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From the Fiorano kitchen: Traditional olive Ascolane

February 15, 2012 by dolcevitadiaries

This is a classic dish from Marche, the part of Italy which is also home to Nudo olive oil. To stand a chance of making them, you really need a very large olive like those found around Ascoli Piceno; the key is stuffing the olives plentifully before frying them. In Marche, they are pretty ubiquitous, popping up as appetizers in the fanciest of restaurants right through to your local pizzeria. And very delicious they are too.

This recipe is courtesy of Paola from Azienda Agricola Fiorano and her mum.

Ingredients for 4

Big fat olives still on the stone – (classically Ascolane olives) about 30

Pork  – 200g/7oz

Turkey breast – 200g/7oz

Beef – 200g/7oz

Mortadella – 100g/3.5oz

Parmesan – 80g/2.8oz

Eggs – 4

White wine – A glass

Nutmeg – to taste

Salt – to taste

Pepper – to taste

Bread crumbs – as required

Flour – as requested

Extra virgin olive oil – as required

Sunflower oil – as required

Brown the chopped meat in a pan with a little oil, add salt and pepper and drizzle with white wine. Cover as soon as the wine has boiled away and cook for another 10-15 minutes. Place the cooked meat in an oven dish with the finely chopped Mortadella, the grated Parmesan, nutmeg, salt, a whole egg and a yolk. Mince finely with a chopping knife or with the mixer until smooth and thick.

Stone the olives by cutting off the flesh in a spiral – start at the top of the olive and try to cut the flesh off in one piece. Take a piece of meat about the size of the original olive in your hand, roll into a ball and spiral the flesh of one olive around it. Then dip the ball first in the flour, then the beaten eggs and finally the bread crumbs. Do this for all the olives. Heat up the extra virgin olive and sunflower oils until boiling and deep fry the balls until golden brown. Serve hot or warm as a yummy starter.

View more photos of our visit to Fiorano here.

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Pumpkin flan with cheese fondue sauce

February 9, 2012 by jason.gibb

This is a lovely light dish for those chilly months when pumpkins of all sizes and hues start to appear on the shelves. It is actually more like a soufflé than a flan and the rich cheesy sauce completes the transformation from humble pumpkin to luxurious belle of the ball. From our friend Guida Stacchietti.

Ingredients for 4 people

Butter – 40g/1.4oz

Flour – 20g/0.7oz

Milk – 100ml/3.4fl oz

Salt and pepper

Eggs – 2, gently beaten

Pumpkin – 150g/5.3oz (from Chioggia if possible) cooked in boiling, salted water

Parmesan cheese – 1 spoon of grated cheese.

Preheat the oven to 150°C/300oF.

Prepare a béchamel sauce by heating the butter, adding flour and milk. Once it’s boiled add salt and pepper to taste. Let is cool and then add  the eggs, pureed pumpkin and parmesan cheese and stir well. Spoon into buttered ramekins and bake in the oven at 150°C for about 20 minutes. Once they have cooled slightly, remove from the moulds and keep warm.

Ingredients for cheese fondue sauce

Parmesan – 1 spoon

Taleggio cheese – 50g/1.7oz

Fresh cream – 50ml/1.7fl oz

Butter – a knob

Milk – 50ml/1.7fl oz

Olive oil crushed with mandarins -  a drizzle

Add the parmesan, Taleggio, butter, cream and milk to a saucepan and dissolve slowly taking care not to boil. Serve the pies with the cheese sauce poured on top and a drizzle of mandarin olive oil.

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Polpette vegetariane alla ricotta

February 2, 2012 by jason.gibb

If you’re after a vegetarian version of our polpette (meatballs), these are so tasty you’ll be delighted to have renounced the flesh. Italians wouldn’t traditionally have polpette with pasta, and they do also work well with some vegetables and a salad on the side. Or just in a tomato sauce with potatoes for a bit of extra substance.

Ingredients for 4 to 6

Dried Lentils – 200g

Ricotta – 125g

Breadcrumbs – 30g

Ragusano/parmesan – 50g

Egg – 1 large beaten

Chill flakes – teaspoon

Garlic – flakes or 3 cloves thinly sliced

Salt and pepper to taste

Olive oil – for frying

First cook the lentils according to the instructions on the package. Drain them and whiz then in the blender for a couple of minutes until smooth. Then mix in all the other ingredients, except for the olive oil, really well. Really well, like get stuck in with your hands, it’s the best way.

You can leave this mix overnight or use straightaway. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and roll the mixture into 4cm width balls. Fry over a medium heat, turning frequently to get them brown all over.

They are best served with a simple, spicy tomato sauce, and with or without pasta.

Posted in Pasta recipes, Primo piatto recipes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino

January 30, 2012 by jason.gibb

Valentine’s day falls on a Tuesday this year. Tuesday is not a day associated with lavish celebratory dinners and romantic indulgence. It’s a cursed school night! So here is a recipe which is a delicious and authentic piatto Italiano, but which you can knock up in minutes. Leaving you plenty of time for that romcom boxset and a bit of canoodling.

Ingredients for 2

spaghetti – 200g/7oz

Garlic – 2 large cloves, minced

Chilli pepper flakes – 1½  tsp

Extra virgin olive oil – 60ml/1/4 cup

Salt flakes – ¾ tsp

Freshly ground pepper – ½ tsp

Parmesan cheese – as much as you like

Bring a big pot of salted water to the boil, and I mean real salty, like the Mediterranean. Cook the spaghetti according to the directions on the package, until it is al dente. Now strain it and place in a large serving dish. Then add the minced garlic, chilli flakes, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and mix it together real well.

Serve immediately with a healthy grating of parmesan and a leaf salad.

Need ideas for dessert? Why not try our delightfully silky olive oil chocolate mousse.

Posted in Pasta recipes, Primo piatto recipes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

100% Extra Virgin?

January 27, 2012 by jason.gibb

I make olive oil. I know every single step of the process inside out, from sapling to mature tree, from the plucking of the fruit to the winding of the press. I also know how much all this labour of love costs. That’s part of my job too – watching every penny and dime we spend, but making sure we never cut corners. So when I go into a supermarket and see a half litre/17 fl oz bottle of ‘Italian extra virgin olive oil’ for £3 ($6), I know that it can’t be true. Extremely unlikely that it is extra virgin, highly unfeasible that it is Italian and totally conceivable that it isn’t even olive oil!

Let’s look at the maths. Each of our olive trees produces about two litres of olive oil a year. One year, one tree, one harvest, two litres. Each tree costs about €5 to prune. We cut the grass twice a year (sounds easy, but across 21 acres it becomes a little trickier) which works out as €2 per tree . Then the other major expenses are the harvesting by hand, costing about €4 a tree, organic fertiliser at €1 a tree and using the communal press to squash the beauties, coming out at $1.5 for every litre. So we are already up to around €7.50 a litre without including any of the farm overheads, taxes, marketing, organic certification, or big pasta lunches. We are however including the fact that we are paying decent living wages, we are not working people into the ground nor are we employing children.

But just considering the basic cost of product and we still need to add at least another €2.50 a litre for bottling, packaging and transport.  So we’re now up to €10 a litre. With no profit taken by us a shop would typically want to sell this for €20 a litre. This is a long way from our cheap, supermarket extra virgin olive oil. Sure there are economy of scales, and no doubt I could get the harvesters (who include myself incidentally), to work that bit faster, but it’s not going to reduce the costs by an order of magnitude is it?

So it comes as no surprise to me that 4 out of 5 bottles of Italian extra virgin olive oil sold in the UK, USA and China don’t have inside what they say they have on the bottle. Which begs the question, what do they have inside? Well in his brilliant new book ‘Extra Virginity: the sublime and scandalous world of olive oil’, Thomas Mueller offers numerous shocking examples where this ‘italian extra virgin olive oil’ turns out to be mixes of chemically extracted olive oils, cut with nut or sunflower oil or both and it’s likely provenance is Spain, North Africa or Turkey. And I repeat, we are talking about 4 out of every 5 bottles here folks.

I’ve never personally seen evidence of any such shenanigans, but I have visited olive groves around Liguria where nets are left under the trees for the olives to fall into them. The windfall is collected every few weeks for processing – to be extra virgin the olives need to be pressed within 24 hours (not three weeks). Locals openly told me the subsequent oil was refined (to remove the rancid taste) and mixed with fruity foreign oil in a specific ratio so the resulting bottle of oil can still be called “Ligurian”.

So the moral of the story is that you get what you pay for. Don’t take your olive oil for granted. Ask questions about its origins. And heck, you can even go crazy and adopt your very own 100% Italian 100% olive 100% tree.

 

Posted in Stories from the Olive Grove | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Carrot cake with lemon cream

January 20, 2012 by dolcevitadiaries

Carrot cake always feels a bit healthier than other cakes doesn’t it? Not really sure how much difference a grated carrot really makes to body and soul, but let’s keep the faith shall we. In this recipe the cake can be served traditionally as a teatime cake, or can be made fancier and served as a desert with the addition of the lovely lemon crema.

Ingredients for 4 people

Eggs – 3

Sugar – 150g/5.3 oz

Olive oil – 100g/3.5 oz

Flour 300g/10.5 oz

Walnuts – 40g/1.4 oz
1 carrot – 1 grated (50g approx)

Packet of yeast

Beat the eggs well with the sugar, add the olive oil, chopped walnuts, grated carrots and then gradually add the flour – the amount will be around 300g/10.5oz but the dough should not be too hard. Finally add the yeast. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes at 160oC/320oF.

And if you want to serve the torta with a lovely zingy cream, here is the recipe for that.

Ingredients for 4 people

Egg yolks – 2

Sugar – 2 tablespoons

Flour – 2 tablespoons

Rind of an organic lemon

Milk – 400ml/13.5fl.oz

Mix the egg yolks  with sugar, add flour, lemon peel (a whole piece), and milk. Cook over low heat stirring constantly up to boiling. Remove the lemon peel and serve the cream with the carrot cake.

This is also delicious with a little crunch of almond croccante.

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The Italian economy

January 16, 2012 by cathy.rogers

According to a recent report by Confesercenti (a federation of small businesses in Italy) there is one part of the Italian economy that’s booming despite the grim economic times: the Mafia. With £100bn annual profits (to put it another way, 7% of GDP) the Mafia seem to be the only business currently skating on liquidity.

For the majority of the Italian public, times are tough and set to get tougher, even without the onerous bills for state funded Presidential orgies (and on that note, can we please take a moment to celebrate, despite the gloomy times, the fact that the country no longer suffers a president who ‘jokes’ about Obama’s being ‘suntanned’ or threatents to ‘dust off his Playboy charms’ to win over the (female) Finnish Prime Minister. A big hoorah for the passing).

All this feels a far cry from Le Marche, a predominantly agricultural region made up of small family businesses. In Italy there are 2.6 million farms, the vast majority (94.7%) of which are family-operated and small – averaging only 5 hectares in size. These are just the sort of farms that together form the Nudo olive grove co-operative. There’s no pretending times aren’t difficult. Economic pressure as well as all the usual worries of weather and bugs and mosca and all don’t add up to carefree evenings. But at least we can guarantee, through our adoption programme, that they will sell their entire olive oil harvest.

With that, and no Silvio, surely there is reason to be cheerful. Happy 2012.

Posted in Stories from the Olive Grove | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Recycle in the original meaning of the word

January 1, 2012 by jason.gibb

In the olden days, recycling meant re-using – like actual reusing – by us. Shoeboxes would become document storage systems, shoelaces would have a second life in beaded necklaces and so on. Today it’s much more indirect, involving special bags and weekly schedules and, on a more personal level, no more than a vague pride that your tin of baked beans might once have been the tail fin ofConcord. And it seems so much less efficient. With this in mind, we have been fretting over the fate of our olive oil tins. Apart from anything, they’re just too pretty to be chucked in the recycling bin with last week’s copy of the Radio Times. So we have come up with some easy ways of breathing second life into your Nudo tin, once the oil’s gone of course.

1. Pen holder/desk tidy
Get a can opener. Carefully cut the top off (don’t start near the seam, you need a run up to this), being really careful not to cut yourself as the blood will really spoil the craft look. Carefully dry the inside of the tin. Cover the sharp edge with something you fancy – we used PVC trimming from a car parts shop, but there’s no reason not to go a bit gaga and add fur trim or tinsel.

2. Plant pot.

Do exactly the same as above, but before you pot your plant make a small hole at the bottom of the tin at the back. This will prevent you being woken in the middle of the night to the sound of your plant screaming ‘Help! Help! I’m drowning!’

Have fun, play safe and do send us pics of your creations.

Posted in Stories from the Olive Grove | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Ben Tish Dish

December 27, 2011 by jason.gibb

Cathy and I, along with half the food-loving population, sometimes fantasise about opening a restaurant.

Cathy’s dream is the ‘starters and puddings’ restaurant, which cuts out the bossy middle man of the main course and allows for variety and experiment in the multitude of courses which replace it. It even has a name – which will only be appreciated by fans of the BBC brains show Mastermind (and quite possibly not even by them) – ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’.

My mischievous suggestion is a vegetarian restaurant that has just one token meaty main course on offer – to give meat-eaters a taste of how I have suffered for the last three decades in restaurants where the only veggie option involves bland, overcooked pasta  or the dreaded 70s staple goat cheese.

In reality, opening a restaurant business is a bit of a pipe-dream, because everyone who has done it says it is a daunting 24/7 job that leeches the entirety of both your energy and your bank balance. And we would have to agree on the kind of restaurant it would be. The closest real-life example of something we’d have loved to have created ourselves is the Salt Yard in London. Its Italian-Spanish tapas – zucchini flowers stuffed with rich ricotta and drizzled with honey or velvety slices of tuna carpaccio in salsa verde with teeny little broad beans – are just our cup of tea. We’re by no means its only superfans: the success of Salt Yard has led to its brainchilds opening new restaurants Dehesa in Soho and Opera Tavern in Covent Garden (each one an assured and characterful sibling of the firstborn).

The same owners also opened a butchers/charcuterie deli nextdoor to one of their restaurants. Having the impeccable taste they do, they of course stocked Nudo olive oil – and through this connection we discovered that Ben Tish, the Executive Chef across the restaurants, was something of a Nudo fan. For a few months now I’ve been pestering him for a couple of his favourite recipes – and I’m very happy to present the first one. It’s well worth the wait.

Marinated San Marzano tomatoes with borlotti beans and buffalo mozzarella

This really is an assembly of ingredients in their prime with a simple vinaigrette to bring all the flavours together. The beautiful, sweet San Marzano tomatoes are worth trying to get; they are available from specialist food markets. And take the time to buy and cook fresh borlotti beans from the pod. They have a sweet, nutty flavour and absorb the other flavours of this beautiful salad. The Nudo chilli oil adds a really nice kick to the salad with a pleasant fruity undertone.

Serves 4 as a tapa

San Marzano tomatoes – 2, eyes removed and skin pricked

Nudo extra virgin olive oil with chilli – 100ml/3.5 fl oz

Moscatel vinegar – 100ml/3.5 fl oz

Thyme – 1 sprig

Garlic – 1 clove, peeled and sliced

Fresh borlotti beans – 40g/1.4oz podded weight

Small onion – 1

Bay leaf – 1

Carrot – half small peeled

Buffalomozzarella – 1x125g/4.4oz ball

Rocket/rucola – 1 bunch, picked and washed

Sea salt and black pepper

Blanche the tomatoes in boiling water for 10 seconds and then refresh in iced water. Peel off the skins and cut the tomatoes in half length wise. Scoop out the seeds and them place the flesh in a bowl. Pour over the oil, vinegar and add the garlic and thyme. Season well and marinate for at least 2 hours.

Place the beans in a pan and cover with cold water. Add the onion, carrot and bay. Bring to the boil, skim and then simmer until the beans are tender. About 1 hour. Drain off the liquid and reserve the beans.

To serve add the beans to the tomatoes and then tear in the mozzarella. Add the rocket and mix everything very well, season again to taste. Divide the salad evenly between two plates.

Posted in Antipasti recipes | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Panettone bread and butter pudding

December 19, 2011 by jason.gibb

At this time of year no bona fide Italian would turn up to a dinner party without an elegantly packaged panettone, pandoro or torrone. If you people-watch at passeggiata time (that lovely post-day, pre-evening interlude), you’ll see all sorts strolling about, carrying their tasteful confections. In deference to this simple and lovely tradition, we started to make our own olive oil panettone. We were very proud when it recently came a close second in a Guardian taste test, and were the first panettone to be mentioned in the New York times for 9 years. Trouble is that this meant we ran out of stock in just three days. So in case you get given a panettone made by someone else, we’ve got a little recipe to turn it into something special.

Ingredients

Panettone – 750g/26oz

Butter – 75g/2.6oz

Milk – 400ml/13.5fl oz

Cream – 150ml/5fl oz single or double

Eggs – 2 free range

Sugar – 125g/1oz

Ground cinnamon – sprinkling

Ground nutmeg – sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 180oC/350oF/GM4. Cut your panettone into slices about 1.5cm/½ inch  thick. Butter one side of each slice and then cut it into triangles.

Lay the pieces on an oven proof baking dish. Continue until you fill the dish, nice and cosy.

Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl and gently whisk them with the sugar. Heat the milk and cream in a saucepan (you can add vanilla too if you like) until it just below boiling. Slowly pour the milk/cream mixture into the mixing bowl with the eggs, stirring continuously. Pour the mixture evenly over the panettone soaking each bready peak, and then put it in the oven for about 25 mins, or until the exposed panettone starts to brown. Eat straight away with cold single cream. (You can also cool it, take to a friend’s house, receive adulation, reheat and eat there).

See some more photos in our Panettone bread & butter pudding album here.

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