Search results
What Is Italian Cuisine? - Yahoo Recipe Search
Food52This pasta recipe is a love letter to my daughters. I've used my cookbook collection and years of trial and error to recreate a delicious dish we had at Mr. Mao's restaurant in New Orleans. My daughters insist that radiatore is the only pasta I can use, but please use your favorite. After a long day of New Orleans fun, we were hungry for something that wasn't Cajun. Mr. Mao's had been recommended to us and it didn't disappoint. All dishes at the restaurant are a fusion of Asian, Latino, Italian, and Southern cuisine. What's more, they are all served tapas style. I think we ordered three (tapas) plates of this delicious pasta that is a mixture of salsa verde, the most delicious strands of pulled pork, radiatore pasta and shaved Parmesan. I recommend enjoying the pasta with a crisp, high acid white wine: a dry Riesling, Falanghina, or Albariño. A German Sekt would also work well. Thank you to Mr. Mao's for providing the experience that is the basis of the dish. My teenage daughters happily take seconds every time. The salsa verde is adapted from Matt Martinez's Culinary Frontier.YummlyIf you have some stale bread in your pantry, you may be much closer to a delicious meal than you imagined. Mixed with a few basic ingredients, dry bread cubes can become knodel — traditional German bread dumplings. Sometimes called 'semmelknodel,' these dumplings are quick and easy to make. They're an inventive way to transform old bread into a warming side dish, or the base of a hearty a main course. Dry bread cubes are simply moistened with milk and eggs, and flavored with minced onion, fresh parsley, and some black pepper. This mixture is formed into balls, and simmered until fluffy. Knodels are particularly popular in Bavaria. They're an ideal accompaniment to traditional dishes like jägerschnitzel or rouladen. They're also in popular in Austria, in the Tyrol region especially, but you'll also find them in the most elegant restaurants of Vienna. The northern Italians even have a version of knodel, also in the Tyrol region. These are classic winter comfort food. In Germany and elsewhere, they are both a childhood favorite and a sophisticated, satisfying staple. Although hearty and satisfying, the ideal knodel are also light and fluffy. These tasty Bavarian dumplings are not at all tricky to make. But a few simple tricks will ensure great results. ## Tips And Tricks For Easy Knodel Preparation And Perfect Results _Start with dry bread:_ Knodel originated as a clever way to use up dry bread rolls so stale bread is the best base for light knodel -- they'll soak up a mixture of milk and egg. If you don't have stale bread, you can do what German cooks do: cut the bread into small cubes and toast them in the oven on a low temperature, much like croutons. Be careful to not let the bread cubes get too dark, but lightly browned bread cubes can give your dumplings a nice toasty flavor. _Use your judgement:_ While this knodel recipe provides the quantity of bread, milk, and eggs you need to make it, knodel recipes are flexible and forgiving and because all bread types are different, you may need a little more or a little less bread. Some bread is very airy and absorbent and can soak up lots of liquid. Other bread may be denser and need less liquid. What you are looking for is a mixture that will hold together nicely and form a smooth ball. If your mixture is too wet, the bread dumplings will fall apart as they simmer. If it's too dry, the dumplings may turn out to be dense and heavy. If you aren't sure you have the right consistency, go ahead and cook a test dumpling. If it falls apart in the water, you need to add a little more bread to help the mixture hold together. If the fully cooked dumpling is too heavy, you can loosen up the mixture with some extra milk. _Use a light hand:_ The key to making feather-light dumplings is a light touch. You don't need any special equipment to make knodel - just a large bowl and your hands. Mix the dough only until it comes together. Some of the bread cubes will remain intact, giving the finished dumplings a little texture. _Get your hands wet:_ Knodel dough can stick to your hands. Before you begin to shape the dumplings, make sure your hands are completely free of any traces of dough. Then get your hands nice and wet. This makes forming the balls much easier. You may need to periodically rinse your hands as you make the dumplings. _Smooth surface:_ Knodel dough is delicate. You want the dumplings to hold together as they simmer, so make sure the surface of your dumplings is absolutely smooth. Be careful not to leave any cracks or openings for water to seep into the dumpling and break it apart. This also ensures that your dumplings look great on the plate. _Simmer, don't boil:_ Easy does it with knodel, every step of the way. Just as you mix the dough gently, and form the dumplings smoothly, you'll want to cook them gently, too. A full rolling boil may break the fragile knodel apart. Before you start to cook, let the water boil to make sure it's hot enough. But then lower the temperature and wait for the bubbles to subside. Slide your knodel into gently simmering water, not boiling water. _Give them room:_ Knodel expand as they cook. Use a large pot to give your dumplings room to swell up and to cook evenly. Fill the pot about three-fourths full. The water temperature will lower as you add the dumplings and deep water will keep its heat better. But you also want to leave enough room for the dumplings. ## Versatile Dumplings There are many knodel recipes to suit every occasion and every taste. And you can easily customize your favorite recipe. For example, although most dumpling recipes call for white bread, you can use whatever bread you like, or even a mixture of breads, to make your bread dumplings distinctive. Most classic German knodel are served as a neutral side dish flavored with some onion and fresh parsley and little else. Semmelknodel can also be added to your favorite chicken soup to give classic American chicken and dumplings a German twist. You can also add meat to them -- some Austrian knodel recipes call for bacon or sausage for a dish that needs little more that melted butter to make it delicious. These simple bread dumplings can also turn a salad into main course fare, like in this recipe for Beet and Knodel Salad that takes its inspiration from traditional German cuisine. In this sweet and tangy salad, the boiled beets are tossed in a light honey mustard sauce. The savory bread dumpings, made with gruyere cheese for added flavor and texture, make an ideal accompaniment. Serve this German-style Beet and Knodel Salad on its own, or pair it with grilled meat.Food52Chicken and rice is a soulful combination, with rich traditions all over the world. I love a one-pot meal, and there are lots of good ways to cook chicken and rice together. Me being a Cajun, jambalaya comes to mind. But something that’s always nagged at me when doing a chicken and rice dish is the shame it is to not end up with crispy skin on the chicken. Often you spend time browning the skin and getting it crispy at the outset, only to lose that effect by finishing the chicken either covered with a lid or submerged in liquid (or both) with the rice. So. I’ve been tinkering with a technique that does a pretty good job of solving this problem. The trick is to bake the chicken, on top of the rice, in the oven. That way, both the chicken and rice are cooked through in the same pot, thus still allowing the chicken to flavor the rice, as it also develops and keeps that crispy skin, because the skin is exposed to the hot oven, not covered with a lid or submerged in liquid. You get the added bonus of the roasted flavor and crispy bits on the edge of the rice that only an oven can produce. Important to note: I use chicken thighs in this recipe, because they have a lot more flavor than white meat, and they’re much more forgiving – you have to try pretty hard to overcook chicken thighs, unlike breasts. And with this recipe, you do need some time in the oven for the rice to cook. As always, bone-in will give the dish more flavor, but boneless thighs are good too, if you can find them with skin on. One way to think about cooking is to cross reference flavor profiles with cooking concepts. For example, I mostly developed this “oven-baked chicken and rice” concept with a Cajun flavor profile, which for me entails some type of Cajun seasoning (like Tony Chachere’s), bay leaves, and maybe thyme; a veggie combo of onion, bell pepper, celery, and garlic; and garnishes of Louisiana-style hot sauce, green onions, and parsley. This recipe, on the other hand, is the same technique, but with a Thai-inspired taste. So the seasoning I use here is soy sauce, fish sauce, Sriracha, peanut butter, coconut milk, and lime zest; the veg is onion, red bell pepper, jalapeno, garlic, and ginger; and the garnishes are lime juice and cilantro. I’m sure there are other ingredients that would make this recipe more authentically Thai, but frankly, my closest grocery store doesn’t have a great Asian food section, and I’m always in favor of using what’s at hand, so I’m happy to keep this recipe more streamlined. The point is – feel free to cook with whatever flavors you want. I can imagine Mexican, Indian, Italian, French, and Spanish versions of this concept. P.S. Fish sauce is ubiquitous in southeast Asian cuisine – it gives dishes a funky, possibly umami(?) kick. But as Jacques Pepin would say, be parsimonious with it. A little bit goes a long way, and generosity here could leave your meal smelling like a dirty sock. P.P.S. My girlfriend just gave me a really nice 3.5 quart enameled cast iron braising pan, which I used for this dish. It’s twelve inches across, which turned out to be the perfect size - big enough to hold all the ingredients, but shallow enough so that the oven browns the chicken skin. Any heavy, oven-proof 12-inch pan should work fine.Food NetworkLasagne, as everyone knows, is a dish of wide flat noodles, sometimes green from spinach (lasagne Verdi), sometimes with ruffled edges (lasagne ricce). The classic, austere version from Bologna alternates layers of lasagne with meat sauce (ragu) and bechamel. I am giving a more exuberant example below. There are many others, including the lasagne di vigilia, Christmas Eve lasagne, involving very wide noodles that remind the faithful of the baby Jesus's swaddling clothes. Lasagne (Lasagne is the singular but it is almost never use. Ditto for other pasta types: who would ever lapse into speaking of a single spaghetto, except in humor) is first and foremost a noodle, not a specific dish, It may be the primordial Italian pasta noodle, or at least the oldest known word in the modern pasta vocabulary. In one way or another, lasagne seems to derive from the classical Latin laganum. But what was laganum? Something made of flour and oil, a cake. The word itself derived from a Greek word for chamber pot, which was humorously applied to cooking pots. And like many other, better-known cases of synecdochical food names, the container came to stand for the thing it contained. And eventually, by a process no one knows with any certainly, laganum emerged as a word for a flat noodle in very early modern, southern Italy. If you are persuaded by all the evidence collected by Clifford A. Wright, you will be ready to believe that in Sicily, an Arab noodle cuisine collided with the Italian kitchen vocabulary and co-opted laganum and its variant lasanon to describe the new "cakes" coming in from North Africa. Would you be happier about this theory if you had evidence of a survival of an "oriental" Arab pasta in Sicily? Mary Taylor Simeti provides one in Pomp and Sustenance, Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food. Sciabbo, a Christmas noodle dish eaten in Enna in central Sicily, combines ruffled lasagna (sciabbo-jabot, French for a ruffled shirtfront) with cinnamon and sugar, typical Near Eastern spices then and now.TastyIf you’re looking for an authentic Creole-Cajun meal, a warm bowl of gumbo is the perfect way to taste what the cuisine has to offer. This seafood filé gumbo recipe will be in your family for generations to come. Use the scraps from chopping the onion, bell pepper, okra, and celery for the gumbo to make the seafood stock.Food.comSimple to prepare, this orzo pasta dish features fresh, fragrant basil, juicy grape tomatoes, garlic and tender shrimp: made with simple, fresh ingredients—precisely what Italian cuisine is all about!Food52After a particularly good (i.e. busy/lucrative) weekend behind the bar, often I like to treat myself to a Sunday-evening dinner at the Red Hen (no, not *that* Red Hen), a low-key, Italian-influenced contemporary American restaurant in Washington, D.C.'s Bloomingdale neighborhood. With its excellent cocktails and well-curated wine list, super-knowledgeable bartenders, and--oh, yeah--the FOOD (Charred Beef Tongue with Root Vegetable Slaw, Mint & Tonnato Sauce WHAT), I've never had a bad meal there, ever. If I can, I like to snag the corner seat at the bar, nearest the open kitchen, adjacent to the pass. My face is familiar enough now that the chef de cuisine will occasionally send over a bonus dish or stop to chat in one of the exceedingly rare moments in which the kitchen isn't cranking. Although the restaurant is justly renowned in the area for its signature Mezze Rigatoni with Fennel-Sausage Ragu, but it's the summertime variation on the seasonally-rotating cavatelli dish that is the perennial object of my obsession, when corn comes in season. Last summer, I sat in my favorite seat and paid close attention as one of the cooks assembled the dish. I could identify every component except one, which was graciously clarified for me: corn brodo. The secret ingredient? A parmesan stock as its base. Blanks roughly filled in, I set out to recreate the dish at home. I amalgamated the parmesan broth from several source recipes, including the Cowgirl Creamery one posted here at Food52, which I love for the addition of dried mushrooms, which works particularly well here given the finished dish's mushroom component.Food.comThis is Bianca Stravato's low calorie, low-fat family recipe for what non-Italians call 'stuffed mushrooms'. Bianca grew up on a farm in Calabria, and came to Australia when her family migrated here in 1964. As she says "We cook the same here that we did in Italy. We keep our traditions. It was harder in the early days because there weren't many Italian delis or shops". How different things are now as I post this recipe for the 2005 Zaar World Tour: Italian recipes have now been thoroughly integrated into C21st Australian cuisine. I found this recipe in the Leggo's Golden Anniversary Cookbook.EpicuriousThis one is Italy, pure and simple. Which is precisely what Italian cuisine is all about: Get yourself fresh, pure ingredients in season, plus some fine, real condiments and seasonings, and put it all together without a lot of fuss, and ecco! A simply superb meal, as healthy as they come and as good as eating gets. It's also beautiful on the plate. Note that scampi does not, in fact, mean shrimp, as many people think, but rather refers to the popular lemon, garlic, and oil preparation for shrimp in so many red-sauce Italian joints.
