Italian

Everyone loves doughnuts, so it didn’t surprise me when these bombolini, Italian for “little doughnuts,” turned out to be the most popular dessert at the Osteria. You’re likely to find some version of sweet fried dough in every Italian region. That said, ours is made with a brioche-style dough that’s fried to order and served with a berry marmellata, or compote, and lemon curd—not at all Italian, but reminiscent of jelly doughnut combinations that Americans know and love. For the marmellata, we use mountain huckleberries from Oregon; you can use blueberries, blackberries, or boysenberries, or a combination—as you like.

One of the principles of Italian cooking—and maybe this is true of all of European kitchens—is not to be wasteful. Italian cooks find a use for every edible component of each animal or vegetable they cook. In the Italian spirit, I use all parts of the celery in this dish. I slice the celery ribs for the salad, and I use the leaves, so often discarded, both in a salad the cheese is served on and to make a celery-leaf pesto that gets spooned onto the cheese. The result is a bright, flavorful, and textural salad that is equally pretty and unexpected. We peel celery using a vegetable peeler anytime we are serving it raw; it takes only a few seconds and the celery is so much more tender with the fibrous strings removed. The pesto recipe makes 3/4 cup, which is more than you will need for this recipe, but it’s difficult to make pesto in a smaller quantity. Spoon the leftovers over grilled chicken, fish, or vegetables; use in place of basil pesto to make a tomato and mozzarella salad; or simply double the salad and the stracciatella in this recipe to make eight salads. Since stracciatella is hard to find, feel free to substitute burrata in this dish. I normally like to use only the pale green leaves from the celery hearts, but since this dish requires so many celery leaves, I call for you to use the darker green leaves for the pesto, reserving the light green leaves for the salad. If you were inclined to buy even more celery, then use the light green leaves for both parts of this recipe—and use the excess celery ribs as inspiration to make Basic Chicken Stock (page 27), Soffritto (page 28), Lentils Castellucciano (page 264), or any of our other recipes that begin with sautéed diced celery.

I’ve been making a version of this condiment for as long as I can remember. Currants and pine nuts are a traditional Sicilian combination, so anytime I use this I feel like I am making a Sicilian dish.

Every restaurant menu has at least one or two items that can’t be taken off lest customers riot. This sundae and the Butterscotch Budino (page 272) are those items for us, which just goes to prove that caramel and salt are a winning combination. In Italy, coppetta refers to an unadorned dish of gelato, but we took liberties with the definition with this sundae. It’s a good dessert to serve to a crowd, since the recipes for the caramel, marshmallow sauce, and gelato make enough for twelve or more. To increase the yield, just increase the amount of peanuts that you toast.

Braised guinea hen served on a big piece of toasted bread and smothered in a rich, gravy-like sauce made of the hens’ livers and pancetta is the house specialty of Ristorante Masolino, my favorite restaurant in Panicale. I felt I would be remiss in not including it on the menu at Mozza, and since we all know how generous and open the Italian people are, I was more than a little surprised when I asked Masolino’s owner, Andrea, for the recipe for this dish, and he refused. Evidently he was not interested in sharing the secrets of his specialty with the world. So I did the only thing I could do. The summer before we opened Mozza I went to the restaurant countless times and each time forced someone in my party to order the guinea hen so I could have a bite and try to figure out how to make it—or how to tell Matt to make it. This recipe requires a lot of preparation, so it’s important to have all of your slicing and dicing done before you start cooking. You can get guinea hen thighs at poultry shops, or order it online from specialty sources such as D’Artagnan. If all you can get are thighs connected to the legs, use the legs to fortify your chicken stock. (Put the chicken stock and guinea legs in a stockpot, bring the stock to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat, and simmer for up to 2 hours, skimming off the foam that rises to the top.) As important as I believe it is for food to look as good as it tastes, I do not delude myself. I know that this dish is not going to win any beauty contests. Rest assured that what it lacks in beauty it makes up for in flavor. I think even Andrea would approve.

It takes a lot of olive oil to make these artichokes, but that’s what gives them their buttery texture and delicious flavor. The good news is that you can use the oil a second time for the same purpose. For this recipe you want to use baby artichokes. If you use the bigger artichokes that are commonly found in grocery stores, you’ll have to remove the choke before braising the artichokes and the final result won’t be quite as pretty. If you like sweetbreads, make a double batch and use half for the Veal Sweetbreads Piccata with Artichokes (page 239), one of the stars on our secondo menu.

I love the way the funky flavor of artichokes complements the mild flavor of buricotta cheese in these crostini. The currant and pine nut relish on top of the buricotta adds a touch of sweetness and acidity, and a little mint pesto livens up the whole story. The result: one of the most popular offerings at the Mozzarella Bar, and one I always recommend to vegetarians.

I love a fish in meat’s clothing, and that’s what this is: a mild-flavored fish cooked in a rich veal jus. I got the idea for it at a restaurant called Ribollita, in Chiusi, the nearest large town to my house in Italy. There, they wrap a pork filet in lardo and then smother it with green peppercorn sauce. Eventually the lardo found its way onto fish instead of pork. We use veal stock that we have left over from making the Veal Breast Stracotto (page 235), but if you haven’t made that dish recently, you can substitute any quality veal or beef stock.

For me, a “tell” for a restaurant I probably don’t want to eat in is seeing a Caprese salad on the menu when tomatoes are out of season. I knew I wanted to serve a Caprese at the Pizzeria, both because everyone loves it and because it is an icon of a casual, inexpensive Italian restaurant. Since we opened in November, when tomatoes were no longer in season, I took it as a challenge to figure out how to present these flavors in a way that was every bit as good as a Caprese made with sweet, vine-ripened summer tomatoes, even when such tomatoes were nowhere to be found. This adaptation, which I first named Winter Caprese, consists of fresh burrata cheese, basil pesto, and cherry tomatoes on the vine that have been slow-roasted to concentrate their sweetness and flavor. I changed its name to Mozza Caprese when winter ended, tomatoes came into season, and it had become so popular that I could not take it off the menu. I suggest you serve it with Fett’Unta (page 65) to sop up the wonderful, juicy flavors left on your plate. The recipe for slow-roasted tomatoes makes enough for six or more of these salads, and the pesto recipe will give you more than enough pesto for that many. So, to expand the number of servings you make, just increase the amount of burrata you buy.

One of the things I like about Italian food in general is that it is not a wimpy cuisine; the flavors are bold and decisive, as you will see in this preparation of bacalà, or salt cod. I first tried this classic preparation at Ristorante Da Delfina, at the same lunch where I also discovered Ribollita “Da Delfina” (page 115). I loved how hearty the dish was and how pronounced the flavors were. In keeping with the Florentine tradition of eating bacalà on Fridays, we serve this as the Friday piatto special in the Pizzeria, and in keeping with our tradition of cooking Pizzeria dishes in the pizza oven, this, too, is cooked in that oven. We start with fresh cod and salt-cure it in the style of old days, where the fish was cured as a way of preserving it. Ideally you will start with a center cut of cod, which will yield more even-size pieces, which will salinate evenly. The cod takes three days to cure, so plan accordingly.

I am a red wine drinker, so any fish preparation that can be enjoyed with red wine, such as this one, which is served with a rich lentil stew and pickled red cabbage, is a winner for me. Sea trout is a freshwater fish that drifted into the sea, so although it is trout, it looks and tastes like it wants to be salmon with pink flesh and the same moist, oily quality that you get from really good salmon. Sea trout is much more consistent in quality than salmon and also less expensive, so I hope you will enjoy this salmon alternative. Sottaceto means “pickled” in Italian. The cabbage here is slow-cooked in balsamic vinegar, so it’s like a pickle, which cuts through the richness of the lentils and the fattiness of the fish. The recipes for the cabbage and lentils both make more than you will need for four servings of fish. You can double the number of fish fillets you prepare, or serve the remaining cabbage and lentils on the side. Since the cabbage is pickled, it will keep, refrigerated, for at least a week.

It’s impossible to walk into any bakery in Italy without seeing a lattice-covered jam-filled tart called a crostata, so when I penciled out a short list of the desserts I would want to make at Mozza, it was only natural that crostata was on that list. For the longest time, I just couldn’t decide how I wanted to serve it. An unadorned crostata seemed fine for a bakery, but it looked too naked on the plate to serve alone at the Pizzeria. At the same time, I was struggling with how to incorporate another Italian favorite, panna cotta, into our repertoire. Somehow, in the course of all of my experimenting, I got the idea to substitute the creaminess of gelato, the most obvious accompaniment to a fruit tart, with the creaminess of panna cotta, and I put the crostata and panna cotta together. It worked, solving both problems at the same time. We drizzle the panna cotta with saba, Sardinian grape must. What we created was a dessert built of all Italian elements that, though you would never see them together in Italy, somehow work. I’m proud of that. The recipe makes twelve crostate, four more than you will serve with the panna cotta. I based the yield on the number of crostate the dough would make—and I figured you could find someone to eat the extras. You will need twelve 1/2-cup miniature brioche molds to make the panna cotta, though you could use 2-ounce ramekins—your panna cotta will taste just as good, it just won’t look as pretty. The crostata dough is the same as the Pasta Frolla (page 276) with toasted sesame seeds added. Dahlia and I got the idea when she was working on a sesame-seed biscotti. We didn’t like the biscotti enough to include them in our repertoire, but we really liked the subtle flavor and crunch that the seeds added to the dough.

When we first opened the Pizzeria, we made a choice not to offer bread, but we often had customers who requested it. We served breadsticks, but we didn’t want to get involved with bread service. We asked Mario for his advice about people wanting bread, and he said, “They want bread, give them bread. But make it into something and charge them.” And then he told us about fett’unta, sliced bread that is grilled and then drowned in olive oil. The word comes from fetta, or “slice,” and ’unta, which means “oily.” Matt made some in the pizza oven, we both loved it, and we added it to the menu immediately. Today, we offer fett’unta at both restaurants. At the Pizzeria, we suggest people order it when they want items that have sauce to sop up, such as the Eggplant Caponata (page 104), Mozza Caprese (page 66), or to accompany a plate of prosciutto. At the Osteria we serve it with a sampler of mozzarella. We serve this bread year-round, but my favorite time for it is late fall and early winter, just after the olive harvest in Italy, when olio nuovo—green, peppery “new olive oil”—is released. If you happen to have a charcoal grill lit, that is my first choice for making this, but you can also make it in a grill pan or sandwich press—but be prepared for a bit of smoke. At home it’s always part of my Umbrian tavola.

The first time I ate at the Atelier of Joël Robuchon in Paris, I saw a whole fish delivered to another customer that I could tell had been boned and deep-fried. The skeleton had been removed but the head and tail, which flipped up so nicely on the plate, had been left intact. I watched in awe as the diner carved into the fish and ate it head to tail, without any of the usual fuss required to eat around the bones of a whole fish. I was so impressed that I told Matt I wanted to put something like that on the Osteria menu. He chose to grill the fish rather than fry it, but it’s the same idea. We chose to use orata, also called dorade or sea bream, a classic Mediterranean variety, because you see whole branzino on every Italian menu from California to Campagna, and we wanted to introduce our customers to something different. We wrap the fish in a fig leaf in the fall and a radicchio leaf the rest of the year before grilling it in order to contain the herbs stuffed inside the fish. Boning the fish is the most difficult part of making this dish—and I won’t lie to you: it is tricky. I promise that with patience, a good sharp knife (preferably a fish knife or a 6-inch boning knife) and fish tweezers, you will be able to do it.

This is a classic olive tapenade spruced up with the zest of oranges and lemons, and I have to say that it’s the best version I’ve ever had. Note when buying olive purée to look for a product that has just olives or olives and olive oil, such as the olive pâté made by Rustichella d’Abruzzo.

Romesco is a Catalan condiment traditionally made of fried bread and dried peppers, and served with seafood. We make our Romesco using roasted red peppers because we love their charred, sweet flavor. We serve it with mozzarella because we love the way it contrasts with the mild flavor of the cheese—and because we are a mozzarella restaurant! If you happen to have Garlic Confit, use it in this recipe; but if not, your Romesco will still be delicious without it.

Americans think of vanilla as “plain” ice cream, the connotation often being that it is boring. But vanilla, if it’s done well, is neither plain nor boring. Although they are expensive, it’s worth the extra money to buy large, plump vanilla beans, which will impart significantly more flavor than lesser-quality beans. My favorite are Tahitian.

When we started working on this book, I had a battle with Matt and Carolynn about whether to ask for the various pestos that we use to be made using a mortar and pestle or in a food processor. I always make pesto using a mortar and pestle, and I feel strongly that pesto tastes better this way. That said, as Matt was so kind to remind me, when I make pesto, it’s usually because I’m in Italy in the summer, where it gets light at five, dark at ten, and I have all the time in the world. At the restaurant we make pesto in such volume that we have to do it by machine; it would not be practical for us to make it by hand. “This is a restaurant cookbook,” Matt said, “and how we do it at the restaurant is in a food processor.” I’m sorry to say that Carolynn took Matt’s side. “Save that for the Lazy Days in Panicale cookbook,” she said. Although here they gave you instructions for how to make it in a blender, I’m hoping you’ll prove me right by taking the extra time and using elbow grease to make yours with a mortar and pestle from time to time.

Like the Butterscotch Budino (page 272), this gelato marries the sweet flavor of caramel with a touch of salt, a combination I love. It is the base of the Caramel Coppetta, a sundae composed of Marshmallow Sauce and Salted Spanish Peanuts (page 296). Even made in a home ice cream maker, it comes out dense and creamy, and I would say one of the real successes of a long gelato-making project involving a team of gelato-obsessed taste testers.

Bacon-wrapped dates—a more elegant version of rumaki, the 1950s appetizer of chicken liver wrapped in bacon with a water chestnut in the middle—have taken Los Angeles by storm ever since Suzanne Goin started serving them at her restaurant, AOC. I didn’t want to copy hers, but I like them so much that I wanted to make a version for Mozza using figs, which are so abundant in my town in Italy that you almost forget they are a delicacy. Although I’ve never been served anything like these in Italy, I certainly didn’t invent the idea of contrasting the sweetness of figs with something piggy and salty: figs and prosciutto is a classic. At the Osteria, we serve these as an antipasto on a tangle of wilted dandelion greens, but they also make a great bite-size snack for cocktail hour, which is how we have presented them here.