Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It (18 page)
Read Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It Online
Authors: Teresa Giudice,Heather Maclean
Tags: #food.cookbooks
2.
Sprinkle a wooden baker’s paddle with cornmeal. Following the directions on page 138, shape the dough into a 10-inch round. Transfer to the paddle.
3.
Spread the marinara sauce over the dough, leaving a ¾-inch border. The rest is like a school art project: dot the anchovies and capers all over the pizza, making a pretty design if you’d like. Sprinkle with the cheese, then the oregano. Drizzle with the oil.
4.
Slide the pizza onto the baking stone. Bake until the crust is golden brown and slightly blistered, 8 to 10 minutes. Use the paddle to remove the pizza from the oven. Let stand 3 minutes, then cut and serve hot.
MAKES ONE
10-INCH PIZZA
This is the Italian version of a Hawaiian pizza, only with beautiful prosciutto instead of just ham, and without warm, soggy pineapple.
Cornmeal, for the paddle
Bread flour, for shaping the dough
1 ball Old World Pizza Dough (
page 141
)
1/3 cup Milania’s Marinara Sauce (
page 119
)
2 ounces thinly sliced prosciutto, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 ounces sliced fresh mozzarella, cut into 1-inch strips
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
1.
At least 30 minutes before baking, place a baking stone on the lowest rack of the oven, and preheat the oven to 475°F.
2.
Sprinkle a wooden baker’s paddle with cornmeal. Following the directions on page 138, shape the dough into a 10-inch round. Transfer to the paddle.
3.
Spread the marinara sauce over the dough, leaving a ¾-inch border. Top with the prosciutto, then the cheese. Drizzle with the oil.
4.
Slide the pizza onto the baking stone. Bake until the crust is golden brown and slightly blistered, 8 to 10 minutes. Use the paddle to remove the pizza from the oven. Let stand 3 minutes, then cut and serve hot.
MAKES ONE
10-INCH PIZZA
Of course, sausage isn’t the leanest meat, but if you’re going to have it on a pizza (as a treat, not an everyday thing), at least do it up right, and make it healthier with the olive oil. You can also use turkey sausage, or do like Joe does, and mix the turkey sausage with the real stuff.
Cornmeal, for the paddle
Bread flour, for shaping the dough
1 ball Old World Pizza Dough (
page 141
)
2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
2 links (4 ounces) sweet or hot Italian sausage, casings removed
1 medium onion, cut into 1/8-inch half-moons
½ red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into 1/8-inch half-moons
1.
At least 30 minutes before baking, place a baking stone on the lowest rack of the oven, and preheat the oven to 475°F.
2.
Sprinkle a wooden baker’s paddle with cornmeal. Following the directions on page 138, shape the dough into a 10-inch round. Transfer to the paddle.
3.
Heat the oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and cook, breaking up the meat with the side of a spoon, until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the sausage to a bowl, leaving the fat in the pan. Add the onion and bell pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until limp, about 3 minutes. Using the slotted spoon, transfer to the bowl. Let cool.
4.
Scatter the sausage and vegetables over the dough, leaving a ¾-inch border. Slide the pizza onto the baking stone. Bake until the crust is golden brown and slightly blistered, 8 to 10 minutes. Use the paddle to remove the pizza from the oven. Let stand 3 minutes, then cut and serve hot.
I already taught you how to make amazing homemade sauces and perfect pizza from scratch. Now that you’re all the way to Chapter 9, I think it’s time to graduate. You are no longer a little kitchen bitch. You are ready for the big time: canning your own tomatoes. Conquer this and you have my full permission to call yourself a hot Italian mamma!
At the end of every August, Italians around the world prepare for their annual tomato canning ritual. And when I say “prepare,” I mean, like, make a hundred freakin’ jars of the stuff! Enough to last your family a full year.
There’s a million ways to do it, but this is my way, and, of course, it’s the best. In my family, we call it a celebration, rather than a chore, because sweating over a hot stove for hours making a year’s worth of sauce is no walk in the park; but if you pour yourself a nice glass of wine, invite your friends over, and put on some music, you can enjoy this delicious day!
Tomatoes. Period.
Remember, both my parents and my in-laws, as well as Joe, actually, were all born in Italy. And in Italy, we have tons of legends and stories and special ways of doing things. One of those “special ways” actually has to do with tomato canning and having your period.
In Italy, it’s widely believed that if a woman is menstruating, she can’t be around the fresh tomatoes or they will all spoil. I know so many people in the old country who have stories about this, and my dad swears it’s true. I think it’s funny, but since I was pregnant, there obviously wasn’t a problem this year. My dad, however, had to take a poll. He actually asked our babysitter if it was her time of month!
Madonna mia
!
I’m not saying I believe it, but your Italian grandmother was right about the peels of potatoes and the crust of bread being the most nutritious parts . . .
The Tomato Canning Celebration
My ma always comes over, and me and the girls have our little tomato-sauce party. This year was our biggest production ever because my entire family was there, including my in-laws, to help out because I was two weeks away from having my baby Audriana. And it was the first day Bravo decided to film us for Season Two of
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
, so my kitchen was full of canning equipment and camera guys, extra lights, and total craziness.
Thank goodness for my girls! No matter what chaos is going on around us, they just make me smile. Gia tied a bandanna around her head and she looked just like a little Italian country girl. She was so serious with the tomatoes. My mother-in-law told her she’d be a very good wife someday, and asked what kind of guy she wanted to marry. She’s so cute, she said, “I’m too young to worry about who I’m going to marry!” Then she changed her mind and said an Italian man like her daddy. (More people quote Gia to me from Season One than anyone else. The favorite seems to be from when I put lip gloss on Gia for her dance recital, and she told everyone: “My mom did it!”)
It was a really great day—it always is—full of family and laughter and tomato juice everywhere. You should definitely get your friends or family together and try it just once. Just promise me that you’ll all tie bandannas around your heads and quote Gia no fewer than thirty times.
The Tools of the Trade
If you don’t have them on hand, you’re going to need a few items, but they aren’t expensive, you can use them year after year, and the money you’ll save (and the hearts you’ll win) making your own sauce will be well worth it!
Boiling Water Canner
A boiling water canner is a huge, deep pot with a tight lid and a rack that sits on the bottom inside (to keep the jars from touching the bottom of the pot and touching each other). You can find them at grocery stores or regular retailers, and, of course, on the Internet. They cost anywhere from thirty to ninety dollars, depending on how fancy you want the extras: some have racks that lift in and out of the water, some have silicone handles that don’t get hot, some have see-through glass lids. Get what you like.
If you don’t want to buy a boiling water canner, you can just use a really deep saucepan (it has to be deep enough to cover your jars with one to two inches of water and still have room for all the boiling) and place a circular cake rack on the bottom.
A twenty-one-quart pot—the average size for canning—will hold seven quart jars.
The Jars
Get good thick jars made to withstand the heat of boiling. You can’t just reuse an old mayonnaise jar or something. They’re called canning jars, but also Mason jars, Kerr jars, or Ball jars, after the manufacturers who made them.
They come in many different sizes, with regular-sized openings or wide mouth (I like the wide-mouthed ones; they’re less messy). They cost anywhere from fifty cents to a dollar apiece, and you can reuse them over and over.
The Jar Lids
Sometimes the jars come with lids; sometimes you have to buy them separately. A jar lid has two parts: the dome lid (the flat part with the rubbery seal on the inside) and the canning band (the screw-ring part). The dome lid sits directly on the top of the glass jar. The canning band just holds it in place while you boil the jar.
You can reuse the screw rings every year, but you have to buy new dome lids because of bacteria and stuff.
Canning Tools
You’re also going to need a jar lifter because the glass jars will be hot (unless you have a rack that lifts out nicely, and then you can use an oven mitt). Save yourself the mess and get a canning funnel.
You don’t need a magnetic lid lifter, bubble remover, headspace gauge, or any of that other crap. Save your money; use a thin plastic spatula.
Food/Vegetable Strainer
This isn’t like a colander that you put in your sink to drain the water out of pasta. A food strainer is a machine that clamps to your kitchen counter and separates the skin and seeds from the cooked tomato pulp. It sort of looks like a meat grinder, but it’s for vegetables. I have a hand-crank type, and it works well. There are also electric ones and ones that come as attachments to your kitchen mixer.
If you’re only making a couple jars (and why go through all that trouble, really?), you can get by without a strainer. You can blanch and peel the tomatoes yourself. But when you’re making 160 jars, you’re gonna want this little machine. It’s only like forty dollars and is well, well worth it!
J
UICY
B
ITS
FROM
Joe
If you can believe it, many people think tomatoes are an aphrodisiac. I can kind of see why—they’re all red and moist and whatnot.
The Aztecs called them
tomatl
, or “the swelling fruit.” In France, they were called
pommes d’amour
, or “love apples.” But no one believes in their sexual power like the Italians. In fact, at one time the Catholic Church actually banned eating ripe tomatoes in public because it was considered a “lewd and lascivious act.”
Where I come from, if you call a girl a “tomato,” it’s a compliment; means she’s good-lookin’. I don’t know if tomatoes are exactly the secret to all of mine and Teresa’s kids, but she is definitely one hot tomato in my book!
The Tomatoes
Now that we’ve got the tools, we need the food!
Start with a trip to your local farmer’s market. Even if you’ve never gone at the end of August before, the vendors there are ready for the Italian sauce makers. The tomatoes are piled up, rich and juicy, ripe and beautiful, ready to be taken home. You won’t have to sift through, squeezing and sorting out the crappy ones, like you do at the supermarket.
You only want to use big plum tomatoes: the long-looking, oval-shaped ones. Plum tomatoes are also called processing or paste tomatoes because they are the best for making sauces. They are harder than round tomatoes, and have way fewer seeds. They also handle really well.
There are a couple different varieties of plum tomatoes: Roma VF, San Marzano, Ropreco Paste, and Big Mama, to name a few. Whatever your local market has will work great. Just tell them you’re making tomato sauce, and they’ll take care of you.
My family of six goes through about 160 jars in a year. You can get around sixteen jars per bushel of tomatoes, so I usually buy ten bushels. Do your own math and buy what you need.
While you’re at the market, also pick up some fresh basil, and a bunch of flowers to make yourself feel good. You deserve it for what you’re about to do!
