Italian

You can substitute fresh or frozen peas for the fava beans. Drain the ricotta in a sieve set over a bowl for about 10 minutes to remove excess liquid. Try to find the denser buffalo ricotta for this recipe. If you use regular ricotta, the filling won’t be as thick.

This Italian classic typically showcases four cheeses (“quattro formaggi”) with different characteristics. For our rendition, we topped the crust with fontina (semifirm), mozzarella (soft and fresh), Gorgonzola (blue-veined), and Pecorino Romano (hard and aged).

The dough is easiest to handle when it’s well chilled—keep it in the refrigerator until right before it hits the grill. Depending on the size of your grill, you can make more than one pizza at a time. (Instead of making six pizzas, another option is to make four large ones; cut the dough into quarters before rolling it out.) If you don’t own a grill, you can make the pizzas on a grill pan.

You can intensify the garlic flavor by rubbing an additional clove on one side of the toasted bread before tearing it into chunks.

Frico, or “little trifles” in Italian, are very thin and crisp. When sprinkling the cheese mixture in the skillet, don’t worry if there are spaces; the cheese will melt into a lacy whole. In Italy, frico are traditionally made with Montasio cheese, but other cheeses, such as Cheddar, Asiago, and Parmesan, produce excellent results.

A technique that is unique to this bread is the use of a cooked flour paste, made the day before. The gelatinized starches release flavors, giving this bread a distinct quality.

Pugliese refers to the southeastern Italian region of Apulia (Puglia in Italian), but the variations on loaves with this name are endless. Many of the versions I’ve seen in the United States are similar to ciabatta—sometimes they actually are ciabatta, but are called pugliese just to differentiate them from the competition. What is the same is that both of these breads, along with many others, fall into the category of rustic breads, which we define as hydration in excess of 65 percent, usually approaching 80 percent. In Italy, where the flour is naturally more extensible than the very elastic North American flour that we use, there is no need to overhydrate. But here we need to pump more water into the dough in order to stretch the gluten strands, giving the loaves their distinctive big-hole structure and delicious nutlike flavor. One distinction between ciabatta, which originated in the Lake Como region of Lombardy (northern Italy), and pugliese is that pugliese breads are usually baked in rounds rather than in the slipper shape of ciabatta. The French version of a rustic bread, pain rustique, is also slightly elongated, but more of a bâtard than a slipper shape. Those, along with the pain à l’ancienne baguette (page 191) and the very elongated stirato and stubby pain rustique (pictured on page 135, made from the ciabatta dough), are all rustic breads, each with its own shape and ingredient makeup. An important distinction of the true pugliese bread, and one not often seen in American versions, is the use of golden durum flour, finely milled and packaged as fancy or extra fancy durum flour. Fancy durum is milled from the same strain of durum wheat as the sandy semolina flour that is sprinkled underneath hearth loaves and used in pane siciliano (page 198), but it is milled more finely. There are bakeries in Apulia that make this bread with 100 percent fancy durum flour and some that use a blend of durum and regular bread flours. In the following formula, I suggest a blend, but feel free to play around with the proportions, moving even into a 100 percent durum version when you feel adventurous. The challenge for anyone tackling this bread is getting comfortable with wet dough. Once you do, you will find it difficult to resist the desire to make rustic bread all the time; the softness and pliability of the dough give it a wonderful feeling in the hand. Combined with the flavor enhancement of long fermentation, this formula brings forth a loaf that is so dramatic, so delicious, and so much fun to make that it will forever change your standard of what constitutes great bread.

Pizza is the perfect food, or so I’m so often told. When I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, I’d heard that there was great pizza to be had, so I asked everyone I met to recommend his or her favorite place. They all seemed to have a different style that they preferred, not unlike the diversity I’ve found in similar explorations into barbecue and chili. There is Sicilian thick-crusted pizza and thin New York style (the kind where the nose of the slice has to be flipped back into the center of the slice to keep all the cheese from running off). At least two-dozen franchise pizza shops exist within a three-mile radius of my home, some with prebaked shells, others with house-made crust. There are double-decker pizzas, cheese-in-the-crust pizzas, and a very popular twice-baked crust, recently dubbed Argentinian pizza in some regions, but here it is mysteriously and incorrectly referred to as Neapolitan. The best pizza I’ve had in recent years was in Phoenix at Pizzeria Bianco, a small restaurant run by Chris Bianco and his friends and family. Chris grows his own basil and lettuce behind the restaurant, makes his own mozzarella cheese, and hand-mixes his pizza dough in large batches (I mean really hand-mixes, on a bench and by hand). It is wet dough, like ciabatta, and sits for hours slowly fermenting. His is the closest I’ve had to pizza made in the style of Naples: simple, thin crusted, and baked fast and crisp. Pizzeria Bianco serves only about six kinds of pizza, a house salad, house-made Italian bread (from the pizza dough), and three or so desserts made by Chris’s mom. They can’t keep up with the business, and getting a seat in the pizzeria is like winning the lottery. Naples is the birthplace of what we today call pizza. Genoa has its focaccia, Tuscany its schiacciata, and Sicily its sfincione, but true Neapolitan pizza is the perfect expression of the perfect food. Every other style may also be crust and topping, but life would be better if only this superior version were allowed to call itself pizza. More to the point, it is possible to make a great pizza at home even if your oven cannot reach the heat levels used by the very best pizzerias that burn hardwood or bituminous coal and reach between 800° and 1200°F! Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a wonderful piece in the August 2000 issue of Vogue in which he told of trying dozens of ways to generate enough heat to replicate a pizza oven in his home. He nearly burned down his house in the process. Unfortunately, most home ovens will not go beyond 550°F, if that, but the following dough will produce an amazing pizza even at that relatively low heat. It has long been my contention that it is the crust, not the toppings, that make a pizza memorable. I’ve seen some expensive, wonderful ingredients wasted on bad crust, or, even more often, a decent dough ruined in an oven that was not hot enough to bake it properly. For many years, cookbook instructions have been to bake at about 350°F or maybe at 425°F. Rarely do you see instructions that suggest cranking the oven to its fullest capacity, but that’s what you have to do to make a great pizza at home. The single biggest flaw in most pizza dough recipes is the failure to instruct the maker to allow the dough to rest overnight in the refrigerator (or at least for a long time). This gives the enzymes time to go to work, pulling out subtle flavor trapped in the starch. The long rest also relaxes the gluten, allowing you to shape the dough easily, minimizing the elastic springiness that so often forces you to squeeze out all the gas. Lately, there’s been a controversy regarding what type of flour to use. Unbleached is a given. It simply delivers more flavor and aroma. For the past few years the trend has been toward high-gluten or bread flour because it promotes oven spring and holds together better during handling (this is called dough “tolerance”)...

Panettone is a traditional, rich Christmas bread originating in Milan. There are many folktales about its origins, the most popular being that it was created a few hundred years ago by a humble baker named Tony to woo his beloved, the daughter of a rich merchant. More importantly, he had to win over the father to the idea of his daughter marrying a baker, so he pulled out all the stops, filling his bread with the baker’s equivalent of the gifts of the wise men: butter, brandied dried and candied fruits, nuts, and sugar. The merchant was so impressed that he not only gave his daughter in marriage, but also set Tony up with his own bakery in Milan with the promise that he would continue to make his bread, pane Tony. For many years the standard panettone found in most bakeries and cookbooks has been one made with commercial yeast, a good but not great rendition. The best and most traditional versions are made by wild-yeast fermentation, augmented by a small amount of commercial yeast. Recently, one of the largest panettone bakeries in Italy changed its formula from commercial yeast to wild yeast, returning to the more traditional method that had all but been abandoned. The bakers discovered that not only does the bread have a longer shelf life due to the increased acidity, but it also outsold the commercial-yeast version. This added up to a huge increase in profits and, more importantly, to happier customers. The following formula will produce a long-keeping loaf that could easily become a perennial favorite at holiday time. It is more time-consuming to produce, but that’s the price of world-class quality. You can also make a perfectly good panettone by following the Stollen formula on page 252, shaping it in the round panettone style.

This is one of the breakthrough breads that taught me the value of combining large portions of pre-ferment with overnight cold fermentation. Semolina is the gritty, sandy flour milled from durum wheat. (Durum is the strain of wheat most closely identified with pasta.) It is a hard, high-protein wheat, but it is not high in gluten. The golden color is mainly due to a high proportion of beta-carotene, which contributes both aroma and flavor as well as the appealing hue. You may substitute a finer grind of this flour, called fancy durum (sometimes labeled “extra fancy durum”). When it is labeled “fancy durum,” the flour is milled to the consistency of regular bread flour. This is the grind used in pasta and also used in the 100 percent durum bread called pugliese (page 222). This version of pane siciliano consists of 40 percent semolina flour and 60 percent high-gluten or bread flour. The finished loaf has a beautiful blistered crust, not too crackly, and a crumb with large, irregular holes, open to the same degree as good French or Italian bread. The sweetness and nutty quality of the semolina, and the complementary flavor of the sesame-seed garnish make this one of my absolute favorite breads.

In America, the term Italian bread has come to mean a loaf very similar to French bread, only usually a little softer. This has very little to do with reality, however, since scores of authentic Italian breads exist. What made the old-time Italian bakeries that were once a part of many American towns and cities special was that the bread was baked fresh daily and bought right at the shop. Today, even with the current bread revolution, much of the bread produced does not stand up to the those old Italian loaves, despite the love, care, and wonderful wood- or coal-fired ovens that we may associate with many contemporary bakeries. This is because many bakeries, smitten with innovative modern ingredients that accelerate fermentation in order to save time and increase profits, have reverted to fast-rising methods that leave much of the potential flavor and color trapped in the starches. The Italian biga pre-ferment method is a step in the direction of improving these breads, much as pâte fermentée and poolish does for French bread. The following formula pushes the biga method to its limits, and the result is an Italian bread as good as or better than any I’ve had in recent years. The use of a large amount of biga insures maximum sugar breakout from starches, evoking a sweetness that is far beyond the small amount of sugar in the formula. The finished bread will be slightly softer than French bread and less crusty.