Food Voyage #1: Three Dishes from Italy
Puntarelle alla Romana, spaghetti agretti, and marmalade crostata
Hi there.
Back when things were a little more normal, for me, travelling has always meant the opportunity to discover new food. Since that is currently off the book, I resorted to learning about new ingredients and attempting to cook dishes from other parts of the world as a remedy to my travel cravings.
So, going forward, this series of ‘Food Voyage’ posts will document these little journeys.
If you have any dishes you would like to see me attempt, let me know! :)
Recently I have been cooking Italian more than usual.
Partly it is because Italian food is just amazing: the sheer number of pasta shapes out there is just fascinating, and I particularly adore Italian home-style cooking — I have been spending a long time drooling over Rachel Roddy’s Instagram feed, her food always seem so simple, cozy, authentic, delicious.
The other half of the reason is Natoora. I very rarely order from them, but every time I do I just end up ordering far too many random but interesting looking things that I have never seen or cooked before. The most recent order contained several Italian specialities.
Puntarelle alla Romana
Puntarelle actually became available on Natoora a while back. When I saw it my first thought was ‘that vegetable has a cool name’: it rolls off the tongue so smoothly that it sounds like a Disney princess.
Wikipedia says it is a type of chicory, except it looked nothing like the usual kind I have been eating. I thought: why don’t I just eat chicory from the supermarket instead?
Then one day I saw Felicity Cloake making Rachel Roddy’s Puntarelle alla Romana. The curly little strips of the vegetable tossed in vinegary anchovy dressing suddenly looked cute and irresistible. So I decided that I would have a go at making it too.
Conceptually, the recipe itself is really quite simple:
curls of tender young puntarelle shoots tossed with a dressing of anchovies, garlic, vinegar and olive oil
Easy, all the dressing ingredients I already have.
When I picked out the puntarelle from the delivery box, however, I was firstly surprised by how much of the leaves I had to take off in order to get to the roots, and secondly, it was incredibly time-consuming to cut the shoots into thin long strips without a puntarelle cutter.
But I persevered with a paring knife. Then I put the strips into an ice bath.
An hour or so later I returned to the pot, at which point I saw that most of the shoots had failed to curl up. Perhaps my strips were not thin enough, and I thought to myself, why did I even waste time trying, should’ve just chopped it up.
I was hungry by then, so I proceeded to drain and dry the shoots, and then added the dressing as per Rachel’s recipe, which consisted of:
2 cloves of garlic, 5 good quality salted anchovy fillets, 2 tbs of good red wine or balsamic vinegar, 5 tbsp good olive oil, a good pinch of salt, freshly ground black pepper
The combination of the things above smelled divine, but I had to wait yet again. Afterall, the key to a delicious salad is time — you have to let the whole thing sit for a while after mixing so the ingredients and flavours have a chance to meld together.
Another hour later I was starving, but luckily the salad was at last ready!
I grabbed the most massive forkful and shoved it in my mouth. The strips of puntarelle were still crunchy, and its bitterness sat beautifully against the acidic, salty, garlicky dressing. At this point I suddenly realised that the unsuccessful strips were not cut in vain: the long strands resembled spaghetti and served as the perfect vehicle for the anchovy sauce.
It was rich in flavour but at the same time simple and refreshing. Despite how much time it took me, I will definitely be making it again before the puntarelle season ends.
Spaghetti agretti
Unlike my influenced puntarelle purchase, I added monk’s beard to my basket simply because it sounded weird. It is only after it has arrived that I thought: what is this and what am I going to cook with it?
Thankfully, Emiko Davies’s recipe (and Jamie Oliver’s notes) came to rescue.
Monk’s beard, or agretti, grows in sandy seashores around the Mediterranean basin, and has a very short season in spring. It is not very well known in England, but the online blogs I have read all rave about how wonderful and unique it is.
Preparing it for cooking, however, proved to be another very time-consuming process. The pink roots have to be removed, and since each strand is so thin and all of them intertwined with each other, you can only align a palmful of strands at a time, then snip off the roots one by one.
Once you have a bowl of cleaned agretti, making the actual dish is (again) very straight forward. All you need is spaghetti, salty water for cooking the pasta, then olive oil, garlic, chilli flakes.
Emiko’s recipe suggests you could (optionally) add a squeeze of lemon juice, but I ran out of lemon, so instead I proceeded with some bergamot juice. The additional acidity and citrus frangrance really made a difference.
The verdict? It is a very unique vegetable indeed: partly ressembles samphire in taste and texture, but is less salty and softer, with a hint of spinach. It also reminds me of shredded seaweed salads, a little crunch but less chewy and more delicate. The vegetable itself was not fragrant, so the toasted garlic and sprinkle of chilli flakes were complementary.
Eating this dish brought feelings of a salty gentle morning breeze by the beach.
Marmalade Crostata
To complete my Italian three-course meal — albeit each course eaten days apart — I also attempted to make crostata.
I first came across crostata in the menu of Burro e Salvia, a small pasta restaurant near Old Street. A short crust pastry pie filled with fruit jam, it is one of the most classic Italian desserts. Admittedly though, I have not eaten a slice in the past couple of years.
The other day, however, I felt like baking a tart, and I had a jar of unopened bitter orange marmalade at the back of my cupboard. Marmalade crostata, I thought, would be nice.
An important thing to get right in a crostata is the pastry dough, or pasta frolla. According to Pina Bresciani,
it can’t be too hard, or too soft, or too crumbly. But it should be a little crumbly once it’s baked and a little soft.
And when she compares pies to crostatas, she goes on to emphasise the importance of getting the dough right:
the star of a pie is the filling, while in a crostata, the dough and filling are equally as important
Unfortunately, her recipe seems to be too big for my pie dish, so in the end I opted for An Italian in My Kitchen’s recipe. The instructions were straight forward, and since a crostata does not need to be as crumbly as the usual short-crust pie, the process of rubbing the cold butter and flour together seemed slightly more forgiving.
The pastry itself has plenty of sugar, so using bitter orange marmalade as the filling was actually a good call. Except some of my friends do not like marmalade, so I carved out a corner for some strawberry jam.
The resulting crostata was a decent first attempt. I did forget to brush the top lattice with egg or milk wash for shine and colour, and I felt using store-bought jam led to a slight overdose in sugar. The pie dough itself, on the other hand, was so enjoyable to eat that I might increase the thickness of the bottom crust next time.
If you do crave some dessert from Italy though (other than tiramisu which you should get from Brawn), this is by far the easiest recipe out of the three in this post, so I would recommend giving it a go.
Plus, there is also 100 points for aesthetics with that shiny fruit jam.
Loved it! Almost feels like I went away too.
Easy baking ideas for valentines next please! X