch of polenta. I included olive oil, garlic and prosciutto (actually Serano ham, but shred it, frizzle it and add it to polenta and I think you'd have a hard time telling the difference) and finished it off with copious Parmesan and a bit of dried mozzarella.

While that cooled to a workable temperature and a pliable texture, I cut out the tough stems from the collard leaves--six leaves for around 1 1/2 cups of polenta. These were big leaves so I could have used another half cup of polenta, really.

To do the wrap, I overlapped the stem-end lobes of the leaf and placed a 3-Tablespoon dollop of polenta a few inches from the bottom. From there it was just a basic burrito fold--once over, fold in the sides, then a tight roll up.

The rolls went into a steamer for as long as it takes for the collards become as tender as you can expect them to get. It'll vary depending on your leaves; Mine took about 10 minutes.

I served them halved with an herbed tomato sauce dip.



There are a couple small problems with this dish. First, because you have to cut so far up the leaf to excise the tough stem, the rolls want to split open at the seam. That's fine once you're plating and want to cut them in half anyway, but it makes them difficult to manipulate out of the steamer. Second, the flavor of the collards just doesn't mesh with the Parmesan or tomato sauce as well as I had hoped they would. I should have kept it Southern and used Cheddar or Monterrey Jack or some-such and served with hot sauce like the original recipe said to do. Well, it was worth a try.

Beer-braised sausage and kale

This is an odd take on gruenkohl und pinkel that I made even odder by making a few poor choices interpreting ambiguities in the recipe. I do think it has promise though, so I'm going to post about it anyway.

To back up a step, what's gruenkohl and pinkel? Well, it's beer-braised sausage and kale--Didn't you read the subject line?--and the name is pretty much the recipe, although I understand you can optionally add a slice of ham. It's a northern Germany thing and sounds appealing enough that I would have made it just like that if I didn't have a blog to fill up.

The unusual version I attempted comes from Dave Copeland, Salon.com's food writer, who has added some possibly ill-advised Italian elements which I've de-emphasized in my version.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound raw sausage, German or Polish would be best, but use your judgment, casing removed
1 medium white onion, chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound kale, washed, de-ribbed and torn or cut into largish pieces
12 ounces dark beer
1 pound dried pasta [I used fresh which maybe could have worked if it wasn't my falling-apart spinach pasta], something thick and chewy would probably be best.
1 Tablespoon mustard [I used prepared mustard, but I see now that the recipe just says "mustard". A full Tablespoon of dried mustard is a whole lot, isn't it? I think he means prepared mustard. But not the strong yellow sort I used. Something more mellow would be best.]
salt and pepper
1 cup grated Parmesan [The combination of Parmesan and dark beer does sort of work but I'm not at all convinced it's the best choice for the job. Most beer/cheese recipes that I've found use cheddar, but not many use dark beer. Still probably a better bet than Parmesan. I could see blue cheese and dark beer, too, maybe.]

1. Heat a little oil in a Dutch oven or large pot over medium high heat and brown sausage, breaking it up. Remove to a bowl.

2. Add onions to pot and sauté until softened, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook briefly until aromatic, then add kale. Toss kale to get it all somewhat wilted. When there's enough room in the pot, return the sausage and add the beer. Bring to a boil, turn heat to medium low, cover and cook until kale is tender, 15-20 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, cook your pasta to al dente.

4. When kale is cooked, stir in salt, pepper and mustard. Add the cheese. When the cheese has melted into the beer, add the pasta and simmer until finished cooking, 1-2 minutes.

Served garnished with a little more cheese and maybe some more mustard too.



The batch I made ended up a weird mishmash of flavors that didn't really work too well. I think you can pretty much tell that just by looking at it. The Parmesan and the mustard particularly don't mesh and the mushy fresh pasta was a huge mistake. But, like I said, I think there's some promise here. I did like the sauce the beer and cheese formed and it did compliment the kale nicely. The kale itself was cooked well and I could see the textures working with a different sort of pasta. So avoid my mistakes and you'll probably enjoy it. Or just add kale to a standard beer cheese soup instead; That might be nice.

CSA week ten wrap-up, week 11 start-up

I made a couple dishes last week not worth a full blog post but worth a mention here: spinach pasta dough and Italian wedding soup.

The spinach pasta dough was a real pain to work with. I kept adding more flour to compensate for the moisture in the spinach, but it stayed sticky and delicate and refused to roll out well in my pasta machine. I ended up using half the dough to make some really tough gnocchi and some noodles that stuck together into a lump and putting the rest in the freezer. It'll probably roll out better half-defrosted, I figure. If it had good spinach flavor, maybe it'd be worth all this trouble, but I could barely taste any. Big waste of some quality spinach.

The Italian wedding soup, on the other hand, was quite good, but it's just adding meatballs and coarsely chopped escarole (or curly endive) to chicken soup and finishing off with egg-drop-soup-style egg threads made out of alfredo sauce. I did make my own meatballs, but not much there to write about.

What's left then? Half a head of escarole, half a head of celery, half a container of grape tomatoes, most of the parsley, the honey and a still-not-ripe canistel. Huh, I thought I had made more of a dent in the share than that. I'll make a frittata or a stew or suchlike to use that up.


If this week's share looks sparse, that's because I left the lettuce behind, as usual, as well as the mizuna. I've got nothing against mizuna, but I'm getting tired of greens at this point, plus I need to limit how many new ingredients I bring in this week. my freezer is completely full and I need to clear out some space so I can make ice cream.

So, the only real non-seasoning ingredient I need to deal with here is the kale. There's a German beer-braised kale recipe that caught my I, but kale has been trendy recently so there are interesting recipes floating around out there. Or maybe I'll just make chips; That's always an option.

For the curry leaves, the trick is using a reasonable amount of them at once. Jamie Oliver has a few recipes that ask for a handful; his fish soup looks pretty good.

I might go Indian again with the dill (as mentioned in the newsletter). I wasn't too impressed with the curry I made with them last April, not while it was fresh, but it improved over time in the freezer and was very tasty when defrosted.

The carrot I've already snacked upon and, as carrots go, it was a good one.

I'll save the pulp from the black sapote when it's ripe and wait for more. It's easier to use in bulk, I've found. I'll probably do the same with the canistel, now that I think about it.

Finally, the green onions are no problem. I use plenty of onions and scallions in my cooking so these should substitute in nicely.

That's still three or four dishes all of which will probably have leftovers. Even if I can pull most of the non-share ingredients out of the freezer, I don't know if I'll be making much progress towards emptying it out. Maybe I'll save the dill and curry leaves. They both freeze well.

CSA week nine - Utica greens

The greens in question here are escarole a.k.a. curly endive a.k.a. the stuff from the CSA share this week.

The Utica in question is a town in upstate New York. I'm always pleasantly surprised to find a regional cuisine that I wasn't familiar with. Yes, this is basically Italian-American, but it evolved its own way upstate to create a few dishes you won't find outside the region. There's this, salt potatoes, riggies, snappys (which I knew as Harry's white hots when I visited family in Rochester) and a few others. There's an interesting list here.

This is one of those recipes where every kitchen has its own variation. Only a few of those are up on the Web. I based mine on one by Janet Chanatry of Chanatry's SuperMarket in Utica.

Ingredients:
1 1-pound head of escarole, cleaned and chopped into large pieces
2 Tablespoons olive oil
at least 1 ounce prosciutto, sliced thin and chopped
copious garlic, finely chopped
2 long Italian hot peppers, seeded and sliced thin [I couldn't find the peppers I wanted so I used Anaheims]
1/3 cup hot pickled Italian peppers, sliced thin [I couldn't find what I wanted here either so I picked peppers out of the various mixes at the Fresh Market olive bar.]
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup or more breadcrumbs
1/3 cup pecorino romano, finely grated
1 cup chicken broth
salt and pepper

0. Preheat oven on broil.

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add escarole and less salt than if you were making pasta but still a good bit. Simmer 4-6 minutes until the escarole is tender and wilted. Remove to a bowl, add cold water until the greens are cool enough to handle. Squeeze out the water and unwad the resulting wads from your squeezing.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large pan over medium heat. Add garlic and proscuitto and cook for 2-3 minutes until prosciutto is frizzled and garlic aromatic. Add both sorts of peppers and cook another 2-3 minutes until the raw peppers soften a little but still have some bite to them.

3. Turn off the heat and add escarole and stock to pan. Mix in breadcrumbs and cheese gradually. The goal is to soak up all the stock so be generous with the crumbs. [Chanatry's original recipe called for only 1/2 cup breadcrumbs but I used lots more. She must have meant store-bought dust-dry crumbs. My homemade crumbs absorb a lot less liquid per cup.]

4. When the mixture is no longer soupy, check to see if you used a pan that can survive going under the broiler. If not, move everything to a baking dish. If you used a cast iron pan then you can leave it where it is. Season the mixture to taste, sprinkle some more breadcrumbs on top and drizzle or spray with a little more olive oil. Broil for a few minutes until well browned.

Serve hot. The Delmonico's menu pairs it with steak. I saw another appealing suggestion of using it to top a chicken cutlet sandwich. Basically, it's both vegetable and starch so pair it with a chunk of meat.

With the prosciutto, garlic and peppers, of course this tastes pretty darn good. The question is: how much do the greens contribute to the goodness? Escarole isn't the world's most hearty or flavorful vegetable so it has a hard time standing up to the other flavors in the dish, but it's in there. It's a kinda-spinachy-letucey baseline (not a bass-line, though. No real low notes in this dish. That's why it's a side dish for meat.) the other flavors work off of. It's also the physical bulk of the dish which is important. It contributes to the dish, but it doesn't really contribute to the goodness. I want to try it again after it's fully clotted and the flavors have had time to blend a little. I think it might come together a bit better on reheating.

CSA week 13 - Spinach gnudi in sage brown butter

For those who aren't familiar with this trendy Italian dish, gnudi and basically balls of ravioli filling. They're supposed to be light and fluffy and it's a serious challenge to get them to hold together while you're boiling them. That's why, most of the time, they're encased in pasta.

I considered trying to make ravioli, but I can't even make the pasta come out of my pasta machine in tidy evenly wide sheets. There's a whole set of challenges there I don't feel like dealing with on a weeknight. Plus I'd have to invest in a ravioli cutter which I can't imagine using very often.

The lasagne idea was still an option, but I couldn't find a recipe interesting enough to post about and since my komatsuna plans are a bit lame too, this had to be the bigger deal of the week.

I found pretty wide range of recipes for spinach gnudi. Well, they all had more or less the same ingredients, but the ratios varied quite a bit and the methodologies for most seemed sloppy, leaving out important steps. I incorporated all the tricks I could find to ensure success. I haven't actually made them yet so we'll so how well that goes.

Ingredients:
1 pound spinach, cleaned and washed
8 ounces ricotta
1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan
2 eggs
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1 teaspoon nutmeg
salt and pepper

I started by blanching the spinach, rinsing it in cold water to stop the cooking, draining and then squeezing out the excess water.

I also squeezed some water out of the ricotta. One of the recipes I found said that American ricottas are looser than proper Italian varieties. That's one issue that can cause integrity problems in the gnudi.

After I pulsed the spinach in the food processor a few times to chop it up finely, I mixed all the ingredients and left it in the refrigerator for a while to let the breadcrumbs absorb some moisture and for everything to firm up a bit.

After an hour I took the dough out, lightly formed it into balls and rolled them in flour. The flour is supposed to form a gelatinous enclosure in the simmering water. I could see that working.

Finally, I simmered them gently without stirring for about three minutes, until they rose to the surface of the water. Here's the first batch:


Three out of four held together; That's not too bad.

The sauce is just sage and pancetta browned in butter. Nothing fancy, but a nice complement. The dumplings are light and fluffy with bright spinach flavor over a creamy base. Very nice with the herbal notes and little crispy bits from the sauce.

The second batch was less successful, but not as bad as it looks. They didn't really fall apart; they just split open. I wish I had realized that earlier before I started doctoring up the rest of the dough. Then I wouldn't have added a full half cup of flour.



Here's the first test dumpling from the recipe:

Well, it certainly held together better but the dense texture isn't nearly as nice. Plus the flavors have been dulled. OK, I'm adding a couple Tablespoons of ricotta to lighten it up and more salt and pepper to bring out the flavors. Let's try this again:

OK, that's substantially improved. It's doughy and hearty, but not nearly as heavy. Still got a bit of raw flour flavor, though. I think these would be better fried than boiled. I'll try that tomorrow and let you know how it goes.

Still, the first gnudi were the best. Now that I think about it, the problem was that I didn't flour the sheet I stored them on; A bit of the mixture stuck to the sheet leaving a small gap in the flour coating, an Achilles heel where the insides could leak out. All that extra messing about wasn't necessary at all.

Ah well, I'm sure deep-fried spinach and ricotta dumplings will have their own charm, too.

CSA week 11 - Celery pesto

Looking at the widely varying recipes on-line for celery pesto, I get the impression that such a thing doesn't actually exist, at least not in any codified form. Each version seems like an independent invention rather than a variation on an established theme. Usually I try to find that theme and work my own variation, but this time I just winged it and saw what I got.

Like I said last Saturday, my celery was exceptionally leafy. I got a full two cups of leaves off of it. I added a handful of parsley to that along with 3 Tablespoons of lightly toasted pine nuts, a couple cloves of garlic and a pinch of salt. I blended all that together and drizzled in extra virgin olive oil until a loose paste formed. About 1/3 cup did the trick.


Now that I've got it, what to do with it? One of the recipes suggested adding Italian sausage and a bit more garlic and serving over pasta. Seems like a sensible idea to me.




The pesto is very light and fresh without being agressively celery-y. The chese helps it pair with the sausage, but the contrast between the fresh greens and the savory sausage is the main thrust of the dish and quite like how they balance. Whether that's better or worse than a standard pesto I can't really say; the lack of an agressively sharp basil or parsley makes this easier on the palate but that also means it's lacking in strong character. I guess it all depends of whether you've got two cups of basil or two cups of celery you need to find a use for; both have their charms.

CSA week two - Italian dandelion greens and penne rigate

That looks pretty tasty, doesn't it? Well, in reality it's barely edible. As the Tropical Locavore (who really ought to change the name on her profile picture if she wants to remain psuedonymous) complained earlier today, these greens are intensely bitter.

I used the traditional cooking method of blanching then sautéing, but it really didn't help much. Maybe a longer boil would draw out more of the bitterness? I found the water afterward to be flavored quite nicely, actually, and used it to cook the pasta.

The recipe in the newsletter that uses the greens raw is definitely contraindicated. Save that for when we get some chard.

I'm not saying to throw the dandelion greens out; just use them judiciously, balancing the bitterness with other strong flavors. I used a handful along with some of the bok choy in a yakisoba last night where a touch of bitterness was a pleasant element. I can't see them staying fresh long enough to use up a whole batch this way, but at least you'll get some good use out of them.

Pizza 101

Earlier this evening the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce Southeast hosted a social networking happy hour at Piola Brickell that was preceded by Pizza 101: "we invite you to learn how to make a real Italian pizza with one of Piola’s master pizza makers! They will teach you all the tricks you need to know to make a superb pizza, while you make it with them right then and there. As a final reward for your efforts, you will get to eat the pizza you made during the class and share it with your friends!!"

I've got no particular need of the networking, but my pizza skills could sure use some work. So, off I went.

Parking's a pain in Brickell, but I got there more or less on time which meant, of course, waiting a good ten minutes for Piola to get their act together and for anyone else to show up. Once they did, they got four of us lined up along a table, dumped a truckload of flour on it and handed out discs of dough for us to work with.

The instructor did far more flirting than teaching, but I managed to pick up a few pointers. First of all, the texture of the dough was unusual. Soft, but not wet. Elastic, but not tight. That seemed to be the biggest trick of the night and I wish they told us how they managed it. I suspect part of it is from intensive kneading following by a lengthy rest to relax the gluten. The hydration level was hard to pin down, though. It can't have been too high as the dough didn't seem to pick up any of the flour, but normally a dough that dry is stiff. I dunno.

I'm also not sure why they used so very much flour. The dough didn't seem in any risk of sticking to the work surface. I presume it served some important function, though. There was a big minus as they never warned us to shake off the excess and we had big problems with baked on/caked on chunks of flour on the finished pies.

The chef demoed stretching the dough, so even if he didn't try to explain it, we had a model to follow. I've seen some folks say to use your knuckles, but he used his fingertips. He also had an interesting technique of letting half the dough droop off the side of the table while he rotated it around, letting gravity stretch it out. It worked pretty well for me too, but the texture of the dough was very forgiving. I'd want to be really confident any dough I made at home wasn't going to tear before trying it.

Most folks used tomato sauce and they showed us the technique you probably know of spooning a dollop in the middle of the pie and then using the back of the ladle to swirl it outwards. It was hard to judge just how much to use since a little goes a long way, but never quite as far as you'd like. Then a couple handfuls of shredded mozzarella and a pretty good selection of toppings. I lot of folks, I think, overloaded both with cheese and with too many and too much toppings. I believe it's traditional (and just a good idea) to use no more than three. I went with ham, roasted peppers and basil. OK, also some ricotta, but I went light on the mozzarella so the ricotta was intended as part of the cheese element, not a separate topping.

Here's before:













and after:



It turned out OK, but I had problems with excess flour and I like a spicier sauce than Piola uses so their unexpectedly sweet sauce threw off the balance of flavors a bit. One other point I learned from someone else's pie was that anchovies are to be used sparingly no matter how high quality they are (and these were really nice ones).

I think the big takeaway here was that getting the right texture on the dough at the start makes the process go much smoother and faster and gives you a better texture and flavor at the end. Does anyone have a favorite recipe they'd like to share?

Italian Cooking Show III part 2

Remember back in June when I said that the Italian Cooking Show was informative and fun and you ought to go? Well, maybe not so much.

This was, I think, the fourth of the Italian cooking demos held at Mia Cucina this summer (and the third annual series, which is where the III comes from), and the last before the grand finale in September. I would have thought they'd be getting better at running them, but there were serious logistical problems this time around.

I'll spare you a full pointless blow-by-blow, but suffice it to say that out of the six dishes, we got three proper cooking demos and three cooking-free descriptions. And none of the recipes demoed or described matched what we had in our handouts.

But demos aside, we still got full-serving samples to try with some very nice wine pairings so it wasn't an entirely wasted evening.

My favorite dish in concept was the fregoletta prepared by Chef Davide Piana from Sardinia. (The name of both the restaurant and the cuisine. Piana himself is from Genoa, I believe he said.) Fregoletta is a somewhat paella-like dish of saffroned fregola, a grain I don't think I've ever had before, tomatoes and clams. If they had bowls so the dish could include the clam broth that moistened the dry grain and tied the dish together, I think it would have been quite good indeed.

My favorite dish in actuality would have to be the Calabrian stuffed peppers prepared by Chef Rosario Corrao from Pelican. It was just a standard stuffed pepper, but the pepper itself was fork tender but not at all mushy which I've never been able to accomplish with the recipes I've tried. I wonder if that's from simmering them before stuffing and then a short baking without saucing. That's what he described, but the recipe in the handout skips the simmering and has the peppers in the over for an hour. That seems more practical to serve a large group so I think maybe it was done that way instead.

Other than those two dishes, it wasn't so great this time around. I'm not entirely disuaded from attending the finale, but they'll have to have some pretty compelling attractions to get me there.

Italian Cooking Show III

Last night I attended the third night of this summer's Italian Cooking Show at Mia Cucina on Miracle Mile that you've probably seen mention of on some of the other Miami food blogs.

Mia Cucina is an Italian kitchen furniture store so they had a dozen display kitchens over which to strew displays of the sponsors' products as well as a working studio kitchen in the back for the cooking demonstration.

We had Chef Riccardo Tognozzi of Blu Restaurant cooking dishes from the Lazio region:

Menu
Gnocchi di semolino - home made semolina dumplings
Saltinbocca alla Romana - Roman-style veal with ham and sage sauce
Ciambelle ruzze - Ring-shaped biscuits

and Chef Julian Baker of Cardozo Restaurant cooking Trentino Adige cuisine:

Menu
Speck con rucola e grana padano
Canederli Tirolesi - Bread dumplings with speck in hot broth
Strudel di mele - apple strudel


These were all quick and easy versions--Tognozzi didn't roll his veal scallops and Baker didn't soak the raisins or toast the pinenuts for the strudel--and I think the recipes were the better for it.

The audience got full servings of every dish which is a practice I'd like to commend to every cooking demo. And we got glasses of three wines from 24SunnyWine importers with refills even. I particularly liked Rosso Sicilia IGT's Rosso Sicilia (made from 85% nero d'avola and 15% merlot grapes) which had a balanced sweetness with a cherry tartness and a little bite at the swallow plus a long subtle but tanniny finish. Well, obviously, I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to wines, but it was tasty.

Of the dishes, I found the gnocchi the most interesting as it was a disk of stiff cream of wheat baked with butter and Parmesan (although all the Parmesan this evening was substituted for with Grana Padano, a rather milder crumblier cheese being promoted at the event, to the detriment of the speck salad I thought). If you can call that a gnocchi when it's made of different ingredients and cooked differently from what most people know as gnocchi then what is the essential essence of gnocchiness? It didn't taste particularly great, but philosophically, it's intriguing.

For eating, my favorite was the ciambelle ruzze--a dry cookie made with white wine, olive oil and anise. I could sit around eating these things all day long and I intend to make a batch so I can do just that.


After the cooking was done, they gave away a bazillion door prizes. I won a couple bags of pasta (which brings the number of varieties of pasta in my pantry up to an even dozen) and a bottle of Villa Caviciana Letizia 2005. The bottle says it's from Lazio too so I'll open it up when I make saltimbocca which turns out to be a lot less complicated than I thought.

There was a reception afterward where you got to dig into those sponsor displays I mentioned up top but I skedaddled pretty quickly instead. I hadn't paid the extra $10 fee for it and fair's fair. Plus, from the crowd reaction when my name was called for my door prize, I think maybe one or more of you, my lovely and charming readers, were present which meant there was the very real risk of someone attempting to talk to me. And, as I had chosen this event as specifically something I could say I've gone out and done when in fact I was just sitting quietly and staring attentively ahead while balancing a plate in my lap in a different room than usual, I wasn't really prepared for social interaction.

Reception aside, this was a pretty darn good cooking demonstration. They've got a few more scheduled for this summer and I recommend going.

CSA week nine wrap-up

I hoped to have another post today but I screwed up the dish and ended up having to throw it out so you're getting the wrap-up instead.

Actually, I threw a fair amount of produce out this week. I had hoped to make another salad soup but the lettuce had gone too grotty so out it went. In contrast, I peeled the canistel too soon and, when I washed up, found my fingers covered with the sticky stomach-ache-causing sap so I tossed that too to be on the safe side.

The dish today was an adaption of this recipe for persimmon chews. I substituted in black sapote for the persimmon, used light brown sugar and added a little vanilla and a good squeeze of lemon juice. The resulting goop was tasty but, after a lengthy time on the double boiler and a cool down, showed no sign it intended to thicken into anything close to a "chew". I don't see how the recipe would work with persimmons, even the more solid sort. The double boiler should keep temperatures from rising anywhere near what's needed for the sugar to thicken up. Maybe persimmons have lots and lots of pectin?

So I figured, put the mix right into the pot, get it up to 250 degrees and that should do the trick. But I got distracted and let it burn, ruining it and quite possibly the pot. I still think the recipe has some promise so I might try it again next time I get some sapote to work with.

I do have one success to report, though. I made the Italian green bean recipe suggested by drlindak in the comments on this week's start-up post. I made the one small change of substituting in the milder pecorino toscano for the pecorino romano. I'm usually not much of a pesto fan, but I liked this a lot. Maybe I just don't care for pine nuts.

Lard bread

I'm making a different sort of bread this week--bread with stuff in it!

Lard bread is a traditional Italian loaf. Apparently, Astoria, Queens in New York is known for them but I don't recall seeing them when I lived (just slightly to the south of) there. On the other hand, my neighborhood was mostly Greek, Brazilian and North Indian so the local Italian bakeries probably weren't the best around.

Lard bread, as you've probably guessed by now, is made with lard and plenty of it. I looked around for recipes as usual. There are a lot of recipes for crepe-like dishes and schiacciatas that use a lot of lard and some sweet lard loaves too, but I was looking for something similar to the loaf featured in a food/travel show I saw that included salami, cheese and lots of black pepper along with the generous amounts of lard. I settled on a recipe posted to chow.com by Patricia Grande that wasn't quite the same, but was different in interesting ways I hadn't tried before. Here's her recipe halved to bring it down to a more reasonable size.

But before we get to that, more on the lard. This is Miami so I could have just gone out and bought some but I've been saving in the freezer fat trimmed from the various cuts of pork I've cooked over the last couple of months. I figured it would come in useful eventually and look, hey, it did. Easiest way to deal with it was to just drop the frozen pork fat into my crockpot, turn it on, cover, and come back eight hours later.


I was a bit concerned about the smell since pork rendering plants don't have sparkling reputations in that regard but it just smelled like pork fat. Although after a while it, my apartment and I all just smelled like pork fat and I can see why that might be an issue. From a full bucket of fat scraps I ended up with a bit over a cup of fat and pile of pork cracklin's. I strained those out, cooled the lard and was ready to go on the bread.



Lard Bread

Dough:
1 envelopes dry yeast (5 tsps.)
around 1 cup warm water
2 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 oz. cold lard, cut into tbs. size chunks
On a large wooden board, make a mound of flour and mix in the salt. Distribute the lard over and rub into the flour. Sprinkle the yeast/water over and begin kneading. Knead 8-10 minutes, until smooth and elastic, adding either flour or water as required (needed?! - OY!)Form into a ball, put into a greased bowl, cover with a towel and rise til doubled, about 1 1/2 hours.

[I used my mixer for the kneading, but I cut in the lard by hand. The original recipe had a typo and only called for a half cup of water for five cups of flour so I had to judge the hydration by eye. I think I'm getting the hang of this as I had no problem slowing mixing the water and determining when I had enough.]



Filling:
2 oz. lard, at room temp
1 oz grated Parmeggiano Reggiano
1 1/2 Tbs. grated Pecorino Romano
1/2 Tbs. coarse ground black pepper (or more to taste)
1/3 c. salami (or prosciutto, or a mixture of both) cut into small dice
3 oz. provolone cut into small dice
(You may also use all one or the other, or use crumbled cooked Italian sausage meat - although if you can't get this bread maybe you can't get good sausage either.)

Grease and flour a baking sheet. Punch dough down after it has risen and turn out onto floured board. Roll into a rectangle 1/2 inch thick, 16 inches long, 12 inches wide. Spread the lard evenly over the dough. [I wish I could get a picture to turn out of the slathered on lard. It's vaguely upsetting but also looks pretty tasty.] Sprinkle with remaining filling ingredients (I like more pepper, you may too).



Roll up like a jelly roll, starting at the long side. Pinch all seams to close tightly then bend into a circle shape, pinching together the joining. Place on sheet and cover with a cloth. Rise until doubled, at least one hour. Bake at 350 for one hour, until light brown. Try to let cool (at least a bit) before slicing.





[Argh! Just now while I was typing this in I realized that I forgot the Parmesan and Romano! No wonder the results are a little blah! Dang.





Other than that, though, it's a nice loaf of bread. The lard makes it light, tender and flaky the same way it does in pie crusts. I added an egg wash to get a nice golden brown crust although, because of the lard, the crust keeps flaking right off. Despite the lack of Parmesan, the flavors still pretty good; if you like salami and provolone sandwiches, here's one ready-made. Some more of each wouldn't be a bad thing though. Just about enough of the black pepper, though.

Despite my lapse there, I'm pretty happy with how I managed to make the dough, roll it out, roll it up and get it baked without mishap. Pretty advanced bread-making technique there. What other odd variant should I try next?


I've been snacking on the bread all afternoon and now I've got a tummy full of lard. I don't feel so good.