Panzanella (Tuscan bread salad)

Panzanella is a classic Tuscan summertime dish. Simple to make, it requires no cooking and is best if made at least an hour before serving, so it's a great dish to bring to potlucks and parties.


The version I made is the most basic one, but it's easy to make your own variations by adding whatever ingredients you want. Some common additions include hard-boiled egg, anchovies, capers, or lettuce.

Ingredients (for a large salad):
1/2 loaf of high-quality, somewhat stale bread (though the typical bread would be Tuscan bread, which is made without salt and in my opinion is a complete waste of flour, I used some older sourdough walnut bread I had, and it was delicious. The walnuts were a great addition to the salad as was the extra flavor of the sourdough)
1 cucumber
5 medium-sized salad tomatoes
1 red onion (the fresh kind if possible)
A handful of basil leaves
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar

Cut the bread into thick slices and place the slices in a large bowl of cold water to soften up. Depending on how stale your bread is, this could take from about 5-15 minutes. The bread should be soft but not disintegrating.


When the bread is softened, remove it from the water and squeeze out any excess water from the bread. Taking a bit at a time, crumble the bread into smallish bits (not as small as real crumbs), and place the crumbled bread in your salad bowl.

Slice the onion into half-rings. Wash and peel the cucumber (if it's the kind that needs to be peeled) and slice it fairly thin. Wash the tomatoes and dice them. Wash the basil leaves and tear them up by hand.

Add the onion, tomatoes, cucumber, and basil to the bread. Add in several spoonfuls of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stir everything up, cover, and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Just before serving, add in a spoonful or two of balsamic vinegar, and extra olive oil, salt, or pepper, if necessary.

Pizza Margherita

About one week after I left Italy and returned to the US, I started having terrible terrible yearnings for pizza. Hot, thin, crusty pizza with streeetchy mozarella and oozy tomato sauce... I couldn't stop thinking about it, or talking about it, as my friends and family will testify.


The funny thing is, I didn't go to pizzerias that much in Italy - maybe once or twice a month on average. I'd definitely gone far longer than a week there without eating pizza*, so why was I going through such serious withdrawal after only one week out of the country?

*A note: by pizza here, I mean the thin, round pizzeria-type pizza, not the fluffy square kind you get for lunch in Italy, which I ate roughly every other day.

I think my withdrawal was less of a sensory thing and more of a psychological one - the knowledge that even if I wanted a good pizza I wouldn't be able to get one was vastly depressing. Ok, there is some decent pizza this side of the Atlantic, but decent is not the same as incredibly unbelievably wonderful. Even the pizzas at my favorite local Italian restaurant which has some great traditional dishes and is owned by an Italian don't come anywhere close to the ones I could get for a mere 6 euros at any of the 3 crummy little hole-in-the-wall pizzerias that sat within 100 meters of my Milan apartment. Maybe it's the ingredients, maybe it's the equipment, maybe the technique, maybe the water for all I know. I do know that something about the pizzas here just isn't right, and every Round Table or deep-dish pizza place I saw sank me deeper and deeper into my pizza funk.

Other than shelling out several hundred dollars for a plane ticket to Italy, there was only way I was going to get out of my funk. I was going to do something I would have never dreamed of doing when I lived in Milan or in Florence where pizzerias are as common as Starbucks is here. Yes, I was going to bake a pizza.

I prepared. I went to zillions of Italian and American websites looking for help on ingredients and techniques. I learned all about ovens and the best conditions for pizza-baking, and I learned to be ready to accept that no matter what I did, my home-baked pizza would never be able reach the level of one baked in a real wood-burning oven; nevertheless, I did not weaken in my resolve to make the closest thing to a real pizza that I could.

As it turned out, the pizza was actually pretty easy to make. The trickiest part was simply getting it to slide off the peel onto the 500 degree baking stone and then scraping it back off the stone when it was done, but I eventually managed to accomplish those feats with no major bodily harm to myself or the pizza. So, for anyone feeling the need for a (nearly) authentic Italian pizza, here is what I ended up doing:

You will need:
Flour (Though white is almost the only type used, I used whole wheat and it turned out fine)
Water
Sea salt
Yeast
Tomato sauce (I used plain canned tomatoes)
High-quality pizza mozzarella (the kind that doesn't come in water)
Toppings - for the Margherita, I used nothing more than a few fresh basil leaves and the pizza was absolutely delicious. Remember that simplicity is often a good thing!

First you'll need to prepare the dough. If your yeast is the active kind as opposed to the instant variety, put it in a little bit of tepid tap water until it forms a sort of foam on the top, at which point you can add it to the flour. If it's instant yeast, just throw it in with the flour immediately. Add the salt and then the water a bit at a time, mixing until the water is well incorporated into the flour. You want pizza dough to be pretty floury - more so than for normal bread.

Once you have a good doughy mixture, turn it out onto a floury surface and knead for about 10 minutes. I always knead in the following way: fold the part closest to you up over the part farther away from you, press down quite hard a few times, give the dough a quarter turn, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Continue repeating until your arms are about ready to fall off. Then repeat some more. At some point you should notice a change in the consistency of the dough - it will seem to sort of fight back when you press it down. This is good. When you get to this point, knead for just a couple minutes more, than ball up the dough, put in it a bowl, cover the bowl, and leave in a fairly warm and undrafty place for a minimum of one hour. Do not leave it in the oven, because you will need to start preheating your oven long before the dough has finished rising.

In fact, I put the baking stone into the oven and started to preheat it pretty much as soon as I was done with the kneading. The whole thing about baking pizzas is that they need to get very hot very fast. For those of us who have not yet installed wood-burning ovens into our homes, the closest we can come is to use a preheated baking stone in an oven set to as high as you comfortably can set it (about 500º F/250º C usually). If you have a convection oven, that's even better because then the hot air will be distributed more evenly. Luckily, I was house-sitting for my parents at the time, and they have both a baking stone (a gift from me in fact) and a convection oven, so equipment-wise I was set. If you do use a baking stone, you need to put it in the oven during the preheating because the stone takes time to absorb heat. Thus, if you put the pizza on the stone and then put the stone in the oven, you're completely negating the effectiveness of the stone, and you would have been better off just using a baking sheet. If you do use a baking sheet and not a stone, it should not be preheated - it just goes in with the pizza on it, and you have to hope for the best.

After your hour is up and the dough has risen, you get to do the best part - the pizza-shaping! I was originally planning to just roll out my pizza into a nice circle, but while I was shaping it, I tried tossing it in the air a few times just for fun and I realized that each time I did, the dough came back down much springier and more pliable. I later read that it is in fact a good idea to keep the dough in the air as much as possible while you're shaping it, so even if your pizza-spinning skills are as terrible as mine, at least try giving the dough a few (gentle) tosses. Just don't drop it!

During the shaping, make sure you put your pizza onto a peel or some other thing that will make it easy to slide into the oven. If you're not using a baking stone, put the pizza directly onto the baking sheet you're planning to use. Finally, and this is the only way to get anything close to an authentic Italian pizza, your final dough disk must be thin thin thin! As thin as you can possibly get it without tearing. The pizza should be large, but it should not be thick. Those are lunch-style pizzas. They don't count.

Once the dough is in a nice big circle, spread your tomato sauce all over so that it covers everything but the very edge and thinly enough that you can still kind of see the dough through it. If you can't see the dough, it's probably spread too thickly. Then either grate or chop the mozzarella into little pieces and distribute them evenly onto the pizza. Finally, wash and dry the basil leaves, and arrange them in a pretty pattern on top.

Next, with oven mitts, and being very very careful, open the oven and use a large metal spatula to sliiiiide the pizza onto the stone (or just insert the baking sheet if you went with that method), shut the oven door, and let bake for about 7-8 minutes. My pizza took 7 minutes to bake, but I was using the convection feature and the baking stone, so if you don't use those things, it may take a little more time. Just make sure the pizza doesn't burn and simultaneously make sure not to open the oven door unless absolutely necessary (quite a trick if your oven doesn't have a glass door).

When the pizza is done and safely transferred to your plate, pour yourself a glass of good Italian wine, grab a fork and knife, and eat as soon as you possibly can without burning yourself!

Pesto alla Genovese

During my time in Italy I actually ate surprisingly little pesto. Though most supermarkets carried several decent varieties, I almost always preferred to cook with produce from the open markets (I would go to the Papiniano market which is one of the absolute best markets in Milan and makes my local California farmer's market look like a paltry roadside fruit stand - and an overpriced one at that).


I do love pesto however; I mean, anything that contains this much basil pretty much has to be good. But making it fresh, grinding up the basil just minutes before you eat it, increases its goodness by at least a factor of six. If you have never made your own pesto, you have to try it - your tastebuds will thank you for weeks!

The process is simple - basically grind, grind, grind (the word pesto comes from the verb pestare which literally means 'to grind'), but some of the recipes I read were very emphatic that you had to grind things in a certain order. The order I ended up going with seemed to work wonderfully so I'm posting that method below, and if you want to try other ways, I'm pretty sure they will be equally delicious (again, lots and lots of basil - you really can't go wrong).

So, you will need:
A large bunch of nice fresh basil.
A couple cloves of garlic
Good extra-virgin olive oil
Freshly grated parmesan (and when I say freshly grated, I mean really freshly grated - stale parmesan is one of my culinary pet peeves, and in this dish especially you want the full flavor)
Freshly grated pecorino (see above)
Pine nuts
Ground-up walnuts
Sea salt

First you'll need to toast your pine nuts, either in the oven (or better yet, a toaster oven) or in a dry pan on the stove. Watch your pine nuts very carefully to be sure they don't burn! Mine burned a bit here, but luckily not enough to ruin the taste, although I had to throw a few of the really bad ones out. So be careful with your pine nuts! Remove them from the heat as soon as you think they even might be done! Then begins the grinding.

While I don't currently own a mortar and pestle (it's on my list), I used a metal bowl and a wood spoon for the grinding, and it worked just fine. Probably a little more work than if I had the marble, but for good pesto, I don't mind a little extra work at all!


Anyways, begin with the garlic. Not every recipe does this, but I think it worked wonderfully well here so I highly recommend it. Grind till the cloves are good and broken-up and then add the (well-washed and dried) basil leaves. Grind grind grind your basil leaves and savor the incredible aromas that come floating up while you're grinding. One of the best parts of making your own pesto is that it's almost as delicious to make it as it is to eat it!

About halfway through the grinding, add in a bit of olive oil and then continue grind, grind, grinding. When you're almost done, add in the parmesan, the pecorino, the walnuts, the pine nuts, the salt, and as much olive oil as you deem appropriate. While I like the olive oil, I would advise not using too much, as the basil provides a good bit of juice on its own and you want all the flavors to come through.

And that's it! Serve over pasta (or even just bread if you want!) and enjoy very verrrrry much!