Bagna càuda recipe

In the earliest part of my childhood I spent a lot of time with my Nonna Titta. I've spoken about her in many occasions on this blog. She was a pillar of my upbringing, and even though I was 9 when she passed away, she left me many memories and an impressive mark on my nature and individuality. I see a lot of her in myself today.

In particular, the memories I associate the most with Nonna are sensory. The taste of her gummy, black Allenbury candies stashed in a tin box at the bottom of her beauty case, the glint in her emerald green eyes while we played pretending to be ladies having tea, and mostly, the smells coming from the kitchen when she'd cook. Her pièce de résistance was bagna càuda, characteristic of her Piedmontese origins.

This appetizer/soup, whose name in dialect means "hot bath," is enjoyed by dipping raw, boiled or roasted vegetables in a manner similar to fondue in a heated blend of garlic, anchovy and olive oil. It is traditionally an autumn/winter recipe and must be eaten hot, as the name suggests.

Bagna Càuda can be served in individual dipping bowls, or placed in a larger terracotta pan, placed on a burner at the center of the table, for communal sharing. Pictured above is the clay pot in which Nonna cooked and served hers.

Whenever my mother or I make Bagna Càuda, this is what we we still use.

Here's how we continue Nonna's tradition:
500 g (2 1/2 cups) extra virgin olive oil
150 g (3/4 cup) salted anchovies
50 g (1/4 cup) butter
6 cloves of garlic, peeled

Assorted vegetables for dipping:
2 cardoons (if these are not available where you live, substitute with 3–4 ribs of white celery, cut in sticks)
2 yellow bell peppers, cut in sticks
1 cup cauliflower florets
2 topinambur (aka Jerusalem artichoke, sunroot, sunchoke, or earth apple), peeled and cut in chunks
5 radishes, peeled
2 carrots, cut in sticks
2 artichokes, cored, outer leaves removed and quartered lengthwise
3 spring onions

Scrape the anchovies with a paring knife, rid them of the bones and open them flat. Brush away excess salt with a kitchen towel, and do not rinse with water.

Thinly slice the garlic and trim away green parts, if any.

In an enameled terracotta pan (if you don't have one, a common nonstick saucepan will do), melt the butter over extremely mild heat, add the garlic and let it tan without browning.

Add the olive oil and the anchovies, gently simmering, stirring and breaking up the fillets with the back of a wooden spoon. Do this for 10 minutes, or until the sauce is creamy and evenly blended.

Serve on a fondue burner or on a cooling rack placed over tea light candles to keep the delicious bagna as càuda as possible while you gobble away, washing down with rivers of Barbera or Dolcetto.

Note: For those fearsome of such copious amounts of garlic, there's a trick: you halve the quantity of oil and compensate with a cup of whole milk, to be poured in at the same time. Identical garlic quantity, and same exact procedure: the milk tames the punch of the garlic.

It works, trust Nonna.

Tasting Tajarin

It felt like being in my Nonna's birthplace, the room smelled like wine, cheese and truffles. My Piedmontese roots came alive last night when I was invited at a lovely tasting event. Thanks to Beppe e i Suoi Formaggi for hosting, and Katie Parla for pulling the evening together, I had the chance to taste tajarin (a traditional Piedmont egg and flour long-strand pasta) in 7 ways, down divine French white wines, and even taste Barolo and Barbaresco, in the company of friends.

Mauro Musso has a terrific story, one that starts with him pulling off his supermarket employee uniform, and following the whim to create Casa dei Tajarin, an artisan pasta workshop he runs out of the ground floor of his parents' home in Alba.

Images © Katie Parla

His tajarin are made with rare flours from ancient autoctonous grains and cereals, only the best in biodynamic and GMO-free staples sourced from Mulino Marino, Italy's premier heritage grain supplier, and organic eggs. Mauro spoke briefly before the carb-fest that followed, and passionately told us how his main focus was to provide a healthy, all-natural version of the traditional pasta of Piedmont's Langhe region, with digestibility taking first place, even before flavor. But I can assure you that the taste of his tajarin is exceptional. The dressings were very mild and subtly brought out the different flavors of the flours used in each different tajarin kind we tasted.

Here's the menu:

Tajarin made with einkorn flour, dressed with Taggiasca olive oil and cracked black pepper.
No wine was paired with this dish in order to avoid interference with the flavor of the "Enkir" pasta.

Soft wheat tajarin called 'Gentil Bianco' dressed with Beppe's Alpine raw milk butter, and white Alba truffles. We drank Champagne Brut Chauvet Carte Blanche with this one.

Soft wheat tajarin called 'Rosso delle Langhe,' dressed in a mild stockfish sauce. The 2009 southern Burgundy Chardonnay Domaine des Fossiles Brinonnais was a pleasant first for me.

White rye eggless rolled pasta salad, with toasted nuts, and three varieties of cubed cheese (goat's–, sheep's– and cow's milk). We paired these to a 2007 German Weingut Tesch "Unplugged" Riesling.

More Einkorn flour tajarin tossed with mixed vegetables and thyme. The wine was a 2004 Friulano "Galea" by I Clivi di Corno di Rosazzo.

Next up was "Sapori Antichi" tajarin, a blend of Einkorn, spelt, kamut, and rye dressed in a rabbit ragù. I gobbled it up so fast, I forgot to take a picture. With the meat sauce, we switched to a 2004 Barbaresco "Montestefano" of Cantina Baldo Rivella.

The triple "Khorasan" flour tajarin with a 3-meat ragù was the last sample, and by this time I was tipsy, so I only had a sip of Barolo Cantina Giulio Viglione (2004).

The platter of mixed cheeses that followed, had a smear of organic fig jam, pomegranate kernels and walnut meats. Oh, and a slice of fresh pear. The Robiola, Torretta di Capra and the Toma were my favorites.


At midnight my babysitter started freaking out, so I sadly had to skip dessert, which was the typical Piedmontese Panna Cotta. I'm sorry I couldn't stay and chat with the other participants sitting in the other rooms, and mostly that I couldn't say good-bye to Mauro, the tajarin master.

It was great to learn about his small pasta operation, and it was a treat to share the meal and wine with such a wonderful group of friends, all with one thing in common: love for good food.

Flash cut to today at noon. I'm meeting a fellow blogger/foodie friend visiting from out of town at Bonci's Pizzarium, and guess who was delivering three crates of assorted tajarin to be sold at the famed pizza shrine?

Needles to say I managed to say good-bye this time.

Carne Cruda all'Albese recipe

Image © cookalmostanything

When I utter the word veal, I see my US and UK friends' and clients' faces twitch just a bit. Even the hardened carnivores find it sometimes hard to stomach.

Foreigners associate veal with the horrid, inhumane treatment and cruelty perpetrated on young male calves. While in Italy, veal is a very common staple meat product, almost more so than beef.

This typical fall/winter Piemontese recipe, which comes specifically from Alba – land of prized red wine and exquisite white truffles – is designed to be made with veal. If you absolutely cannot stand the idea of veal, you can make this very easy and simple tartare with beef.

400 g (14 oz) veal breast or beef tenderloin (have the butcher carve the meat wafer thin)
1 garlic clove, peeled
The juice of 1 lemon
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and black pepper
White truffle (optional), shaved

Finely chop the meat with a very sharp knife. Do this shortly before serving the meat.

Season with with salt and cracked black pepper.

Dress with a thread of olive oil, and some freshly squeezed lemon juice

Using the tines of a fork, pierce the clove of garlic and use that to toss the seasoned meat.

If you're lucky enough to have some white truffle standing by, shave some on top.

Serve quickly before the lemon marinades and "cooks" the meat.

Good with warm toasted bread, a crisp arugula salad, and a waterfall of fruit-forward red wine.

Agnolotti recipe

Agnolotti are a type of square ravioli typical of the Piedmont region, made with thinly flattened pasta dough, folded over and stuffed with a ground meat and vegetable filling. Typically, agnolotti are made with leftover cooked meat. This is another example of how the ages-old habit of recycling food in Italy commonly results in an elegant and very tasty dish.

My mother and I made a batch for Sunday lunch today. Here is the step by step recipe, which yielded 70 agnolotti pockets. We cooked half and froze the rest in sealed freezer bags.

For the pasta dough
500 g (2 1/2 cups) flour, possibly "00" + more for dusting
6 eggs
3 yolks

For the filling
400 g (2 cups) beef pot roast leftovers
150 g (3/4 cup) roast turkey, chicken or other cooked white meat dish
50 g (1/4 cup) mortadella, roasted sausage or any other pork cold cut (not prosciutto)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
A bunch of fresh spinach (you can use other greens if you like)
1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano
3 whole eggs
A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Make the dough from the flour and the eggs (see instructions if need be), put it in a bowl, cover it with a moist kitchen towel, and let it sit.

Blanch the greens for 3 minutes, drain, squeezing well to extract moisture, and mince them finely. Then sauté in the butter until done and set aside.

Remove bones, sausage casings and any sinewy parts, and grind the meats quite finely (you can blend them, but be careful not to make a paste!).

Combine ground meats, sautéed greens and all other ingredients for the filling in a bowl, and mix thoroughly with your hands to obtain a homogeneous mixture, seasoning to taste with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

Roll out the pasta dough dime-thin. I use an Imperia pasta machine, which gives me the necessary long and paper-thin sheets ready to be stuffed and cut into perfect agnolotti. But you're free to roll out the dough by hand, obviously!

Cut the rolled dough into long strips, about 20-inch long and 3 inches high, and cover to keep moist.

On your dusted work surface, dot a sheet with blebs of filling about the size of a small walnut, putting the dots in a row, about an inch apart. Make sure the row is in the bottom half of the pasta sheet.

Fold over the top part of the sheet, and lay it over the filling. Crimp the sheet down well around the filling to make it stick, and cut the agnolotti free with a serrated pastry wheel.

Boil the agnolotti in broth or salted water, fishing them out with a skimmer into a serving bowl, as soon as they rise to the bubbling surface.

Typically, Piedmontese agnolotti are dressed in beef broth with a little melted butter, or in a fresh sage and browned butter sauce. A complex condiment would play down the flavors contained in the agnolotti pockets.

I usually season mine with a simple tomato sauce, and dust with lots of freshly grated Parmigiano. As an alternative, you can dress your agnolotti with drippings from Braciole or Involtini.

Wine? This plate begs for a full-bodied, unoaked Piedmontese Barbera d'Asti!

Buon appetito.

Grissini - Breadsticks recipe

Breadsticks are one of the most celebrated and widespread products of Torino's gastronomy and one of the most renowned items of Italian cuisine abroad.

Tradition has the birth of grissini located around 1668, year in which court baker Antonio Brunero invented the long, thin crisp strands of bread as a novelty food for future king Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoy, who’s health was very delicate and whose frail stomach did not even tolerate soft breadcrumb.

The success of breadsticks was particularly rapid, due to the food’s high digestibiltity compared to common bread, and for the nearly two week conservation without any deterioration.

Among the greatest fans of grissini was Napoleon Bonaparte, who at the beginning of the 19th century, founded a stagecoach service between Torino and Paris mostly dedicated to delivering him what he called les petits batons de Turin, his favorite little sticks from Turin.


Here's how to make your own grissini from scratch:

2.5 kg (5 lbs) unbleached all-purpose flour
1.5 lt (6 cups) of water at 50-53°F temperature (41-43°F during hotter months)
30 g (1 oz) yeast (halve quantity during hotter months)
150 g (5 oz) rendered lard (the one that looks like a white paste)
175 g (6 oz) baker’s barley malt (syrup or crystals)
3 tablespoon kosher salt

Knead the flour with 4 cups of water, adding salt, malt and lard to the dough. Dissolve the yeast in remaining water and incorporate gradually, in small amounts at a time.

Work the dough a little more and roll into 7" long ropes, about 1 1/2" thick. Grease the ropes with olive oil, cover with plastic wrap and grant them a 2-hour nap.

When ready to continue, cut strands breadthwise into 1" strips and pull them, stretching the strands into long and slender breadsticks, about 22-25 inches long.

Toast them in a hot oven (around 270°C/520°F) until crisp and light brown.

You can reduce the amount of lard and increase the quantity of olive oil. But grissini are what they are mainly because of lard. Just so you know...

Trivia: In the Cathedral of Chieri, a dozen kilometers southeast of Torino, in a 15th century fresco of the baptistry, there is a character depicted eating what appears to be a breadstick.

Images © Food Network, The Nibble, Just Baking.