It’s been an Italian sort of day, which means I affected an effortlessly elegant look and bribed a public official.
Okay, it means I ate a bunch of Italian food. For lunch I grabbed a panini from Delaurenti, whose sandwiches are austere in conception and hugely appealing. I had the Misto, with salami, mortadella, Asiago, and Mama Lil’s peppers. There’s another one on long skinny bread with prosciutto di Parma, arugula, and I think Parmigiano. And several more in the same vein. $5.50 and highly recommended.
Then I rushed home to start preparing the *stracotto,* which is nothing more or less than Italian pot roast, made with tomatoes and red wine and often mushrooms. I don’t like stewed mushrooms so I sauteed them separately with fennel and red onion. I plated it up (actually big-bowled it up) as follows:
* polenta
* meat
* ladle of highly reduced sauce
* vegetable saute on top
A delicious mess.
The stracotto recipe I used was from Cook’s Illustrated. There is something funny about the CI pot roast recipe and its variations:
> Once in a while in the test kitchen, we happen on a true “Eureka!” moment, when a chance test result leads to a breakthrough cooking technique. Some days before, we had forgotten to remove one of the roasts from the oven, allowing it to cook an hour longer than intended. Racing to the kitchen with an instant-read thermometer, we found the internal temperature of the roast was still 210 degrees, but the meat had a substantially different appearance and texture. The roast was so tender that it was starting to separate along its muscle lines. A fork poked in to the meat met with no resistance and nearly disappeared into the flesh….
> We “overcooked” several more roasts. Each had the same great texture. The conclusion? Not only do you have to cook stracotto until it reaches 210 degrees internally, but the meat has to remain at that temperature for a full hour. In other words, cook the stracotto until it’s done–and then keep on cooking!
So this breakthrough cooking technique is, uh, cooking the pot roast until it’s very tender. Standing on the shoulders (and bowtie) of Christopher Kimball, have discovered another breakthrough cooking technique. When heating up a slice of bread, allow it to continue heating until it is actually browned on both sides. Alert the media.
The punchline is that “stracotto” is Italian for “overcooked.”
can i please just tell you that i felt the same little leap of recognition/joy just now reading “mortadella” in your post that i used to feel reading “nick rhodes” in articles about duran duran, circa 1985?
i was never, ever a balogna lovin’ kid. would not have ever described myself in terms like “i sure like some large-diameter sausage with large chunks of fat throughout” (um, this might sound more dirty than i mean it to).
but now, now that i have quit an accidental office job that made me cry, and work in a gourmet wine/cheese/samwich/etc. shop…i can’t eat enough mortadella!
i tell people that have never heard of it that it’s like if balogna graduated from college and backpacked around europe for a year.
um, the rest of your post sounded tasty, also.
As I’m sure you’re aware, there aren’t many Italians back on the farm in Vermont.
On the subject of, um, Italian food, I was just looking up recipes for peperonata, and the fifth link (out of, like, thousands) was to an old egullet column of yours. It was even higher than peperonata.com…
Anyway, I have a whole bunch of organic peppers sitting around waiting to be used, because we actually don’t really like peppers that much, but they come from the CSA; I thought I’d use them all up at once in some peperonata; but none of the recipes seem the same as my host signora’s (originally Veronese). Is your Biba recipe pretty good to eat plain, rather than on bruschetta?
I think it is, Wendy. It’s definitely good on polenta.
The mind boggles.