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By Root 4066 0

The Italian ministry of agriculture recommends that it be used within a year and a half after it is bottled. It can be kept in its original container, if unopened, for that much time, or slightly longer, if stored in a cool, dark cupboard or in a wine cellar. Once opened, it should be used as soon as possible, certainly within a month or six weeks. Keep it in a bottle with a tight closure. Do not keep it in one of those oil cans with a spout unless you use it up rather quickly. If an opened bottle of oil has been around for some time, smell it before using it and, if it smells and tastes rancid, discard it or it will spoil the flavor of anything you cook.

Cooking with olive oil It is sometimes suggested that while one should choose the very best oil one can for a salad, it’s all right to use a lower grade for cooking. Such advice is flawed by a flagrant contradiction. One chooses an olive oil because of its flavor, and that flavor is no less critical to a pasta sauce, or to a dish of vegetables, than it is to a lettuce leaf. Once you have had spinach or mushrooms or a tomato sauce cooked in marvelous olive oil, you will not willingly have them any other way.

If taste is the overriding consideration, use the olive oil with the finest flavor as freely for cooking as for salads. If other factors, such as cost, must be given priority, cook with olive oil less often, replacing it with vegetable oil, but in those less frequent circumstances when you’ll be turning to olive oil, cook with the best you can afford.

OLIVES

Olive

The olives used most commonly in Italian cooking are the glossy, round, black ones known in Italy as greche, Greek. They should not be confused with the other familiar variety of Greek olive, the purple Kalamata, elongated, tapering at the ends, whose flavor is ill suited to Italian dishes.

When cooking with olives, it’s preferable to add the olives at the very last, when the sauce, the fricassee, the stew, or whatever you are making, is nearly done. Cooking olives a long time accentuates their bitterness.

OREGANO

Origano

Botanically speaking, oregano is closely related to marjoram, but its brasher scent is more closely associated with the cooking of the South, with pizza and with pizza-style sauces. It is excellent in some salads, with eggplant, with beans, and extraordinary in salmoriglio, the Sicilian sauce for grilled swordfish. Unlike marjoram, oregano dries perfectly.

PANCETTA

Pancetta, from pancia, the Italian for belly, is the distinctive Italian version of bacon. In its most common form, known as pancetta arrotolata, it is bundled jelly-roll fashion into a salami-like shape. To make pancetta arrotolata, the rind is first stripped away, then the meat is dressed with salt, ground black pepper, and a choice of other spices, which, depending on the packer, may include nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, or crushed juniper berries. It is moister than bacon because it is not smoked. When it has been cured for two weeks, it is tightly rolled up and tied, then wrapped in organic or, more commonly, artificial casing. At this point, it can be eaten as is, as one would eat prosciutto. It is more tender and considerably less salty than prosciutto. Its more important use, however, is in cooking, where its savory-sweet, unsmoked flavor has no wholly satisfactory substitute. Some Italians use a similarly cured, flat version of pancetta still attached to its rind, known as pancetta stesa. Pancetta is never smoked except in Italy’s northeastern regions—Veneto, Friuli, Alto Adige—where a preference for flat, smoked bacon similar to North American slab bacon, is one of the legacies of a century of Austrian occupation.

PARMESAN

Parmigiano-Reggiano

Common usage bestows the name “Parmesan” on almost any cheese that can be grated over pasta, but the qualities of a true Parmesan—rich, round flavor and the ability to melt with heat and become inseparable from the ingredients to which it is joined—are vested in a cheese that has no rivals: parmigiano-reggiano.

What is parmigiano-reggiano? The name is stringently