Fluid Gels on Chefsteps!

I have mentioned fluid gels before. This is one of the iconic parts of modernist cuisine and is a great new way of doing sauces and purees. Now there is a great opportunity to learn about this new thing on chefsteps.com. This is one of my favourite web sites and a great resource for anyone who wants to learn about new ways of cooking and how to optimise food. Just go to https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/fluid-gels/landing#/.

I tried out the beet fluid gel and used it in their blini recipe. Worked out perfectly. I started with 9 beets which I peeled and diced and juiced in my Phillips juicer.

This piece of machinery does a fantastic job at turning vegetables into juice. After adding the balsamic vinegar and the mix of salt, gellan and xantana, I brought it to a boil and chilled it over an ice bath.

This resulted in a nice gel that I then churned in a blender. The resulting fluid gel turned out perfectly.

The blinis did not visually turn out as well as they could because I portioned them in the pan using a spoon in stead of a bottle. I topped them with the beet fluid gel, creme fraiche and trout roe. Quit yummy!

By the way, I had quite a lot of fluid gel left. When we had lunch at the Fat Duck, we had a very nice beet meringue thingy. I put my fluid gel in my spuma bottle, added two cream chargers and made some tops on a sheet of baking paper. These I put in my dehydrator to see if i could make something resembling those. I could not. The nice tops of beet fluid gel had complete flattened by the time they dried, so I ended up with flat turds on paper.

A Tuscany adventure - #8, More pizza!

More Pizza!

Just a follow-up on yesterday's pizza post. I just wanted to share some more pictures from SiToscana's first pizza evening, this time from their own blog.

Go to http://blog.sitoscana.com/2014/07/3036.html and enjoy!

A Tuscany adventure - #7, Fire!, Making pizza

Fire!

So, at last we fired up the new pizza oven. My friends Tage and Sissel here in Montemagno in Tuscany have had a new pizza oven built in their garden, and we just fired it up for the first time. An oven like this is fired with wood and reaches 400 degrees Celsius and more. At this temperature it is ready for pizzas.  We had been told that olive wood was the only correct thing to use and we had procured some of that.

Since this was a brand new oven, we had been told that we needed to heat it slowly the first time, so we started with a small fire that got the oven up to 100 degrees in twenty minutes or so. The door of the oven has a thermometer so that it is possible to measure the temp in there. After building successively larger fires, we eventually reached 400 after about three hours. We pushed the fire to one side, cleared the other side and we were ready for the first pizza.

First pizza going in!

Here is how to make pizza, according to the locals:

The dough is made into a circle with the edge a bit thicker than the rest of the pizza. Tomato sauce is added. This should be just peeled tomatoes, crushed (with an immersion blender in our modern world), and salt and pepper added if you want to. It should not be cooked in any way.

Then add all un-cooked toppings: mushrooms, uncooked sausage (which we used), onions, cheese etc. This goes in the oven. After 2-3 minutes, the pizza was cooked. Then take it out and add any other toppings like cured ham, ruccula etc. Then in again just to warm this, and the pizza is ready.

The first pizza was perfect! Nice crust and all. The next one, however, did not cook properly, and checking the temp, we found that it had dropped significantly. We had to do put on some more logs and make sure the temp got up again. When the oven is hot enough, the inner wall of stones should be all white. This time we made sure they were, and we pushed the fire to the back of the oven. This seemed to work better and the temp kept up for the rest of the evening.

After a few more trials, Tage and Sissel will probably offer pizza evenings through their company SiToscana. I can absolutely recommend it!

A Tuscany adventure - #6, Comprare per la pizza!

Comprare per la pizza!

My hosts here in Montemagno, Tuscany have had a pizza oven built in their garden. This is a wood fired, traditional oven, and we are all excited about trying it out.

Today we went shopping for pizza ingredients, and then it dawned on me that shopping in Italy and Norway are two very different experiences. In Norway, you go into a shop get what you want, pay for it and walk out, possibly without exchanging a single word with anyone. Not so in Italy.

We went to several stores to get what we wanted, and my host, being a rather talkative fellow explained what we were going to do. Immediately we got advice from all the staff about how to make the perfect pizza. Even fellow customers chipped in. This, of course is also due to the fact that Italians care much more about what they eat than Norwegians do. It is in their soul and blood. There is only one way of doing a pizza, and that is the way their mothers did it. Nothing else will do.

So we set out without ingredients or recipes or anything, really, and came back as knowledgable pizza chefs (or so we thought, anyway) with the car full of good stuff. Ham, two types of cheese, salsicce (a sausage), olives.

This being the first time we try out the oven and the emphasis is on learning how to use it, we even opted for ready-made pizza dough sold frozen as individual blobs, each perfect for a normal pizza.

And now for the main task: Firing up the oven!

There will be pizza tonight.

Hopefully.

A Tuscany adventure - #5, Merenda!

Merenda!

I did write that the Italians eat colazione (breakfast), pranzo (lunch) and cena (dinner). It turns out that that is not the complete picture. Between these meals it seems like they have a tendency to run off for a little snack, and these small in-between meals are, according to informed sources, called meranda. While strolling around in the small town of Calci, 2 km down the hill from Montemagno, I suddenly felt a bit 11-o'clockish and set my bearings towards a small bar called Andreoni.

As this was way past colazione time, I thought the bar would be more or less empty on a Thursday mid-morning, but entering it I found that half the town was queuing up for a small little something and a cup of coffee. The counter was filed with all kinds of small and large pastries. I ordered a small something and a cup of hot chocolate.

Now, those of you that like chocolate should try this. Those of you that do not should definitely stay away. This hot chocolate is not for the faint hearted. This is not some cheap powder with lots of milk or even water. This is melted chocolate with just enough liquid so that you can drink it. Think hot chocolate sauce. I love it. It is almost a meal in itself. Yummy!

A Tuscany adventure - #4, Cena! A night at Trattoria di Montemagno

Cena! A night at Trattoria di Montemagno

The Italian dinner is no small deal. A normal dinner as eaten by the family will contain

• Antipasti (starters)
• Primo (first course)
• Secondo (second course)
• Dolce (dessert)

And for a big meal there may be more than one of each. No wonder they cannot eat a big breakfast in the morning!

In Montemagno there is a trattoria or restaurant. It is simply called Trattoria di Montemagno and it is widely known for its simple but excellent food. People flock to it from near and far, and not only tourists. That is a sure sign that a restaurant is good; that the locals queue up at mealtimes.

Trattoria di Montemagno does not advertise. If you wander round the village looking for the name in neon, you will probably perish of hunger. If you do not know where it is, you have lost. I, luckily, knew where it was as my host had taken me there on previous occasions. This particular night I was alone in the house, and decided to venture downtown (as in go down the steep road to the lower part of the village) to chew the fat.

I have been trying to learn Italian for a number of months, so I was set on communicating solely in that language as I eagerly stepped through the door at 7:30 asking for una tavola per una, per favor. But the waitress smelled the rat immediately. Anyone looking as non-italian as I do and asking for a table a full half hour before the official dinner gong must be a tourist, so without hesitation she flung her English at me and I had lost.

I did know I was too early. Dinner is at 8:00 pm. Or later. The point is that being as good as it is, this place is often packed full, and I had not booked a table, so I was trying to be on the safe side. I did get a table. I was, of course, the first guest. They are closed on Mondays, and on Tuesdays and perhaps Wednesdays you can generally get a table without booking if you are not too late, but from Thursday on you should definitely book!

Trattoria di Montemagno is not a fancy place in any way. The most fancy item there is the elaborately carved bar in dark wood. The rest of it looks like a cheap cafe, but in a good way. Homely is the word I am grasping for. Simple furniture, yellow painted walls with a few pictures on them, blackboards with today's menu. I odrdered the house antipasti, the risotto con caprino e peperone, the tongue with a tomato and onion sauce and the peach tiramisu. And half a bottle of red wine.

When it comes to wine, you have four choices. Red or white, whole bottle or half. That is it, and that is enough. The bottle are unlabelled and the contents are drawn from larger sources in the kitchen. The wine is excellent. I had the red and it tasted like (and probably was) a young Chianti.

My antipasti consisted of a crostino tasting of olive oil and garlic, a small dollop of a salad of some sort with something resembling cous-cous, a piece of omelet and a slice of ham. All well prepared and tasty. The risotto was perfectly cooked. Creamy, but still with a slight bite to every grain of rice. And packed with flavour.

As I ate my risotto, the church bell struck eight, and suddenly they started pouring in like cattle coming home for the night, the people who knew when dinner was supposed to commence. Within the next ten minutes I counted six or seven parties entering with anticipation written all over them.

At precisely 8:08 an elderly man in a red shirt and a matching scarf entered, book in hand. He might have been around 75-80 years old, and I would be very much disappointed if he turned out not to be the local artist. After having studied the blackboard for a minute, he ventured into the kitchen, probably to order something else. Out there he erupted in song before coming back, sitting down to what probably was his usual table and started reading.

My tongue arrived. Tongue may be hard to do right and may be tough and not at all pleasant if not cooked to perfection. It requires a great deal of love. This particular instance of the species had been caressed and loved for quite some time and was a heaven of tenderness, succulence and taste.

By 8:40 the premises were quite full of people who ate, drank and talked as only Italians can. As a ate my light, tasty, sweet and well made dessert, I envied those who live here and can do this every night. Or at least several night every week. Like the elderly artist. As he got his second course, he took one glance at it and sent it back out. After two minutes the cook came in with it again, and this time it seemed that everything was in order. I don't know what that was about.

Four courses, water and wine, 26 Euros and 50. In Norway this would easily have been at least 65 Euros at a mediocre place. And the Trattoria di Montemagno is not mediocre. I said buona sera and strolled out into the night a better man.

A Tuscany adventure - #3, Pranzo!

The shop in Montemagno

Pranzo!

I am trying to learn Italian. I do find it a bit hard. In fact I find learning anything new harder as you get older. Or, as my friend and host Tage puts it, things are easier to learn now, but more difficult to remember. Anyway, pranzo means lunch, and lunch is not to be taken lightly in Italy. Indeed, no meal is taken lightly, except, perhaps, for la colazione, breakfast.

Coming from Norway I have always been taught that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and Norwegian breakfasts may, like English breakfasts, be a quite substantial meal. But then we would usually have a rather light (and boring) lunch consisting of sandwiches followed by an (in comparison to Italy) early dinner. I should also mention that Norwegian lunches have changed lately and more and more often will consist of a hot meal.

The food regime in Italy, however, seems to be quite different. Norwegians on holiday in this country just cannot understand the Italian breakfast. A cup of coffee and either bread with jam or some sort of pastry. This is just to get the blood sugar up enough to last until lunch.

Lunch, on the other hand, is often what I would consider a whole dinner and is by many regarded as the most important meal and often consists of both starter, main course and dessert. But today I am making a very simple lunch for myself and Gunn who also works at SiToscana.

Italian food is often very simple and relies entirely on a few very good ingredients treated with care. Today I am making a simple pasta dish with ravioli. Here in Montemagno there is a small shop presided over by Liana. She sells bread, cheese, ham, pasta, wine, oil, vegetables and other staple foods. From her I got some very good ravioli, great tomatoes that has actually had time to ripen well in the sun and some cooked ham.

I made a tomato sauce just by cutting the tomatoes in half and heating them in a pan with a bit of olive oil and a dash of Chianti wine. This simmered until it had a sauce like consistency. I actually also had the tomato stalks in there (rinsed, of course) as these also contain lots of flavour. Just remember to take them out before serving! Towards the end of the cooking I added shreds of cooked ham and some more halved tomatoes just to have a bit of texture and something to bite into. I seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper and a pinch of sugar, and the sauce was ready. The ravioli was given three minutes in salted, boiling water, and then lunch was served. Simple and delicious!

A Tuscany adventure - #2, SiToscana!

Some people live dull, predictable lives. Probably most people. I do, anyway. But then there are those who suddenly break up from it all and do crazy stuff, and that is certainly true for my friends Sissel and Tage who own the house I am currently staying in.

These two were living in Tromsø, a city north in Norway. They both had ordinary, good jobs and a normal life. But then, in 2002, they sold their house, got rid of whatever could not fit in the car, drove to Italy and bought an old house in the little medieval village of Montemagno near Pisa in Tuscany. The house was all but a ruin, and the oldest part was 900 years old. They spent the next two years fixing it and ended up with a beautiful house with two extra apartments that they started renting out to tourists. This was the start of their company SiToscana (http://www.sitoscana.com/intro_eng.htm).

Today they run their small, but thriving business renting out the two apartments in their own house plus another small house they have bought just up the road. In addition they have access to lots of other rental apartments and villas all over Tuscany. They also arrange excursions and events showcasing Italian food and wine, walks in the mountains, MC excursions etc. and they draw on all the experience they have gained for the past 12 years to provide their guests with personalised and tailored experiences in Tuscany. It is almost like having personal friends there to organise your stay to whom you can come for assistance with almost everything. And they will serve you a glass of Prosecco or a Dry Martini while helping you. They are just fabulous.

So for the next days I will be enjoying their hospitality while helping them with small jobs and learning more about Italian food. And first and foremost, we will be figuring out how to make the perfect pizza in the newly built stone oven out on the terrace, but more on that later.

A Tuscany adventure - #1, Holiday!

One of the distinct feelings I remember from university is the feeling of finishing an exam. For weeks you work and study frenetically as the upcoming exam races towards you. The world does not contain anything else than the exam and you and you plunge towards it head first - and emerge on the other side to find yourself floating in an empty void. Where, for just a few moments ago, life had a clear goal that everything spiralled towards, there is now only emptiness and silence. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the change is so abrupt that it stuns you slightly.

From time to time this same feeling pops up again later in life as well, as it has indeed done for me now. For the past couple of months I have been leading this project at work. I have been working too long hours for weeks on end (which, by the way, is the reason why this blog has been silent recently). Yesterday my holidays broke out, and I find myself in a void again.

Currently, my void is situated in the kitchen of a thousand year old house in a medieval village in Tuscany called Montemagno. And as voids go, this is a good one. For one and a half weeks I will be soaking in myself in Italian everyday life and experiencing Tuscan culture, food and wine. Those of you who plunged into this blogpost hoping to find stuff about foams, fluid gels and other modernist concoctions may be disappointed. What, you may exclaim, is the point of calling a blog "modernist" if one writes about Italian cuisine that is anything but modern? Italian food is probably as far from modernist you can come!

Two reasons:

1. Before trying to modernise or perfect or otherwise change traditional food (which, I think, is one of the tasks of modernist cuisine), one should know and love the traditional.

2. I did not manage to set up two pages so I could feed these posts into a separate blog.

Lunch today was at La Vecchia Pieve in the nearby town of Calci and consisted of pasta with mushrooms and a plate of mixed grilled meat. And the inevitable finger in front of the lens. Simple, but good.  The food, not the finger.



So the coming posts will be a mixture of travel and food, all based on Tuscan traditions. I hope you will come along on the journey with me.