Pizza Tonno e Cipolla

Pizza tonno e cipolla, that is, pizza with tuna and onions, is one of my all-time favorite pizzas.


Unfortunately, it's a pizza that isn't too popular here in the U.S. Even though we're willing to put just about anything on our pizzas, some of them quite horrendous, tuna does not seem to be a topping people think of when writing their pizza menus.

So, of course, I decided to satisfy my cravings by making my own! I had also just bought a baking stone, and this seemed like a good opportunity to try it out. Well, it seems I needed a bit of practice with this new stone. Even though I had successfully made pizzas on my parents' baking stone, this time it took me not one, not even two, but three tries before I could declare myself successful in my pizza-making endeavor. The first time I tried, it was actually more an ingredient issue as I didn't realize my flour was not high-gluten; the pizza came out OK, but it was a bit more work and one side got a bit smushed when entering the oven.

The second time was, at least presentation-wise, a disaster. The pizza dough stuck horrendously to the peel, so much so that even with the help of a spatula I couldn't get it onto the stone. Eventually I had to transfer the gooey mess that had once been a lovely-looking pizza onto a baking sheet and bake it that way. The good news was it still tasted fantastic, but unfortunately not very photo-worthy.

Well, this time, I learned from my previous mistakes and now, an older and wiser pizzaiola, I present you with my method for making a pizza tonno e cipolla.

I used a slightly different dough recipe this time, partly due to necessity (i.e. lack of ingredients) and partly just to experiment. It came out just as good as my previous doughs, so I think either one is fine. I also added cherry tomatoes because that was the way my favorite lunch pizzeria in Milan did it, and I loved it.

For the dough:
150 g bread flour
50 g whole wheat flour (this is how I compensated for the fact that none of the grocery stores I visited had whole wheat bread flour. It's not nearly as hearty as using all whole wheat flour, but it's enough to add some oomph to the dough!)
About half a glass of water
Half a package of yeast
A small spoonful of sea salt
A small spoonful of sugar
A larger spoonful of olive oil

For the toppings:
A small cupful of tomato sauce (I just use canned tomatoes for pizzas)
About 100 g pizza mozzarella
1 small-to-medium yellow onion
About 100 g tuna
A handful of cherry tomatoes
Another spoonful of olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Oregano

A note about the tuna - using higher quality tuna really makes a difference here. I still remember the pizza tonno e cipolla I had at a pizzeria in the Navigli section of Milano where I'm sure they used fresh tuna because the taste was just amazing. Of course, it will still taste good with standard canned tuna, but I think it's worth it to try to get the best kind available. One brand I like is Ortiz, which comes preserved in brine in a glass bottle.

A couple of hours before you want to eat your pizza, prepare the dough. If you're using active dry yeast, activate it by adding it to a small cup of warm water, along with the sugar. Sift together the two flours and then add the sea salt. Form the flour into a sort of fountain, high on the sides and low in the middle. Pour the yeast mixture into the center and gradually blend in the flour from the sides, adding more flour from farther out as you go. Add in the oil and then the water, a bit at a time, blending until you get a smooth, slightly sticky dough.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead for several minutes until the dough becomes resistant, bouncing back when you press it down.

Form the dough into a ball, coat it lightly with oil and place in a large bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a cloth or some such thing and leave it in a warm, non-drafty place. Do not put it in your oven, as this is the point where you should start preheating. Remember, to make a good pizza you want your oven to be hot hot hot!

If you own a baking stone, make sure the stone is in the oven before you start preheating. If you plan to bake your pizza on a baking sheet, do not put the sheet in the oven. In either case, heat the oven to about as hot as it will go, usually 500ºF or 250º C.

After about 45 minutes, start preparing your toppings. One of the reasons I think my second pizza stuck so much was that I took too long to put the toppings on. The quicker you are in topping your pizza, the less chance there is that it will stick to the peel, so make sure everything you need is perfectly ready before you roll out the dough.

Begin by peeling the onion and chopping it into half-rings. The first time I made this, a big question I had was whether the onions should be raw or pre-cooked before going onto the pizza. My internet research proved unhelpful as there seemed to be several people who swore by putting them on raw and several others who insisted they should be cooked. One person even described an elaborate method that involved marinating the onion in wine for a full day beforehand!

While I was not about to try the marinating method, I did decide to do an experiment in which I covered one half of the pizza with raw onions and one half with pre-sautéed onions. In my opinion, the sautéed onions tasted much better, so that is the recipe I'm giving here.

Onion Experiment

After you've chopped the onion, heat some olive oil in a pan. When the oil is hot, add the onion and let cook a few minutes until tender. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper, stir a bit, and then remove the pan from heat to let the onion cool.

Chop up the mozzarella and tuna, and wash the cherry tomatoes and slice them into halves. Be sure to have your tomato sauce, oregano, and a spoonful of olive oil ready.

When the dough has doubled in size (after about an hour or an hour and a half), take it out and roll it out onto a well-floured surface. For those of you using baking stones, another trick you can use to keep the dough from sticking to the pizza peel is to start by rolling it out onto a different floured surface and then transfer it to the peel before you add toppings. I also sprinkled some semolina onto the peel, but I decided I didn't like the taste when the pizza was done, so I don't think I'll be doing that again soon.

When rolling out the pizza, it's good to keep it in the air a fair amount, tossing it gently and then spinning it a bit so it stretches evenly. When you get it pretty well tossed, you can also go around stretching out the edges to make it bigger and thinner. Remember that a true pizza should have a very thin crust!!

When the pizza is ready, test to make sure it's not sticking to the peel by lightly bouncing the peel up and down a few times and seeing if the pizza moves. If not, unstick it now before you add all the ingredients, after which it will become impossible. It's also important not to weight the pizza down with too many ingredients, though these ones are so good that it's hard for me to stick to that rule!!


Spoon on the tomato sauce, spreading it evenly across all but the very outer edge. Sprinkle the mozzarella over it, then the onions, tuna, and finally the cherry tomatoes. Try to place the cherry tomatoes facing up so that the skin doesn't burn.

Drizzle everything with olive oil and then sprinkle oregano over the top. Place the pizza into the oven, keeping the peel level and just bumping it slightly to get the pizza onto the stone (of course, if you're using a baking sheet you don't have to worry about any of this).

Let the pizza bake for about 8-10 minutes, remove from the oven, let cool just a bit and eat up!

Crustless Vegetable Quiche

It's always nice when you make something for the first time and it actually turns out pretty decent!


I had some eggs and vegetables to use up and I realized I had never made a quiche before, and it might be fun. I wasn't really in a pastry-making mood (I also didn't have time) so I decided to make a crustless quiche and, in addition to being very tasty, it was so easy!

You will need:
2 eggs
About half a cup of milk
100 g emmenthaler (gruyère would probably also be lovely)
A small bunch of swiss chard (or spinach)
1 leek
Half a zucchini
Half a pepper
1 carrot
Several leaves of parsley
Salt
Pepper
Allspice

First, prepare the vegetables. Wash the swiss chard and tear it into smallish pieces. Wash the zucchini and pepper and chop them into little cubes. Peel the carrot and chop it into little cubes too. Finally, wash the leek. Leeks tend to get pretty dirty so they require special washing (but they're so delicious it's worth it). My technique is to first tear off the outer leaves, then chop off the top part where the leaves are all splayed out. At this point, I give it a quick rinse and then slice through cross-wise from the top down to just above the root. Then I hold the leek under the sink and splay the leaves out, rinsing thoroughly in between them to get out any icky little dirt particles. After the leek is well washed, chop it up and then also wash and chop the parsley.

Preheat the oven to about 180º C / 355º F. In a large sauté pan, heat some olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the leek and let cook until tender (a couple minutes). Once the leek is tender, add the swiss chard, in bunches if necessary so that there's only one layer covering the pan at all times.

Once the swiss chard has diminished substantially in size, add the zucchini, carrot, and pepper. Let everything cook for 5-10 minutes, stirring from time to time. Once the vegetables are somewhat cooked, turn off the heat and let them cool while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Butter the bottom and sides of a round pan and then cover the buttered surface with a thin layer of flour. In a bowl, beat the eggs, and add the milk. Grate the emmenthaler into the mixture, and mix everything up. Add in the flour, salt, pepper, and allspice and mix again. Finally, add the vegetable mixture along with the parsley and stir everything up thoroughly.


Pour the mixture into the pan and place in the oven. Let bake for about 40 minutes and then let cool another 10 minutes or so.

Eat and enjoy!

Spaghetti with cream of zucchini

I promised to post a recipe for a pasta that was not penne and so, here it is!


The idea for this dish came about because of the large zucchini that had been sitting in my fridge for nearly a week and clearly needed to be dealt with. This is how a good number of my recipes come about (and I might guess, many other people's recipes as well): I think "hmmm, I need to get rid of this ___(insert perishable food item)___. Now, what would be a fun way to do that?"

This time, the idea of a creamy zucchini sauce really appealed to me and it was something I had never tried before, so I decided to give it a go!

While the basics of the sauce weren't that hard to figure out, I had a lot of trouble deciding which cheese I wanted to go with my zucchini (being slightly lactose-intolerant, I'm not a big fan of sauces that use actual cream, which is a shame). Ricotta seemed like an obvious choice but I just wanted something different this time. The only problem was that I didn't have any idea what that "something different" would be. I went to three grocery stores, hoping for that one cheese that would just pop out at me, and finally, at the third - the one with the best selection of cheeses - I found one that looked promising - a cheese by the name of Laura Chenel Chef Chevre. This soft chevre, I decided, was just the thing for my zucchini sauce.

An excellent idea, as it turned out. Though I'd never seen a zucchini-chevre pairing before, I'm a big fan of goat cheeses in general, and the lightness of the chevre was a good companion for the delicate zucchini. The only issue with this combination was that the sauce was a bit drier than I would have liked - an issue which can easily be fixed by adding in a bit of milk along with the cheese.

You will need:
75 g of spaghetti (I finally got a kitchen scale so I could actually measure instead of just guessing!)
One largish zucchini
One shallot
Extra-virgin olive oil, which I have just realized is what is being called "olio EVO" in all these Italian recipes, i.e. "olio ExtraVergine d'Oliva"
About 50 g chevre
Half a glass of white wine
Salt
Pepper
A few spoonfuls of milk/cream

Chop up the shallot and wash the zucchini, cutting off the ends. Using the large holes of a cheese grater, grate the zucchini into little striplets. If you don't have a cheese grater, you can chop up the zucchini into very tiny pieces, or find some other tool that will help you get the zucchini into a similar state. Whether you add the peel or not is up to you. I like to add it in, but I have to chop it up since I haven't found a way to grate an entire zucchini without also grating my fingers!


When grating, do not use the fine holes of a grater or a microplane or any such thing. You will get a bunch of very messy and difficult mush, as I discovered the first time I tried to grate zucchini.

In a large pot, bring some water to a boil. When it's boiling, salt it and add the spaghetti. Then, heat the olive oil in a sauté pan. When the oil is hot, add the chopped-up shallot. I always test the olive oil by flicking a few droplets of cold water onto it and seeing if they start jumping and sizzling. If they do, I know the oil is hot enough.

Once the shallot starts to become translucent and give off its lovely shallot aroma, add the grated zucchini. Sprinkle salt and pepper over everything, and then pour the white wine in.

Let the zucchini cook until the white wine has evaporated. While it's cooking, crumble or chop the chevre into smallish chunks. Once the wine has pretty much all evaporated, add in the cheese and the milk/cream. Stir everything up and drain the pasta, if you haven't already (you should be testing to see if it's done while preparing the sauce and drain it the minute it stops being raw in the center). Add the pasta into the sauce, stirring everything up again so the pasta is well-coated.

Serve warm and enjoy!

Roasted Red Pepper and Feta dip

This dip was mainly inspired by Htipiti, which is a Greek spicy pepper and feta dip that I first encountered at a Greek restaurant a few months ago and loved. I looked it up online but could only find two recipes, and while they both looked good, neither of them actually had you roast the peppers and for some reason, I really like roasting peppers. So I created my own Htipiti variation, and it turned out to be quite delicious!


From what I gathered from my online research, it seems Htipiti is generally quite spicy. In fact it is usually made with only hot peppers. I had a lovely bunch of sweet red peppers at hand, so that's what I used, but I added some crushed chilli pepper to give everything a bit of spice, and you can certainly add more if you like your food hot!


You will need:
4 largish red peppers
125 g feta
One red onion
A spoonful of olive oil
A couple spoonfuls of lemon juice
A small bunch of parsley
Salt
Pepper
Crushed chilli pepper

Preheat the oven to 180º C/355º F. While the oven is heating up, wash and dry the peppers and place them on a foil-lined baking sheet.

Once the oven is hot, put the peppers in and let them roast for about 30-40 minutes (depending on their size), turning them every so often so they cook evenly.

When the skin of the peppers is all black and crinkly, take them out of the oven and wrap them up fairly tightly in the aluminum foil (if the sheet they were roasting on isn't big enough, place another one on top).

While the peppers are cooling, prepare the other ingredients. Chop up the onion and wash and then tear or chop the parsley. Put the onion and parsley in a bowl and drizzle with the olive oil and lemon juice. Add the salt, pepper, and crushed chilli pepper, and stir well. Let sit for at least 15 minutes.


Once the peppers are easily handled (probably give them about 15-20 minutes), unwrap them from the foil and peel off the skins. Use a knife to scrape out all the seeds and any long white fleshy bits. Chop up the remaining pepper flesh and then place it all in a bowl and mash up thoroughly.

Add the onion-parsley mixture to the peppers and then crumble up the feta and mix it in too. Stir everything until it's well mixed and either serve immediately or place in the refrigerator to eat later.

I baked some pita to go with mine, adding a few cucumber slices for good measure!

Potato Gnocchi

I remember the first time I ate gnocchi, I was amazed that anything could possibly be so good! I was even more amazed when I realized I could make them on my own, and it's not even that difficult. If you've never made your own gnocchi, I strongly suggest you try, at least once, just for the fun of it!


You will need:
1 large potato per person
100 g flour for every potato

You want to use yellow potatoes that are nice and starchy. If you can't find good potatoes, it's not really worth it, so wait until you see some nice ones.


Place the potatoes in a large pot of water and bring the water to a boil. Let the potatoes cook for a long time until they're nice and soft (test with a fork).

When the potatoes have softened, drain them and run some cold water over them very briefly, just so that you will be able to handle them. Peel off the skins and mash them up thoroughly.

Dump the still-warm potatoes onto a well-floured board and mix the flour in with them, kneading for a few minutes. Though most recipes call for plain old white flour, I've used both whole wheat and semolina, and I liked both quite a bit. Another note here is that many people also mix in an egg with the flour and potatoes. I generally don't, and I think the gnocchi come out well either way.

After you've kneaded for a bit, roll out portions of the dough into long cylindrical strips, about the width of a finger.


Chop the strips into little squares with a knife. If you have a rounded cheese grater, press the gnocchi against it to get little patterns. You can also use one of those wooden boards with horizontal ridges on it to get striped gnocchi. As I had neither of these tools at my disposal this time, I just rounded out the gnocchi by pushing into their centers with my thumb, but here are some whole wheat gnocchi I made back in Milan when i did have a rounded cheese grater:


After you shape the gnocchi, put them on a well-floured plate or towel. At this point, you can let the gnocchi sit until it's time to eat.

When you're ready to cook the gnocchi, heat some water in a large pot. When the water is boiling, salt it, and then add the gnocchi, making sure not to crowd the pot (add them in groups of say 15-20 at a time, adding one group after you're removed the previous one). As the gnocchi rise to the top, ladle them out with a slotted spoon and place them in your serving dish.


Serve with the sauce of your choice. I like to make my gnocchi with tomato sauce (I also added sage to the sauce this time) and then grate a healthy dose of parmesan on top, as you can see here.


Eat warm and enjoy!

Provolone and Arugula Tartine

I'm not a big arugula-eater, but every so often I'm suddenly and mysteriously attracted by a sandwich or a pizza with arugula and today was one of those days when out of nowhere I decided that arugula would be the perfect thing for lunch.


It wasn't quite out of nowhere actually - what happened was that as I was wandering the stalls of the farmer's market, the rain, which had been fairly light, suddenly increased into quite a downpour (at least for California). Being without an umbrella, I decided to wait it out under the stall where I had just purchased a lovely bunch of carrots. While waiting, I started looking over all the vegetables again, and a bin of arugula caught my eye. It occurred to me that the arugula would probably go very well with the provolone I had sitting in my refrigerator, and so the idea for the tartine was born. I bought my arugula, the rain let up a bit, and I hurried home to try out my idea.

As it turned out, the arugula went wonderfully with the provolone, the spiciness of the cheese contrasting nicely with the slightly bitter arugula, with everything rounded out by the sweetest of the tomatoes. A lovely little lunch, and very very easy to make!

You will need:
Good bread. I am very picky about my bread and never ever buy anything pre-packaged, pre-sliced etc. I'll either bake my own or buy some fresh-baked by my two favorite local bakeries.
Several slices of provolone
A small bunch of arugula
4 or 5 smallish tomatoes or 2 or 3 larger ones

Slice the bread and cheese and lay the slices of cheese on the bread. Heat the bread and cheese, preferably in a toaster oven if you have one. I do not have one and attempted to heat the bread and cheese in a frying pan, which was OK except that it burnt the frying pan a bit. In retrospect, heating the bread on a foil-lined baking sheet in the oven would probably have been a better idea.


Wash and chop up the arugula and tomatoes. Place the arugula on top of the cheese, followed by the tomatoes. Eat up!

Penne with Spinach and Feta

It seems I post quite a few pasta recipes that involve penne. This is a bit odd, since I'm sure I eat far more spaghetti than penne. And besides spaghetti I actually have three favorite types of pasta asciutta - literally "dry pasta" (this is as opposed to pasta fresca, or "fresh pasta" which includes things like fettucine and also stuffed pasta - pasta ripiena - like ravioli and tortellini). Anyways, my three favorite types of pasta asciutta after spaghetti are penne, fusilli, and farfalle, so I'm not sure why only penne have made it up here so far, though I will try to correct this error in the future!


However, this particular recipe comes from a little cookbook I picked up in Italy called "Primi piatti di verdure" (vegetable entrées), and that recipe actually calls for sedanini, which are closer to penne than they are to fusilli or farfalle, so I consider myself justified in posting yet another penne recipe, though of course you can substitute other types of pasta if you prefer. Though I found the cookbook rather disappointing overall, there are a few stand-out recipes hidden in it, and this is definitely one of them. Though feta isn't normally a feature of Italian cooking, it works really well with this pasta dish, and I highly recommend you try it out!

You will need:
Penne - 75-100 g per person
About 250 g spinach
A small block of feta
A handful of hazelnuts
One medium-sized shallot
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg

Though you can also use ricotta instead of feta, I really like the saltier addition of feta, which contrasts nicely with the hazelnut and nutmeg. Please also use real hazelnuts if you can, and not filberts, which I've found don't have anywhere near the same flavor. It's true that hazelnuts are absurdly expensive around here, but in my opinion it's worth it for the taste!

Wash and dry the spinach, removing any hard stem parts, and tear the leaves up, setting them aside in a large bowl. Chop/grind the hazelnuts into little bits and chop up the shallot.

In a large pot, bring some water to a boil. When it's boiling, salt it and add the penne. Heat some olive oil (butter in the original recipe) in a fairly large sauté pan. When the oil is hot add the shallot. After a minute or so, add the ground-up hazelnut. After another minute or so, add the spinach, in parts if necessary so that there's only one layer covering the pan. The recipe also says to add some of the cooking water from the pasta, which I invariably forget to do. I think it just makes everything more sauce-like, but I forgot this time and it was still fine.

Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg to the spinach and let cook, stirring frequently. After the spinach is fairly well-cooked, chop or crumble the feta and stir it in. Turn the heat to low and let everything cook another few minutes so that the feta melts, not forgetting to stir.

Drain the penne and add them to the spinach-feta mixture, mixing everything up until the penne are well coated with sauce. Turn off the heat and spoon the penne into your serving bowl. Serve warm!