Eating Italy: A Chef's Culinary Adventure (19 page)

For the chickpea cakes:
Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C). Butter and sugar eight 4-ounce (120-ml) ramekins or baking tins and place on a baking sheet.

Puree the chickpeas in a food processor or blender until relatively smooth, scraping down the sides once or twice. You should have 2 cups (475 ml) of thick chickpea puree. Transfer the puree to a large bowl and add the sugar, lemon zest, flour, salt, whole egg, and egg yolks. Gently whisk until smooth. Whip the egg whites in a stand mixer on high speed until medium-stiff peaks form when the beaters are lifted. Gently fold the whites into the puree mixture. Spoon the batter into the prepared ramekins and bake until the cakes are set and golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes.

For the lemon sauce:
Whisk together the lemon juice, sugar, and egg yolks in a heatproof bowl until light and pale yellow. Heat the butter and cream in a heavy saucepan over medium heat until it begins to simmer, and then remove from the heat. Whisk half of the hot cream mixture into the yolk mixture until incorporated, and then return the combined mixture to the pan. Return the pan to low heat and stir constantly but gently until the sauce thickens slightly and registers a temperature of 165°F (74°C) on a candy thermometer, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir for about 2 minutes, or until the sauce thickens to the consistency of heavy cream. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and let stand a few minutes, stirring occasionally. You should have about 2 cups (475 ml) of sauce.

To serve:
Spoon a pool of warm lemon sauce on each plate. Turn out a warm cake onto each plate. Drizzle a little olive oil around the plate, then dust the cakes with confectioners’ sugar.

“BAROLO HAS BEEN CALLED ‘THE KING OF WINES AND THE WINE OF KINGS,’” SAID CAMILLO. HE TOLD ME BAROLO HAS SO MUCH TANNIN THAT IT IS BEST AGED FOR AT LEAST TEN YEARS TO MELLOW IT.

But in the 1980s, new producers wanted to start selling the wine sooner. So they shortened the traditional fermentation time to less than two weeks and aged the wine for only a few years in smaller French oak barrels instead of in big Slovenian casks. “For Barolo traditionalists, this meant war,” said Camillo. “It was a fight over what could legally be called Barolo wine.”

This was my first trip to Piedmont, about a two-hour drive southwest of Bergamo. As the birthplace of the slow food movement, the first Eataly megastore, the world’s best white truffles, and some of Italy’s finest wines, Piedmont is a culinary mecca. Camillo wanted to show me some of the wineries that helped Frosio Ristorante earn its Michelin star. It was 2004 and Matteo Donadoni (nicknamed “Jack”) was driving. Jack worked the front of the house at Frosio, along with Camillo.

We left Bergamo at six in the morning and drank wine all day from eight thirty to five o’clock. Camillo took us to both modern and traditional Barolo and Barbaresco wineries, including Scavino, Clerico, Ceretto, Rocche dei Manzoni, and Marchesi di Grésy. In the center of Barbaresco, we stopped for lunch at Trattoria Antica Torre, just down the street from the famous Gaja winery. Antica Torre serves classic Piedmont dishes, such as Fassone beef carpaccio,
vitello tonnato
, tajarin egg noodles, and
bonèt
, a rich chocolate-amaretti pudding cake. We ended the meal with some Bra and Castelmagno cheeses.

On the drive back to Bergamo, Jack pontificated about the food. “Everything is a little richer and more refined in Piemont,” he said. Jack explained how the region borders France and was under French control a few times. Even the traditional Barolo winemaking methods were originated by a Frenchman. The truffles and chocolate are finer than anywhere else in Italy. They fatten up the local Fassone cattle with sugar beets and zabaglione to make
bue grasso
and hold a Fat Ox festival every year in Carrù. Even such peasant dishes as risotto get the royal treatment up here, with a finish of truffles, butter, or cheese. “We have a saying in Bergamo,” Jack went on: “‘La
boca l’è mia straca se la sa mia de aca.’
It means, ‘Your mouth is not tired if it doesn’t taste like milk.’” In other words, always finish a meal with some satisfying cheese, no matter how full you might be.

I think Jack was a little drunk, but I got the picture. And I totally agreed about the lavish food in Piedmont. It made me want to come back.

In the fall of that year, I drove there with Claudia for a weekend getaway. We had GPS but it didn’t do us any good. As the nights get cooler in Piedmont, a dense fog settles into the hills, making it impossible to find your way. Factor in the steep, twisty, one-car roads, and you’re lost in no time. We started driving around ten in the morning for a lunch reservation at Da Cesare, a tiny restaurant in Albaretto Della Torre, about twenty minutes from Barolo. But a thick fog led us so far astray, we didn’t make it to Da Cesare until two in the afternoon! It didn’t matter. When you make a lunch reservation at Da Cesare, that could mean anywhere from noon to three p.m. Chef Cesare Giaccone cooks when you show up. There is no menu because it changes every day. Except for the
capretto
and
zabaione.
Cesare always spit-roasts a baby goat over a wood fire outside the kitchen. And he always serves
zabaione
tableside from a big copper bowl with his famous hazelnut cookies, baked and served right in the hazelnut shells. I’ve tried to make those cookies a hundred times and still can’t get them right.

That fall, he started us off with his signature porcini and white peaches, thinly sliced and sautéed with a pan sauce of chicken stock, sherry vinegar, and cream. Next came a warm salad of duck breast with orange vinaigrette and local lettuces. Claudia licked her fork, and I could hear Cesare chopping the goat on his butcher block. The meat came to the table crispy but tender and drizzled only with herbed olive oil. It was outstanding. Cesare is one of Piedmont’s most well known
personaggi.
He makes his own Barolo salt and Barolo wine vinegar, ages cheese in his cellar, and paints in his spare time. In his cellar, he showed us a wheel of Castelmagno cheese that he’d been aging for a year; his bottle of 1955 Gaja Barbaresco; and a dust-covered bottle of 1906 Barolo from Mascarello, one of the region’s oldest winemakers. “When are you going to retire?” I asked him, trying to wrap my head around my own future as a chef. Cesare was already seventy. “Never,” he said. “I’ll be cooking for the rest of my life.”

Claudia and I thanked him, and then drove to Ca’ du Rabajà, a B&B about twenty minutes away, in Barbaresco. It’s a beautiful brick red inn and winery that overlooks the vineyards. Ca’ du Rabajà is a member of the Produttori del Barbaresco, a consortium of winemakers that pools its grapes and expertise to produce consistent Barbaresco wine. Barolo wine has a loftier reputation than Barbaresco, but Barolo wines are notoriously inconsistent. Both wines are made from 100 percent nebbiolo grapes, the local grape named after the local fog
(nebbia
, in Italian). But Barolo’s wider growing zone and changes to the winemaking methods over the years have made Barolo something of a crapshoot. It’s true that Barbarescos don’t bottle-age as gracefully. And they don’t get nearly as big and aromatic. But Barbarescos are more drinkable when young and more reliable, thanks in part to the consortium.

We checked in, showered, changed, and drove to Osteria dei Catari for dinner that night, in the medieval village of Monforte d’Alba. The restaurant is super-rustic with exposed wooden beams inside, brick showing through the stucco here and there, and a dark wooden staircase leading to the second floor where colorful murals line the walls. For a first course, I had
tajarin
, the region’s thin handmade egg noodles, and they were insanely good. The shaved fresh truffles helped, of course. Claudia had veal-stuffed
raviolini del plin
draped in a buttery sage sauce. She ordered veal breast with Barolo sauce
for an entrée, and I had rustic, “hunter-style” braised rabbit. We couldn’t resist the
torrone semifreddo
with chocolate sauce for dessert.

Eating different versions of the same food in both Barolo and Barbaresco, I started to realize something: Italian cooking is intimately tied to the place that it comes from and the people who make it. It’s hyperlocal. The people in each region, and even each town, depend on their local food and local wine for their unique sense of identity. There is no single, standard
tajarin
or
vitello tonnato.
The dish changes from town to town. This fundamental idea is no more evident than in Barolo and Barbaresco, two famous Italian wines that are made within ten miles (16 km) of each other and use the exact same grapes, yet employ different winemaking methods that result in two distinct wines, each with its own distinguished and celebrated characteristics.