Last week we had here in Istria temperatures of over 35ºC. The heat wave was able to kill my appetite but not my curiosity. I was wondering, is it possible to make a refreshing appetizer for a dinner on a warm summer evening?

Something like gaspacho but made from an ingredient you don’t meet every day. The last package of wild asparagus foraged last spring was hanging out in my freezer and I got a crazy idea. I’ll try to make a salty sorbetto from them.

Here is what I invented after consulting recipes of similar sorbettos on the web.

Ingredients:
60 g steamed and blended wild asparagus (or green cultivated ones)
15 g egg white
7 g white wine
20 g white sugar
5 g water
2 g lemon juice
2 g salt

Make sugar syrup with water and sugar, leave it to cool down. Then mix all ingredients. You will get a thick green cream. Now it’s time to turn the liquid into ice.

I did it in a fast way by using liquid nitrogen, but no worries, you can also make it in classical way by using an ice cream maker. The advantage of liquid nitrogen is that as you pour it into the mixture, it heats up, it goes from the liquid to the gas phase, the gas evaporates and part of it gets incorporated in the sorbetto, making it fluffy and with foam-like texture. The use of liquid nitrogen to rapidly cool down the ingredients has now become a classical technique of molecular cuisine and it’s convenient way to make creamy ice cream or sorbetto in 5 minutes.

With an electric mixer on low speed continuously mix the cream while another person slowly pours the liquid nitrogen in the bowl (many thanks to my roommate who helped me, although she thought her life is in danger). Do it slowly, otherwise everything will solidify and you won’t see what are you doing due to the large amount of mist that will form (see the video below).

In about five minutes the liquid will turn into tiny ice crystals and your sorbetto is done. Here is the consistency you should get at the end.

Alternatively, put the cream in the ice cream maker and follow the instructions until the sorbetto gets desired consistence. This method takes more time, 30-40 minutes at least. The third method is to put the bowl in the freezer, and then every hour you should mix everything thoroughly with the electric mixer.

I contrasted the sorbetto with something really weird – olive oil powder. It is a solid that looks like almond chunks and it smells like olive oil. At first it is crusty in the mouth, then finally while it melts you feel the taste of olive oil. Here is how I presented the dish (the mist is from the liquid nitrogen I poured before serving it).

To make it you need to find maltodextrine powder, complex sugar derived from starch that is used as a food aditive. This stuff has amazing capability to absorb any kind of fat (up to twice of its weight) and remain dry – the powder between fingers will seem as dry as breadcrumbs. You can buy maltodextrine in a sports supplements store since it is used to make high-carb drinks for endurance training (running, cycling…), or it is added in post-workout protein shakes that are usually consumed after the weight training.

You need two part of maltodextrine and one part of some good extravirgin olive oil. I used the oil made from Buža, indigenous Istrian olive variety with exceptionally strong flower and grass aroma, subtle sweet flavor and just a bit spicy in the finish. Mix the oil and maltodextrine in a small bowl with electric mixer. Pass it through tamis to aerate it and obtain fine powder. Put the powder in a stamp of your choice and serve it with a ball of asparagus sorbetto.

Final judgment on this experiment? The sorbetto was tasty and refreshing but asparagus flavor was very mild, the bitterness was almost absent so it was hard to tell it’s made from asparagus. Next time I’ll put more of them and use only freshly picked ones because after staying two months in the freezer their flavor was too faint.

What do you think: are salty sorbettos and ice creams something you would like to try or it’s balsphemy and only sweet variants should be made?

Have you ever eaten flowers? Probably yes, artichokes flowers on your Four Seasons – Quattro stagioni pizza.

Artichokes with peas

As the season of wild asparagus slowly fades away, another vegetable appears on our spring table in all its glory – artichokes. We have few plants in our garden that two weeks ago started to give us their first flowers. They are really easy to prepare.

Here I present a traditional recipe of artichokes with peas usually served with pan-seared chicken. For me this dish is an ultimate delicacy, my madelaine that brings me back to my childhood right in the season when the school was ending and summer holidays were close.

You need for 2 persons:

4 artichokes
300 g green peas
3 tbs breadcrumbs
4 tbs extravirgin olive oil
few cloves of garlic
few branches of italian parsley
1 dl white wine

Remove all but 1-2 cm of stem and the tough outer leaves. Cut away about a quarter of each scale with knife. Finally, trim the tip of the artichoke so that it can stand upside down. Finely chop garlic and parsley, add breadcrumbs, salt and with the aid of some olive oil make a paste.  Put about 1 teaspoon of the paste in between the leaves and in the cavity from which the inedible choke was previously removed. In a deep pan heat the olive oil and arrange the artichokes so that they stand upside down. In other words, the pan should be narrow enough to not give them room to fall over. After 1 minute add wine, a pinch of salt and water until the liquid level is half the height of the artichokes. Cover and simmer on low heat for 30 minutes, then add the green peas and cook until they are done.

Pan-seared chicken with white wine

Usually the artichokes are eaten with chicken that was slowly pan-seared with the addition of aromatic herbs and white wine.

Again heat the olive oil in a deep pan, put on low heat. Pass the chicken pieces in the flour, add to the pan, fry until the meat gets a nice golden crust. Then, when the juices almost evaporate, add a 1/2 glass of white wine, a glass of water and aromatic herbs of your choice (rosemary, sage, thyme…). Simmer for another half an hour, adding more water if necessary. At the end you should have few spoons of thick sauce that you will pour over the meat.

Foraging for wild asparagus near Nature Park Cape Kamenjak was a great fun, but now it’s worth to think of what can be made with these gentle vegetables apart a simple omlette or a more elaborate risotto.

Pasta? Sure, but I want a juicy and creamy dish, with full taste of asparagus. To make it a real challenge I want to use one of my favorite pasta – bigoli – fat Venetian spaghetti with a rough surface that tend to absorb a lot of sauce (if you cannot find bigoli, choose some thicker spaghetti instead). So, we need a lot of sauce, you got the message!

Bigoli is great pasta, but it needs a lot of sauce

The creaminess is easy to achieve with risotto. Take rice of good quality (arborio or vialone nano), a good vegetable stock, excellent extravirgin olive oil and a lot of patience, and you will easily get asparagus risotto with a nice creamy texture even without adding any milk cream or butter – the starch from rice does its job.

With pasta thing get more complicated if you want to avoid these two ingredients. No, I’m not a strict traditionalist that discards them just because they are never used in Istrian cuisine, or because I joined a Weight Watchers program. Here cream, and in a lesser extend butter, would just overwhelm subtle vegetable taste of asparagus and make the dish unnecessarily heavy and less digestible.

The trick is to use the stalks to make a thick soup that will give us a lot of juice. Here are the details.

Wild and cultivated green asparagus

I had both wild and cultivated green asparagus. The wild ones have stronger taste while the cultivated ones we will basically use for the soup. You might have only the cultivated ones, but this is also fine, only the taste of the sauce will be less intense. Chop by hand soft and tender shoots of both species in 2-3 cm long pieces and put them aside.

Peel the remaining woody stalks of the cultivated asparagus (this is an important step!) and chop it in 1 cm pieces. Chop also the stalks of the wild asparagus but throw away very fibrous stalks that can not be easily chopped by hand. Put these stalks in o.3 L of vegetable stock and cook for 10-15 min. Blend the soup and return it to the heat until it get thick like some good cream.

Woody stalks are for the soup, tender green shoots are fried with onions

While the soup is cooking, fry finely chopped onions in some good extravirgin olive oil for 2-3 minutes. Toss in the tender shoots and fry for another 5-10 minutes on low heat, constantly mixing the veggies in the pan. Pour few spoons of vegetable stock if the water evaporates. Do not overcook the asparagus, they need to remain al dente. The same is true also for bigoli that needs to be boiled separately in a lot of salty water.

Add the bigoli in the pan with asparagus, mix everything. At the end, pour the warm soup inside until you get the right level of creaminess/juiciness. Do not exaggerate, we want a good pasta, not a soup. Return to low heat and cook for another minute until everything is nicely unified.

Shock your guests by serving steaming hot pasta directly in the pan. Some good Parmigiano Reggiano grated over and few turns of pepper mill will give that final touch.

PS: Please let me know if also in your kitchen asparagus pasta finally won the battle over asparagus risotto.

What's better - asparagus with pasta or rice?

Some time ago I posted a recipe for Labinski krafi, Istrian version of ravioli filled with young cow cheese and raisins. Inspired by minimalist graphic design (hate it) and black and white movies (love it), I invented a revised version of the recipe with the intention to use two colors – black and white – as two main ingredients of the dish (some artist say these are not even colors, but anti-colors). I prepared it today on Good Friday when usually here in Istria we eat seafood.

Here is the final result, black version of Labinski krafi in white sauce and traditional white version in black sauce.

Labinski krafi in B&W

Now, the recipe.

To make the white krafi follow my previous post. Making of the black version is very similar, you just have to add a package of the cuttlefish ink (nero di sepia) into the pasta dough and knead it thoroughly until you get an uniform black color.

Black and white pasta dough

Use the pasta machine to make 1 mm thick pasta sheet and you will already start to feel sea smell in the air. What to put inside the pasta? This time I had some fresh shrimps in the fridge, but shrimp scampi would be an even better choice for the filling.

Black pasta sheet and shrimps

Inventing the white sauce was easy – I just reduced two cups of good fish stock and thickened it with a teaspoon of cornstarch. In Istrian cuisine milk based sauces are not used at all, but if you like creamy feeling in your mouth use béchamel sauce

The black sauce was a challenge, in fact, there are not so many ingredients that can give a nice black color and. And I wanted to avoid using again cuttlefish ink since it’s not so easy to digest and would give too strong taste to the sauce. Finally, I used black olives tapenade diluted in some water, thickened with cornstarch with few drops of aceto balsamico. The result was satisfactory, although I am not quite happy about it since the olive taste prevailed too much over all other ingredients.

Any other idea for a subtle, elegant yet black sauce that would pair nicely with fresh cow cheese inside the white krafi? Blackberries? Aubergines? I don’t have idea.

I dedicate this recipe to Katarina Matić Ferić, my beloved chef from Restaurant “Milan” in Pula. Looking forward to cook something together with her.

Today it’s Mardi Gras, the end of Carnival festivities, the start of the annual Catholic 40-day long fast and the day when fritule are made. All along the Adriatic coast, from Istria to Dalmatia, tradition is very similar – these doughnut-like pastry will be fried and taken outside on the streets, to be eaten still warm in a carnival procession.

Fritule - a traditional Mardi Gras pastry

Fritule are very easy to make. Here is a modernized recipes that includes yogurt and grated apples. No need to use yeast of any kind and wait for the dough to grow. You need:

250 ml yogurt
2 eggs
3 teaspoons baking powder
a bit of salt
3-4 tablespoons of sugar
raisins according to your taste, soaked in warm water or dark rum
10 tablespoons of flour
1 sachet of vanilla sugar (or add a bit of vanilla essence)
2 grated apples

Mix everything thoroughly. Pour enough vegetable oil in a pan so that fritule do not touch the bottom. Heat the oil until very hot (but not burning!). Use a teaspoon to grab a bit of the dough and fry it until golden brown. Put them on the tissue paper so that the excess oil gets absorbed. When you are done with the frying, sprinkle them with icing sugar.

Meet a traditional dish eaten on Christmas eve when it is customary not to eat meat. This jewel of Venetian cuisine is in Istria typically served with pasta, and here I present it in a revisited, modern version.

Pasta rolls with Baccalà mantecato

600 g  salted or dried cod (stockfish), depends what you can find but the dried one is tastier
1 L milk
6 anchovy fillets
1/2 cup of breadcrumbs
1 chopped clove of garlic
at least 500 g of very good (!) extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup cleaned (stems removed) & chopped Italian parsley
Salt & freshly ground pepper to taste

I bought a nice specimen of the ragno stockfish. Here is the beast.

Dried cod (stockfish)

Ragno means it comes from the islands of Lofoten in Norway, where the best quality stockfish is produced thanks to stable weather conditions during the drying process. Usually the fish is stamped with ragno sign in order to mark its superior quality.

Superior quality dried cod (stockfish) - Ragno

Bad news, you can not prepare it the same day. Remember, the time is the secret ingredient of many delicious recipes. There is no haute cuisine without patience.

You have to put the cod two days before in cold water to rehydrate it or to remove the salt. Keep it in the fridge under 5ºC and change the water every once in a while, every 8 hours is enough.

Stockfish soaking in cold water

After two days of soaking, dry the fish. In a large casserole heat the milk, add the fish and cook it on low heat for at least 30 minute. Remove the fish from the milk and drain it in a colander. Reserve the milk. Clean the fish from bones and skins so that only the white meat remains.

Mixing the baccalà

Place the fish in a large mixing bowl. Heat olive oil, add smashed garlic and fry it for not more than 1 minute. Chop the garlic and add it to the bowl together with 3 anchovy fillets and parsley. Blend the ingredients with the hand held mixer and simultaneously add the olive oil, until the mix gets white and foamy like a cream. To make the dish even fancier, add some chopped black truffles in the mix (this version I really ADORE!)

At this point add the milk (but not too much so that your mix does not get too liquid) and everything will become nicely creamy. Add the salt and pepper as needed. The baccalà mantecato is finished. You can serve it also as a nice appetizer on toasted bread.

Now the pasta. In abundant water cook pappardelle which are large, broad fettuccine. Keep them al dente, of course. Drain the pasta.

Prepare the sauce. In a pan heat the olive oil, add 3 anchovy fillets and breadcrumbs. Smash the anchovies so that everything amalgams in a nice sauce.

Making of the pasta rolls

Take few pappardelle and aligned it on a dish. Put a roll of baccalà mantecato in the middle of pasta, add few drops of the sauce and make a nice roll. Put the roll on the plate, on the top add again a bit of the sauce, parsley and two spoons of extravirgin olive oil.

This dish pairs well with a sparkling wine or a fresh and crisp white wine (Istrian Malvasia for example) that will contrast the creaminess and high oil content of the dish.

After more than two months, last Saturday I went to cut my hair. It is Christmas time so I took a bottle of my olive oil (Oio Manjadico) to give it as a present to my favorite hairdresser Danijela. She was surprised and excited about the oil, but she also prepared a much bigger surprise for me.

She gave me something you can not buy in the supermarket. Something that probably was appreciated by the kids in ancient times, before the advent of chocolate. A dessert that was probably made also in ancient Mediterranean civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome…

Dried figs from Zaton near Šibenik

I got a garland of dried figs from Zaton Šibenski, a small village near Šibenik in Dalmatia. It is made of a black fig variety indigenous to Dalmatia that you can not find it Istria. Tasting the first one was like entering a teleport that beamed me from the cold windy Istrian winter to a sunny Dalmatian island in August. The figs were incredibly delicious that I ate four in a row! And I thought I do not like dried figs.

You bite it and it is so tender, definitely not a tooth breaker like some dried figs can be, the skin is nicely crusty and inside it seams there is some juicy marmelade. Each fig is separated with a bay leaf that gives a particular aroma to the fruit and protects it from rottening and flies. Apart the aroma of bay leaf, you feel cinnamon and clove (remember, no spice is added to the garland).

After the Sunday lunch, it was great to enjoy it with non-sugared Turkish coffee and a glass of red wine.

Dried figs, turkish coffee and red wine

This garland is quintessence of non-interventionist approach so common in Mediterranean cuisine. Danijela’s grandmother Golubica Martinović just picked the figs and bay leafs, made the garland out of them, left it for few months in a dry and dark place and that is the whole preparation procedure.

Golubica Martinović from Zaton Šibenski

No preservatives, no spices, no sugar. Just nature.

Many thanks to Danijela for such a beautiful Christmas present.

PS: If you come to Pula in December contact Danijela on her phone +385 91 538 6351 and you can get a fig garland for ONLY 35-45 kn (around 5 euros)! This noble stuff should cost at least twice as much.

I like to eat seasonal. What is more seasonal now in autumn than quinces, kakis and young olive oil? Don’t ask me why kakis have become almost autochtonous to Istria. Here is a nice dessert you can prepare in less than 10 minutes.

Quince sauté on kaki mousse with chocolate and young leccino olive oil

For 2 persons you need:
1 quince, 2 kakis, 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 tablespoon of sugar
cinnamon, 1 clove, 25 g dark chocolate, 1/2 lemon
2 tablespoons extravirgin olive oil, possibly fruity, young and cloudy

Peel quince and kakis. Cut quince in slices. Slightly caramelize sugar in a saucepan on low heat. Add quince slices, clove and butter and sauté everything for five minutes, until the slices are cooked but remain al dente. Put kakis, cinnamon and lemon juice in blender and make the mousse. Put the mousse on the bottom, add quince slices on top. Melt the chocolate and pour over the fruits. At the end, juice everything with a young olive oil that will add a nice refreshing peppery note to the dessert. Otherwise it would be too boring.

Wine and olive oil have a common enemy – oxygen. It oxidizes their flavors and aromas so that they loose their complexity, become boring and dull, and may even acquire defects. What is the cheapest and the most effective way to protect your wine and olive oil at home? Use a aerosol spray can filled with argon, a noble and inert gas that forms a protective blanket on the liquid surface.

Using argon in aerosol spray can to protect olive oil and wine

In wine oxygen works faster, partly because there are also acetic bacteria that will use it to turn alcohol into acetic acid. Wine that remained in a closed half finished bottle for just 24h will already be altered and in few days it may become even undrinkable so that you can either pour it down the drain or try to make your own vinegar. What to do if you would like to take five bottles of wine and open them at once (of course, not to get drunk, but just to taste different flavors and aromas one after another, or to change wine with each course)? Or, you own a wine bar or a restaurant that serves wine by glass and would like to keep the wine quality unaltered?

Wine saver vacuum pump

There are several methods which can slow down or completely stop wine spoilage. The simplest one is to put the bottles in the fridge. In that way, the acetic bacteria reproduce more slowly than on ambient temperature. From my experience, this method is applicable only for one day and the results are not very good because you do not prevent aroma and flavor oxidation. There are observations that intense reds will loose the flavor intensity and acidity when kept only for a day in the fridge.

The second method is to use a wine saver vacuum pump. According to this post, the pump is worthless since the sucking pressure it generates is too low to remove much air from the bottle. Nevertheless I should give it a try; maybe it is effective at least for 3-4 days that is enough time to consume the entire bottle? The third method is to replace air in the bottle with some non-oxidizing gas.

In case of olive oil only the third method is used. In fact, before bottling the oil is usually stored in large stainless steel tanks in which large surface of oil comes in contact with the air. Oil oxidizes more slowly than wine – a month or two are needed for any perceptible change in aromas and flavors. The worst thing it may happen is that the oil in six months can even get rancid and therefore loose its precious extravirgin status.

Tank blanketing with nitrogen for olive oil preservation

Which gas is used in the third method, knows also under the name tank blanketing? The most common is nitrogen since it is cheap and easily available. The problem with nitrogen is that it has density of 1.251 g/L which is comparable to the density of air (1.2 g/L), so the pressure of nitrogen inside the tank needs to be kept constant. Therefore, you need to buy an expensive bottle and a pressure controler connected to your container (see the picture above).

Argon, on the other hand, is heavier (1.784 g/L) than air which makes its usage much easier. You need to buy it packed in aerosol spray can can so there’s no need to bother with valves, tubing and pressure controllers. It is enough to gently spray it for 2-3 seconds in the bottle or stainless tank and heavy, inert argon molecules will sink down and form a protective blanket on the liquid surface (surface blanketing effect). The oxygen will no longer be in contact with the liquid.

Unfortunately, it is hard to find argon in aerosol spray on the market. Here are some web shops where I found what we need:

Europe:

Argon (99.995%) 4 L from Sigma-Aldrich   75.30 €
Gives an application to about 120 bottles of 0.75 L. It is ultra high purity argon sold for laboratory use. It is also completely suitable for alimentary use, but its price way too high. We need to find something cheaper.

Private Preserve – Wine Preserver on www.amazon.co.uk 12 £
Again, 120 bottles of 0.75 L can be preserved. It is a mixture of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and argon that are all gases suitable for oxygen blocking. The gas mixture density, a factor important for efficient surface blanketing, is not specified. I presume the manufacturer have put inside more argon and carbon dioxide (heavy gases) than nitrogen (light gas) to keep the average density at least 30% higher than the air density.

USA:

Private Preserve – Wine Preserver on www.amazon.com $8.95
Same as above but cheaper. Here is the manufacturer website.

Winelife $9.80
Very similar to Private preserve. It is not pure argon but a mixture of oxygen blocking gases (probably also nitrogen, carbon dioxide and argon).

Ultra Wine Saver $19.95$
99.99% Argon. Very nice and ergonomical design. One argon cartridge ($2.75) gives an application to about 18 bottles of wine.

Bloxygen Gas 9.95$
120 bottles of 0.75 L can be preserved.  I checked the composition and they claim it is 100% Argon. Disclaimer: This product is sold for preserving unused finishing materials. The exact composition should be double checked with the producer to see if the product is suitable for alimentary use.

Hope I did not bother you too much with such a long and technical article. I think it will be useful to many wine and olive oil enthusiast in Istria who have never heard of this cheap and useful technology.

Ossobucco with king boletes risotto, creamy spinach and 3-weeks-old olive oil

For two (moderately hungry) persons you need:
1 ossobucco (veal shanks) of 300 g
2 carrots
1 onion
1 small celery root
2 garlic cloves
1 lemon (for making zest)
3 table spoons of extravirgin olive oil
1 dl white wine
3 tablespoons of flour
for bouquet garni:
thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, 1 celery stem with leaves, 2-3 parsley branches

Cut carrots and celery root in small cubes. Slice and finely chop onions and garlic. Take the pressure cooker and slowly heat the olive oil in it. In the meantime, rinse the steak in cold water, pat it dry with paper towels, add some salt and pepper and finally flour both sides. Fry each side of the ossobucco until they get a brownish color.

Set the meat aside, add onions, carrot and celery root cubes to the cooker and fry everything until the onions get transparent (3-4 minutes). Add garlic and fry it for less than one minute otherwise it gets bitter. Add the wine, 2 dl of water, lemon zestes and our bouquet garni. In original recipe you add also a can of peeled tomatoes, but I decided to skip this ingredient since I prefer milder flavors.

At the end, put the meat back in the pressure cooker and careully close the lid. When the steam starts to go out from the nozzle, cook for 25 min on low heat. When you open the lid, the meat should be tender and your house will soon be filled with inviting bouquet.

The bone of ossobuco is the yummiest part

In the meantime you can prepare the side dishes. Yesterday, I was cooking dried king boletus that previously have to be soaked in water for an hour. Luckily, I have put the soaking water aside and today it was great for cooking parboiled rice in it. During the cooking, the water should entirely evaporate so that the rice absorbs as much as possible of the boletus aroma and flavor. To achieve this, the volume of water has to be three times the rice volume. If needed, on medium heat reduce the soaking water to achieve the desired volume. Add some salt or half of a bouillon cube in the water, and that’s it. In that way you get a “fake” or poor man’s king boletus risotto prepared in 10 minutes. It is not so tasty to serve it as an independent dish, but as a side dish is perfect.

To make the creamy spinach is even easier. Steam the spinach for 5 minutes and then drain it. In a large skillet melt the butter over low heat, add spinach, the cream and the salt. Raise the heat to medium, mash the spinach with a wooden spoon, cook for 3-5 min. Add some pepper and serve it. To contrast the sweet and tender flavor of cream, I poured over the spinach one tablespoon of my fresh olive oil (3 weeks old) which is right now peppery and bitterish

Enjoy!