If you grew up Italian, you probably have a relative that forages for wild plants and mushrooms.  I was lucky enough to tag along with my father, uncles and nonno when I was a kid to learn from them and to this day, heading into the woods has remained one of my favorite pastimes.  So yesterday I headed out to a favorite spot of mine in search for some wild edible plants.

My targets were 2: asparagus and morel mushrooms.  I know where to find the first but the second has managed to eluded me once again (stupid Morels!)

The Asparagus are ready! As you can tell from the photo, these asparagus at one time were farmed. They are much different than the ones we found in Calabria.

read how we came across this wonderful field of asparagus last year.

When we got the asparagus home, we cooked them up and wrapped them in prosciutto!  (of course we did… it makes them more Italian.)

The morels are still a mystery… but I will find them someday.  Here are a few other wild things I came across.

Wild Onions (I think they are officially wild garlic… but they look and smell a lot more like onions to me)

Wild Onions were everywhere!

Wild Mustard Greens … little late when they’ve flowered.

Wild Carrot

Wild Strawberries will be ready soon!

Orpine – The leaves are great raw or in salads.

It’s true: Italians like foraging for wild things.

]]> http://italyville.com/2010/05/stuff-italians-like-wild-edibles/feed/ 13 http://italyville.com/2009/11/stuff-italians-like-2/ http://italyville.com/2009/11/stuff-italians-like-2/#comments Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:25:29 +0000 Joe http://italyville.com/?p=990 Italians (especially Italians living abroad) like to buy old Italian cars.  My uncle and my brother-in-law both have Fiat Spiders… my dad has 2 (luckily he’s a mechanic.)

Italians (especially Italians living abroad) like to buy old Italian cars.  My uncle and my brother-in-law both have Fiat Spiders… my dad has 2 (luckily he’s a mechanic.)

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The question is, what is Italian food?  I continuously see commercials for large chain restaurants that promote their pizza or pasta or panini or whatever “they think” Italian food is and how they have conquered it… finally!! The ones that irk me the most recently are from Pizza Hut.   One commercial shows how they go to Italy and serve unsuspecting Italians Lasagna and how they all rant and rave about how good it is and how similar it is to their mother’s recipe.  Really? Then the chef comes out and announces to everyone that he didn’t really cook the lasagna but it was actually from Pizza Hut and they give the delivery guys a standing ovation.  {If you know Italians at all, you know that NOTHING is as good as their mother’s food (unless it’s their grandmother’s.)}

A recent commercial shows a family that is blindfolded as they drive off to dinner but are actually brought back to their own house… walk up the same 10 steps to their front door but after tasting the pasta they think they’re at an Italian restaurant (if that’s true, they could be the dumbest family in America.)  Pizza Hut’s claim is “Restaurant Quality Pasta”… which goes to show that they don’t even consider themselves a restaurant (neither do I by the way.) In my opinion, restaurants should be shooting for “Home Quality Pasta.”

Let’s look at this from a marketing standpoint for a second…  In my opinion, Pizza Hut’s campaign revolves around the company’s ability to fool people.  So you go to Italy and fool Italians into eating your lasagna and go to New York to fool people into eating your pasta… you even go to someones house and fool them into thinking they’re somewhere else!  Why would you do that?  The obvious answer is to get people to try something that they would otherwise not try then create conclusions for your real target consumer.  I don’t believe Italians are a target consumer for Pizza Hut… but if their Pasta and Pizza is good enough for Italians then their target consumer will feel better about how authentic it is and buy it.  The contradictions are endless though.. authentically fooling people?  So this leads me to one of two conclusions:

1. Either they are incredibly naive (drinking from the company Kool-Aid) and think their Tuscani Pasta (which is what it’s called) is truly authentic Italian food or…
2. They have no intention of being authentic because that’s not what their target consumer wants.  If their target consumer wanted authentic Italian pasta then they wouldn’t be offering “Creamy Chicken Alfredo” or the ever popular and authentic Italian dish, “Premium Bacon Mac N’ Cheese” neither of which would be found a mile from an authentic Italian restaurant.

So why does this irk me?  To me as an Italian American, it’s insulting.  Food is a big part of our culture and not only do we as Italians and Italian Americans know this but the rest of the world knows it as well.  So if your plan is to capitalize on this fact (and many companies have) then try harder! otherwise don’t brand it as Italian.  There’s nothing wrong with creating a Pizza Hut line of pastas… great, maybe it even tastes good but once you call it “Tuscani Pasta” (which isn’t an Italian word that I know of but is meant to be in my opinion)  and then create a campaign on how Italians in Italy love it and people who eat it think they’re in an Italian restaurant, then it’s a different story.  If Pizza Hut really thinks they’re Tuscani line is authentic then maybe we should have a taste test… How about any of their Tuscani Pasta vs. my mother’s pasta.  We can get a whole restaurant full of Italians and see what they think.  I’ll even substitute my mother’s pasta for any Italian mother’s in the country.  Surely their “Restaurant Quality Pasta” is superior to Mom’s Pasta.  Or maybe they can open a Pizza Hut in Italy (surprisingly there are currently no Pizza Huts in Italy) and serve their pasta and Lasagna!  Their taste test obviously proved that Italians love it! What do you think Pizza Hut?  email me and we can make it happen.

So back to the question: What is Italian Food? Italian food to me is more than just ingredients… it’s an experience, it’s creativity, it’s simple and not overdone, it’s making the best out of what you have locally.  It’s creativity that created pizza when southern Italians had little and wanted to make something delicious with the little they had.  It’s not stuffed crust or extra cheese.

5 clues that your food is not authentic Italian

1. Your tractor trailer pulls up once a week and delivers pizza dough and other food made somewhere else that only needs to be cooked or warmed up at your restaurant.
2. Your menu is a never ending list of over-doing-it.  Super sized, stuffed crust, meat lovers supreme, butt buster specials that come in portions that could feed a large family… twice.
3. You need to try way too hard to get approval from Italians because they would never eat in your restaurant and/or have never heard of the dishes you’re claiming are Italian.
4. You use ingredients that can’t be pronounced in an effort to enhance taste and preserve “shelf-life”
5. Your recipes were developed in a laboratory by chefs with chemistry degrees.

So what is authentic Italian food to you?

This past Saturday, we made our tomato sauce for the year. We used to be able to make all our tomato sauce from tomatoes we grew in our own garden but times are changing and the garden isn’t as big as it used to be. Not a Problem! Do you think we would buy it at the grocery store? NEVER! It’s still doable. This years tomato crop here in New England took a serious hit from all the rain and finding Roma/Plum tomatoes has been difficult and expensive. The local farm we usually buy them from didn’t have any but after a little research, I found a great website called pickyourown.org that lists farms by state where you can…. you guessed it, pick your own fruits and vegetables. After about 10 phone calls with no success and venturing further and further from home, I came across a farm in Avon, CT that had Plum tomatoes and we were off to pick em! We picked 5 bushels and got together to make sauce. Interested in giving it a try??

What You’ll Need:
-Tomatoes: Cost – $15-20 per bushel ($10 last year!) if you pick your own, more if you get them pre-picked. I’m sure the cost varies from farm to farm and certainly from year to year, so shop around if you can.
-Tomato Sauce Machine
-Large pots, buckets, containers
-Large wooden spoon
-Sharp knives
-Jars, jar tops
-Basil (optional)
-Stove or propane burner

We like to pick our own tomatoes, so that we can select the ripest and best ones. Why leave it up to someone else? Our family has always used Plum or Roma tomatoes to make our tomato sauce because they have less water content. Less water = thicker sauce. As I mentioned, this year we picked 5 bushels (give or take) of tomatoes and they yielded about 80 quart size jars of tomato sauce.

Here’s a brief step by step of how to make your own homemade tomato sauce.

1- Select the ripest tomatoes: We recommend Plum/Roma tomatoes. They can usually be found at a local farm in your area. In our experience one bushel of plum tomatoes will make 15-ish quart size jars of tomato sauce.

2- If your tomatoes need to ripen a little, lay them out for a few days. We usually lay them flat on a tarp or a blanket in the garage or shed.
3- Call the family over, friends… whoever likes to show up when you’re making pasta on Sundays. Use the, “no work, no eat” phrase that my dad likes to use whenever one of these occasions presents itself.

4- Wash the tomatoes in a large container to get rid of any dirt, etc. Basically fill the container with water and dump in your tomatoes for a quick bath.
5- Once you’ve washed the tomatoes, cut the top piece off… not too much, just the little round dot on the top of the tomato (not sure what it’s called in English but codicino in Calabrese) and slice the tomato down the center the long way. You don’t need to cut them in half, just slice them so that they open up. Some people like to squeeze some juice out of the tomatoes after they slice them but we don’t do that anymore. It all depends on the type of tomatoes you’re using. The round tomatoes like Beefsteak, Jet Stars, etc. have higher water content, so it might be a good idea to give them a squeeze if that’s the variety you’re using.

6- Place your washed, sliced tomatoes in a large pot (see below) and cook them for approx 20-30 minutes at high heat, stirring occasionally. You’ll know they’re ready when they start getting soupy and you can pinch the skin off the tomatoes (don’t burn yourself trying). We find that it’s easier and quicker to cook the tomatoes on a propane burner. It speeds up cooking time, you can use larger pots and you can do it outside or in the garage/shed, which makes cleaning up easier.

7- Now that you’ve cooked the tomatoes, you’re ready to put them through your sauce maker. You can buy a sauce maker online or at a local kitchenware store. There are manual and automatic ones depending on your preference and price point. They can run from $40 for a manual one to $200+ for an electric one. We use a manual one…. My dad says the sauce tastes better when you work harder. Which is code for, “I’m not paying for an electric one, so shut up and turn the handle.”
8- Scoop the stewed tomatoes into the machine and crank the handle. We usually scoop some of the water out so that the sauce is thicker. The sauce will come out one end and the skins out the other. Make sure you have containers to collect both. Once you have processed the tomatoes, put the skins through for a second time. The sauce from the second round is thicker because there’s less water. We usually put the skins through a third time as well but you don’t have to.

9- Now that you have your sauce you need to fill your jars. The sauce machine usually comes with a funnel that fits standard jars to make things easier, otherwise you should buy a funnel… or you’ll make a mess. We grow a lot of basil, so we like to place a few leaves in each jar for taste but it’s not necessary. Scoop your sauce with a cup or mug and fill your jars a few inches from the top. Don’t fill the jars too high, we’ve found that when we fill the jars too high some of them go bad (not sure why.)

10- Once you’ve filled your jars, cap them with jar tops (you can finds jars and tops at any hardware store.)

11- When you’ve finished jarring, you’ll need to boil your jars of sauce to seal them. Place the jars in a large pot and fill the pot with water so that all the jars are submerged. Bring the water to a boil and boil the jars for about 20-30 minutes. Again, we like to use the propane burner (seen below) because it’s faster and we can use a larger pot. The pot below holds about 20 jars.

12- After boiling the jars, remove them and cover them with a blanket. We lay one blanket down and cover the jars with another blanket so that the jars don’t cool too quickly and crack. You can leave them overnight.

This sauce has no preservatives or additives. You can’t find this quality of tomato sauce in a grocery store. You’ll still have to cook it, add spices, meat, etc. but you’ll have fresh, homemade tomato sauce made from local ripe tomatoes for the entire year. Open a jar, make it the way you like it and Buon appetito!!

I was at a local grocery store the other day that in my my opinion has been modeled after a Whole Foods…. basically it has lots of organic foods, high end products, etc. and I came across a display for “Benedetto Cavalieri” pasta (from Lecce.) It was in a real fancy package (that included a ribbon.) It looked good and since I am always one to try new pasta, I bought a pound of the Casarecci…. even though it was $7.99! I cooked it and it was good… not sure if was $7.99 good but I chalked it up to experience. De Cecco is still better:) I guess I got a deal since I just saw some online for $8.60.

Here are a few reasons I think they can justify the high price of this pasta:

1. They’ve been around since 1918…. if it’s an old company they can charge more.
2. Apparently they use the “Delicate Method” which is VERY expensive. It costs more to be delicate.
3. The Blue ribbon on the bag.
4. I hope you’re not taking me seriously.;)

Well my last post certainly triggered some rants and stirred the pot a little…. I like that. It also got me thinking about a topic that I have always wanted to post about but it’s a monster of a debate, so I have stayed away …. until now. Maria from Philly mentioned it in her comment. The topic is “Gravy.” che cosa? exactly….. GRAVY.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, “Gravy” is a term that some Italian-Americans use to refer to their pasta sauce.

I’ll start with a sprinkle of what I think and add in a pinch of what I know.

What I think: The short answer is I think gravy is for turkeys… I’m not making fun, I just think it’s what you should have with turkey.. not pasta.

What I know: “Gravy” is not an Italian term (then again, neither is “sauce”.) It is however a legitimate Italian-American term in certain regions, so it has its place in Italian-American culture. If you are an Italian-American from New York or New Jersey… maybe even outside of that area you may refer to your pasta sauce as “Gravy”. I grew up in New England and as far as I know, Italian American’s in this area do not use the term.

I think the word “Gravy” may originate from a sauce that is made with meat. It’s common practice to make a tomato sauce starting with meat and then pull the meat out as a separate dish. The juice from the meat remains though…. so like making gravy, you’re using the juices from meat.

So the closest definition of “Gravy” in Italian would be Ragu, which is a meat based sauce.(not the porcheria you see in a jar at the supermarket)

What is Italian? Sugo, ragu, salsa di pomodoro
Look up sugo in an Italian/English dictionary and you’ll find both sauce and gravy (sugo di carne.) It is a lively debate. If you grew up using the term, you swear by it and if you didn’t it’s a crazy concept. Either way… buon appetito!

I’ll leave you with this little clip from the Sopranos… I just wanted to use the first part of it but couldn’t find a shorter version, so sorry for the profanity…. and play nice!

PS – Notice how the Italians think Paulie is cRaZy!

Thanks to rickyracoon2007 for the clip