Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [18]
Buying ricotta One should look for ricotta in the same place one looks for other good cheese, in a cheese shop, in a food store with a specialized cheese department, or in a good Italian grocery. In any place, that is, that sells it loose, cutting it from a piece that looks as though it had been unmolded from a basket. Usually, it is not only fresher than the supermarket variety packed in plastic tumblers, but it is less watery, an important consideration when baking with ricotta.
Note If the only ricotta available to you is the plastic tumbler variety, and you intend to bake with it, the method described below will help you eliminate most of the excess liquid that would make the pastry crust soggy:
• Put the ricotta in a skillet and turn on the heat to very low. When the ricotta has shed its excess liquid, pour the liquid out of the pan, wrap the ricotta in cheesecloth, and hang it over a bowl or deep dish. The ricotta is ready to work with when it has stopped dripping.
ROMANO CHEESE
Pecorino Romano
The Italian for sheep is pecora, hence all cheese made from sheep’s milk, such as romano, is called pecorino. The sheep antedates the cow in the domestic culture of Mediterranean peoples, and the first cheeses to be made were produced from ewe’s milk. Today there are dozens of pecorino cheese of which romano is but one example. Some are soft and fresh, like a farmer’s cheese, and there are others that mark every stage of a cheese’s development, from the tenderness of a few weeks of age to the crumbliness and sharpness of a year and a half or more. The most stirring flavor and consistency of any table cheese may be that of a four-month-old pecorino from the Val d’Orcia, south of Siena, served with a few drops of olive oil and a coarse grating of black pepper.
Romano, on the other hand, is so sharp and pungent that only a singular palate is likely to find it agreeable as a table cheese. Its place is in the grater, and its use is with a limited group of pasta sauces that benefit from its piquancy. It is indispensable in amatriciana sauce, a little of it ought to be combined with Parmesan in pesto, and it is often the cheese to use in sauces for macaroni and other factory-made pasta that are made with such vegetables as broccoli, rapini, cauliflower, and olive oil.
In most instances where one would use romano, a better choice, if available, is another ewe’s milk cheese, fiore sardo, a pecorino from Sardinia that has been aged twelve months or more. Fiore, while it delivers all the tanginess one looks for in romano, has none of its harshness.
ROSEMARY
Rosmarino
Next to parsley, rosemary is the most commonly used herb in Italy. Its aroma, which can quicken the most torpid appetites, is usually associated with roasts. In Italian cooking, a sprig of rosemary is indispensable to the fully realized flavor of a roast chicken or rabbit. It is exceptionally good with pan-roasted potatoes, in some emphatically fragrant pasta sauces, in frittate, and in various breads, particularly flat breads like focaccia.
Using rosemary If at all possible, cook only with fresh rosemary. Grow your own, if you have a garden or terrace. It does particularly well with a sun-warmed wall at its back, putting out beautiful violet blue flowers twice a year. Some varieties have pink or white blooms. For the kitchen, snip off the tips of the younger, more fragrant branches.
If you have absolutely no access to fresh rosemary, use the dried whole leaves, a tolerable, if not entirely satisfactory, alternative. Powdered rosemary, however, is to be shunned.
SAGE
Salvia
A medicinal herb in antiquity, sage has been, since the Renaissance, one of Italy’s favorite kitchen herbs. It is virtually inseparable from the cooking of game birds and, by logical extension, necessary to those preparations patterned