Welcome to Segreti d'Italia, the monthly newsletter of the Aparments Florence blog!!
The purpose of this Newsletter is to inform visitors on all that's happening in town and to give them special insights on Florence, but more than that, to give them the tools to live the perfect italian lifestyle.
For this year and the ones ahead of us, we will be concentrating mainly on what we call the re-institution of La Dolce Vita, leaving aside, in abandon, all issues regarding politics, traffic, security, McCains (both the running president and the French Fries), and the cost of living.
We will focus instead on fresh produce,incredibly good recipes, who does the best vodka martini, which side street and which bell to ring on for an oriental massage,where to get the best french manicure, and how to spend four thousand euros on just one pair of shoes. Yes, that is correct.
Today we will start with something simple and healthy, the favourite, in season vegetable, at this moment ranking very high on the market of commodities: the Artichoke.
The artichoke plant loves the meditarranean climate. If the plant weren't cut off before the planting for specific culinary purposes, the only possible result would be a beauiful wild flower, similar to the one you can find on of the coat of Arms of Scotland. The pronunciation for Carciofo is: k'arch-oh-fow, and the actual name derives from the arab kharshuf.
There are 2 main families of Carciofi, the spiny ones and the non-spiny ones. Within the spiny range, you can find the Ligure, the Tuscan and the ones from Sardinia. These are the favourite ones to be eaten raw, or slightly cooked. The non-spiny family's main artichoke type, instead, is the Carciofo Romano, also said "La mammola", due to its big-mama kind of shape, and this is the main artichoke for recipes where the artichoke is cooked for longer times, like in stews. Our favourite artichoke, belonging to the spiny family, is the Tuscan one, obviously.
Because we live just once, and we like to be fussy on everything, we recommend the "Morellino" artichoke, which comes from the beautiful region of the Maremma, south of Tuscany confining with the Tirrenian sea. You can recognize the Morellino from it's size (smaller than the other artichokes) and from its very dark colour, hence the name "Morellino" which means: "short guy with dark hair".
When you pick your first Morellinos, make sure that they are hard, that the outer leaves are very closed and tight and that there are no stains on them. If you find them with the long stems still intact, with the big leaves on them even better. SEGATO DI CARCIOFO Now we are ready for our first recipe.
Take the Morellini, one for each person at the table, break off the long stems till about 4 centimeters from the base, and start taking the outer leaves out, one by one. You have to take off about 10 to 12 leaves, reaching to those inner leaves that are pale yellow on the lower half of the leaf and dark green until up to the point the spine on the upper half of the leaf.
Now prepare a bowl with water and freshly squeezed lemon juice from at least two lemons.
Take the artichokes, one by one place them sideways on the cutting board, cut off all the dark green upper part, leaving just the pale yellow lower part together with the base of artichoke.
Now trim a little bit of the base all around. Then cut the artichoke in half, and, as quickly as you would on an open heart surgery, with the point of a pointy knife, remove the fuzzy hairy bit right in the heart of the artichoke, you don't want to eat that. Do this passage as quickly as you can, and immediately soak both halves of the artichoke heart in the lemony water bowl, to avoid that the leaves become black and bitter. If you cut all the artichokes together, and then put them all in the water, they will become black and bitter, so you should do this one by one.
Leave them soaked for 10 minutes.
Then start taking the "cuori di carciofo" (artichoke hearts), and on the cutting board cut each half finely to the length of the leaf. After each heart, take the finely cut leaves and put them in a separate serving bowl and squeeze in a small lemon twist straight away. Then go on to the next half, and so on. When you are done, add salt, pepper and olive oil to taste. Complete with pinenuts and finely cut parmesan flakes.
Pick the best flavoured oil, as it it one of the key ingredients to the recipe, and it can blend in with the taste of the raw artichoke in an extraordinary way.
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Segato di Carciofi
By Admin Apartments Florence (11/1/2008 3:42:29 PM, in Florentine recepies, read 1,978 times)
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