La Minestra

La Cucina Povera- The Food of the Poor. It was about to be a huge fad, and then people realized they didn’t want to pay ten bucks for bread soup. Surprise.

I’m making soup. I’m making Minestra di Pasta e Fagioli. This is a soup often known in the US as “Pasta Fazool,” because of the Neapolitan word for bean: fazzulo. Whatever you call it, soup, pasta and beans are cooked together and separately throughout Italy in many preparations. There are many renditions of this soup in American restaurants and they largely suck, frankly, because they take a french or franco-american approach to an intrinsically Italian soup. They take beans and boil them with chicken stock, add a can of tomatoes and a bag of frozen vegetables. It’s a simmer-and-stir. Many delicate french soups are made this way (minus the frozen vegetables) and it’s a perfectly fine technique- but not for Italian soups.

Italian soups have 2 components  that will set them apart: pestata and pandade. Like everything in Italian, there are many different words that mean the same thing, but here’s what they mean: Pestata (or trito or mirpazza) is a paste of aromatic vegetables and fat- usually pork fat like back fat or salt pork, but could also be lard or olive oil. Garlic, onions, carrots, celery, parsely, rosemary- whatever is appropriate to the recipe (or your mood) are chopped together until very fine, and then the fat is added and chopped in as well (or you can do what I do- use a food processor). This is one of the traditional uses of the mezzaluna you got for christmas five years ago and lost in the back of the pantry. The paste is then fried separately and added to the soup once it’s lightly toasted.

Then there is the panade (or rinforzo) or thickener. In many recipes with beans, which have a natural affinity for them, potatoes are cooked along with the legumes until they’re cooked enough to be mashed, either in the soup pot, or taken out and mashed to a finer consistency and added back in. Bread can act in this role as well, and grains like semolina. Rice is generally not used in this way, since its consistency, like pasta’s, is considered sacred and is added only at the last moment to cook to its optimum point. The point is, unlike a roux or cornstarch, these add body and flavor, not merely viscosity.

And in the spirit of soup’s economy, after dinner which included a potato and radicchio salad, there was a little left, and into the soup that went as well.

I could hear my grandmother calling me a greaseball.

Welcome back.

We are back, and as you can see, we’ve done some remodeling. I can even post photos, look:

P, Secret Agent Gnocchi and Myself

And what’s more, you’ll see your comments more quickly, since I don’t have to wade through comment spam for 30 minutes every time I log in, thanks to Akismet, and other snazzy devices that I may or may not completely understand. The search feature works, the blog looks nicer and we now have the ability to post video and audio — the podcast lives! The blog is also easier for me to use, not that you care, but it means I’ll be able to upload more- and more interesting- content more regularly.

A few ghosts still haunt us:

Link and text formatting on old (2009 and earlier) entries

The old blog was entered in something called markdown syntax. This was a very fast and superior alternative to the text editor in drupal (the old content management system). Unfortunately, now that we’re in WordPress, if we load markdown, we disable other features that we really want to use, so for the time being, old posts are going to look strange and hyperlinks won’t work (although you can see the web address, you’ll just have to copy and paste it). Secret Agent Gnocchi and the Gnomes are working on this, but if this problem is going to be permanent, I will update the text in the more often-visited posts.

WordPress has human-readable URLs

When I post an entry or a photograph, it becomes an entry in a database. Drupal would just number them as they were created, so if you looked in the address bar, it might look like this: http://omnivorousfish.com/node/199. WordPress, however, takes the node’s title into consideration, and the same article’s URL becomes: http://omnivorousfish.com/gnocchi-the-finer-points/. Why do you care? Well, unless you link to or have bookmarks of any specific posts (not just omnivorousfish.com) you don’t care. If you are linked to me and I know about it, I will email you the correct links when I get around to it. If you’re looking for something you had bookmarked, the Search feature actually works now.

Comments prior to July 2009 are gone for the time being.

Yeah, we have no idea WTF happened on this one. They just disappeared. This really stinks, because a lot of the pasta posts had great dialogue in them, not to mention the fact that a lot of blogging luminaries showed up over the years to grace my little site with a comment, and now those comments are gone…and those people may not come back. I’m hoping they’re in an Uh-Huh video somewhere, and will come back in shaky pencil animation.

Older Photos are too wide for the new page format.

Again, this is a migration bug, and really a very minor one. If there’s a photo at the top of an old post, it impinges on the right block. No biggie.

Other than that, we are back on board with a new look and a new commitment to the slaughter of sacred cows in the food world. If you have any questions, please email us at make pasta at gmail dot com.

Pizza Series: Shaping

Last time in the world of pizza, we talked about [crust, what we want from the crust and how to make dough](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/339). Today, let’s talk about shaping the dough.

You’ve all seen the pizzaiolo (pizza guy) tossing pies in the air. There are hundreds of ways to shape pizza, some very showy, some not. They all have advantages and disadvantages, to home use and to commercial use. As usual, I will try to provide you with enough information for you to make a decision on your own.

Before we get too far into shaping, though, I want to talk a minute about the Tools of the Trade. As always, you don’t need much besides your hands and a stove to make decent food, but there are some things that I really need to stress are important to the making of great pizza. The one thing that will have the greatest effect on the overall taste and texture of your pie is without a doubt some kind of stone on which to bake it. There are pizza or bread stones available in cookware shops that yield good results, but they are often expensive and prone to breakage and usually too small to do much on. Commercial pizza ovens have a kind of composite ceramic material and if you go to a used restaurant supply house, you may be able to get a broken piece of “oven floor” that will fit in your oven, or can be cut (or smashed) to fit. Old school wood-fired ovens have soapstone floors, I am told, but I’ve never worked on one. Another inexpensive alternative is unglazed quarry tiles, which Home Depot used to carry (and may still, but I switched to Lowe’s, who definitely does not carry them) but you can get at any tile shop for about 20 cents apiece. Bread ovens are often made of firebrick, which is the material the interior of fireplaces are made of, and you can buy enough firebrick to line your oven for about $10 at any block yard.

Whatever you use, you’ll want to put your oven rack on the lowest position and cover it with whatever stone medium you choose. If you use tiles, cover as much of the rack as you like, but leave yourself a couple of inches around the perimeter of the stone to allow air to circulate around it. You’ll want to preheat your stone for at least an hour before trying to bake on it. At home, you will probably just want to set your oven to the highest setting it will allow. My oven goes to 550 and produces decent results, but higher would be better. Commercial American ovens are usually run around 600-650, sometimes higher depending on the style of pie. Wood-fired dome ovens are usually kept at ambient temperatures of about 800 degrees, though the floor remains much cooler.

You will often see recipes telling you to bake at a more conservative 450 or even 400, but this won’t create a blisteringly hot surface to crisp up your crust properly, and will necessitate too much time in the oven, making sauce, dough and, especially, cheese very unhappy.

The other piece of equipment I’d encourage you to invest in is a small peel, which is the flat shovel you use to slide the pies on and off the stone. Aluminum ones are easier to care for, and perhaps to use to a novice. They don’t perform as well as wood, but you can get into trouble more easily with wood as I’ll explain later. You can find a cheap, generic peel at any restaurant supply for about twenty bucks, or you could get one [here](https://www.surfasonline.com/products/4146.cfm). You can use a cookie sheet as a peel as well, or even an upside-down jelly-roll pan, but the operation of raw pie to stone will never be easier than with a peel.

**Shaping a pie**

No, we do not start out tossing the dough in the air, cool your jets. A pizza at home, a nice 10-12” pie should come from a piece of dough that’s around 6-7 ounces. If you’re metric, this would be about 200g. The [previous post](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/339) tells you how to get the dough ready. After its 24 hours in the fridge, here’s how to proceed.

Handle it carefully. You will deflate it eventually, but you want it to happen evenly. Dunk the dough in bench flour on each side, and tap it gently in the air to dust off excess.

Working on a smooth surface (like marble or formica), dimple the dough evenly with your fingertips all over, but avoid the very center. You generally avoid pushing the center because as the circular movements happen, then center of the dough gets stretched whether you press on it or not. Press on it from the beginning, and the dough becomes unevenly thin in the center.

At this point, you could punt with a rolling pin, and pinch up the sides a little to make an edge to your crust. But if you want to go pro…

Some people- in italy and here- will continue to pat with their fingers and stretch at the sides until the dough has reached the desired diameter. Some people “scratch” pies. This means placing your hands flat on the dough, side by side in a quasi pyramid shape. Holding one hand still (your left if you’re right-handed), gently providing a grip on the dough, move the other hand away and ever-so-slightly down, stretching that quadrant of dough. If you move your scratching hand in a continuous circular motion, you will be able to rotate the dough between stretching by lifting your static hand and lowering it again when you’ve rotated the dough sufficiently.

That’s a terrible description, but that’s all I got. I promise there will be photos and videos soon, we just need to migrate out of this drupal wilderness.

After a revolution or two of scratching, lay the dough over one hand on the counter. Make a fist, but then hinge your fingers slightly forward again. That’s how you want to have both hands for the next step. Lift the dough up off the counter with your not-quite-fists and gently stretch it by moving your fists apart. Almost simultaneously, spin the dough slightly across your hands so you’re turning and stretching in a continuous motion. Be mindful of places where the dough is thicker or thinner. Even is important.

This is the point at which you would throw the dough in the air, allowing centrifugal force to stretch the pie for you.

Now you’re headed for the peel, and I could write a whole article on the topic of what to put on the peel. Some people say there absolutely must be cornmeal on the peel. Some people say whole wheat flour. Some people say as little as possible, and I agree with them. When I’m eating pizza, I don’t like my tongue encountering a bunch of foreign nibs along the bottom. At the same time, too much flour and you will be eating raw flour on the surface of your pizza – also not enjoyable.

Here’s the issue, though. The moment the sauce goes on the pizza, the pizza wants to stick to the peel. The best way to avoid this is to work quickly, which isn’t much comfort when you’re new at something. There is a trick, though, to come in a minute.

So, just as a safety, put your peel or cookie sheet on top of your pizza stone and make sure that you’ll be able to fit your pizza on it. If the stone is smaller, take a pencil and just scratch some reference lines on it.

Next, lightly dust your peel with flour and arrange the dough over it. Put about a half a cup of sauce – ish, judge as you go – and starting from the center gently press a ladle or the bowl of a deep spoon to the top of the dough and swirl a vortex out to the sides of the pie creating an even layer of sauce.

Quickly scatter the cheese over the pie, though not too much, you should still be able to see sauce, and then tear a few basil leaves over the top. There’s your margherita.

Now take the handle of the peel and gently flick it to one side or the other. Ideally, the peel will move but the pie will stay more or less still. If it doesn’t, here’s what to do: get your face up close to the pie, pick up one edge just slightly, and blow air underneath it. A giant, crazy air bubble will move around between the dough and the peel. Once it’s traveled around, pick up an edge to dispel it, and you’re ready for the oven. (You can accomplish the same thing by lifting one edge of the pie somewhat high and quickly flicking it back down, but it’s not as easy.)

Place the edge of the peel on the far corner of your stone. Very gently begin shaking the peel back and forth, walking the dough off of the peel and onto the stone. Go slowly and forgive yourself if your first pie bunches up here or there. Once it’s on the stone, it’s there, so don’t try to adjust it. That stone is hot and you **will** burn yourself.

Once you’ve got it in, get the oven door closed ASAP- you’re losing heat. After six minutes, take a peek. If you’re not browning evenly, reach in with the peel and spin her around. If it looks even, leave it, until the top of the pie is golden and the bottom is well browned.

Give yourself a few minutes between pies, since the stone will need some time to heat up. All in all, in a home oven at 550, I’d plan on 8-10 minutes for your pie. I guess next time we’ll have to cover sauce.

Listening: The birds. The movers come tomorrow, so I’m enjoying it while I can.

Easter Photos

Since Drupal hates me and I can’t upload photos, I’ll let facebook deal with it.

Here’s some photos of the [pregame](http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=13308&id=1627995706&l=30251d2b87), courtesy of Santa Monica farmer’s market.