Archive for the ‘tomatoes’ Category

SAN MARZANO TOMATOES: REAL OR FAKE?

Posted: March 26, 2014 in Food, Italian, san marzano, tomatoes
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1

If you do your share of Italian recipes, a common product that you can find in just about any store has many people confused: San Marzano tomatoes. Most good cooks agree that San Marzano tomatoes are some of the best canned tomatoes you can buy.

But unfortunately,  the label can say “San Marzano tomatoes” even if they are not real San Marzano tomatoes.

San Marzano is a region in Italy near Naples and Mt. Vesuvius, and the special combination of climate and volcanic soil make these plum tomatoes world famous. They have less water, fewer seeds and are picked off the vine when perfectly ripe and processed the same day.

But San Marzano is a variety of tomato, too…and so you can have a can of San Marzano tomatoes that are not from San Marzano. And to add to the confusion, there’s actually a brand of tomatoes called San Marzano, with tomatoes grown in the United States. Bet your ass the sellers of these tomatoes are counting on you not to know the difference!

Sold everywhere, but not the real deal. Grown in the USA.

Real San Marzano Tomatoes are a very old variety, extremely limited in quantity, grown and produced exclusively in the San Marzano region of Italy. Because production is so very limited, the Italian Government and the European Union have formed a way of protecting consumers from fraud by having San Marzano tomatoes tightly controlled. DOP, or denomination of protected origin, is the mechanism that the government is using to control the production and marketing of genuine San Marzano tomatoes. Labels for DOP products must be individually numbered and manually applied to each can in specific lots and government officials must oversee this application. So here’s the deal: unless you see “DOP” on the label with a hand-stamped number on the can, it’s not a real San Marzano tomato.

 

Real San Marzano tomatoes. Cento also sells non-certified San Marzano’s, so always look for the DOP on the can.

Another way to tell when you’re in the market is simple. Check the price. Your average can of tomatoes will be in the $2 range. Real DOP San Marzano tomatoes: about $4–$5 a can. It’s all about quality.

REFRESHING SHRIMP CEVICHE

Posted: March 2, 2014 in ceviche, Cucumbers, Recipes, seafood, shrimp, tomatoes, Uncategorized
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I’ve never met a ceviche I didn’t like. Sometimes, nothing can stop a serious seafood craving like sushi, sashimi or ceviche. They require the freshest seafood and veggies you can get your hands on. And other than some fine chopping, they require little else.

The acid in citrus juices basically “cooks” the seafood in a process very similar to applying heat, but when I use shrimp in ceviche, I place them in some boiling salted water first…although very briefly.

Crazy colored shrimp, thanks to blood oranges.

Crazy colored shrimp, thanks to blood oranges.

Ingredients:

For the poaching liquid…

2 quarts water

1/4 cup salt

For the ceviche…

1 pound raw wild-caught American shrimp, peeled and deveined

juice of 2 lemons

juice of 2 limes

juice of 2 oranges (I had blood oranges this time)

1 cup diced seeded peeled cucumber

1/2 cup finely chopped red onion

pinch of red pepper flakes

1 cup diced seeded tomato

1 avocado, chopped into 1/2″ pieces

1 tablespoon roughly chopped cilantro leaves, plus more for garnish

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/4 teaspoon Fleur de Sel

Combine water and 1/4 cup salt in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Add shrimp and immediately turn off the heat. Let the shrimp sit for just a minute, drain and transfer to a bowl of ice and place in fridge to cool.

Remove cooled shrimp from fridge and drain. Chop shrimp into 1/2″ pieces and place in a medium non-reactive bowl. Add lemon, lime and orange juice. Stir in cucumber, onion and pepper flakes. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

Stir in the tomato, avocado, chopped cilantro, olive oil and Fleur de Sel into the shrimp mixture. Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes before serving. Garnish with cilantro leaves, if desired.

PASTA WITH LOBSTER SAUCE

Posted: January 19, 2014 in Food, Recipes, seafood, tomatoes, travel
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One of the most incredible dishes I’ve had on the beautiful island of Santorini, Greece, is lobster with pasta. It’s one of those dishes that takes time to prepare, because the pasta lobster sauce they make is a labor of love…time consuming and so spectacular.

To try to replicate that lobster sauce we had in Santorini, I started with a kick-ass lobster stock. It’s simple but flavorful:

Stock ingredients:

clean, empty claws, tails and bodies from two 1-1/2 lb. lobsters

12 cups water

1/2 onion

3 celery stalks

1 carrot

Place all ingredients in a large pot and set on high heat. Crush lobster shells with potato masher. Cook until it is reduced by half.

Strain the stock, discarding the lobster shells and veggies. Bring the stock back to the heat and reduce until all you have left is 1 cup of intense stock.

Cooking the stock

Cooking the stock

Now that I have the stock, I can make the sauce!

Sauce ingredients:

1/2 onion, finely chopped

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

pinch of Italian red pepper flakes

teaspoon parsley

extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup lobster stock

1/4 cup San Marzano tomato sauce (see below)

splash of white wine (I use Alice white Chardonnay)

salt and pepper

1/2 lb. cooked pasta

Add some olive oil to a pan and saute the onions until translucent. Season with salt and pepper. Add the garlic and cook for 10 seconds. Add the red pepper flakes and parsley.

Add 1/4 cup of the lobster stock and let it cook, reducing by half. Add the other 1/4 cup of lobster stock and the tomato sauce. Let it cook for a couple of minutes and add the white wine. Cook for a few minutes more.

Cook pasta and drain even before it reaches the al dente stage. Place the pasta in the pan with the sauce, heating and coating thoroughly. Serve immediately.

For the San Marzano tomato sauce: I take a can of San Marzano tomatoes and place it in a food processor or Vita-Mix and blend until I get sauce. Pour into a pan and reduce over medium heat by half, until sauce has thickened.

OVEN-ROASTED PLUM TOMATOES

Posted: October 4, 2013 in Food, garden, tomatoes
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Now’s the time to head to your local farm stand and pick up a bag of gorgeous plum tomatoes, before the season is gone! And this is what you do with them…

These are not sun-dried tomatoes. They’re better, because fresh plum tomatoes are still moist after roasting, with a bit of that magic tomato liquid in every cup! A great, simple platter to offer at parties.

Tomatoes before

Tomatoes before

Ingredients:

12 to 18 halved, seeded plum tomatoes

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons organic cane sugar

Freshly ground pepper

Fleur de Sel or sea salt

Pre-heat oven to 250.

Line a baking sheet with foil and rub it lightly with olive oil.

Arrange halved and seeded tomatoes on it in a single layer, cut side up. Drizzle evenly with 1/4 cup olive oil, sprinkle with 2 tablespoons sugar, and season with pepper to taste.

Bake the tomatoes until they are still juicy but slightly wrinkled, about 3 hours. Transfer to a platter and let cool slightly.

Just before serving, sprinkle tomatoes with Fleur de Sel, and garnish if you like, with chopped parsley leaves, mint leaves, or basil.

Tomatoes after

Tomatoes after

A BLT EPIPHANY

Posted: March 23, 2013 in bacon, beef, Food, Recipes, tomatoes, Uncategorized
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There are very few sandwiches more perfect than the BLT, and I would be a fool to try to improve on it. Freshly toasted bread, a slathering of mayo (Hellman’s only, of course), crisp lettuce, juicy sliced tomato, and my own homemade bacon (https://livethelive.com/2012/12/01/makin-bacon/). What could be better?

I recently tried my hand at smoking and slow-roasting a huge slab of grass-fed beef brisket, and it came out beautifully. Rich and smoky, there was far too much of it for a mere mortal like myself to polish it off, even if I ate it for days in a row. So I cut the brisket into more manageable sized slabs, wrapped them and placed them in the freezer.

beef brisket

I took one of those slabs out of the freezer the other day, and noticed that, with the grain of the meat and fat, it resembled bacon. And then it dawned on me: I could slice it like thick-cut bacon, fry it in a pan, and make my own BLT with it: a Brisket, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich!

steakon!

The end result was fantastic. Quite different than the infamous BLT, but a winner in its own right.

Alz BLT: Brisket, Lettuce and Tomato

Alz BLT: Brisket, Lettuce and Tomato

MAKING REALLY AMAZING PIZZA AT HOME

Posted: September 30, 2012 in cheese, fleur de sel, Food, Italian, montanara, pizza, Recipes, san marzano, tomatoes
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There are few foods that people take as personally as pizza. Tell someone that your pizza place is better than their pizza place, and chances are you’ll start a fight. Well, my pizza place is better than your pizza place, because I make it at home. Besides, I can run faster than you.

I’m not going to say that much of the pizza that I’ve tried here in Rhode Island is mediocre, but I will say that I was born in Brooklyn and grew up working in many New York pizza places in my youth. So yes, I do have a very strong opinion on what I think makes a good or bad pizza.

My homemade pizza is all about the basics. The better quality my original ingredients are, the better my pizza will be:

 

The dough…

The key ingredient is 00 flour, and it can be found in specialty stores,  or online. My favorite new source is Central Milling in Logan, Utah. They make a 00 flour that is top notch. I buy it through the Forno Bravo pizza oven website: http://www.fornobravo.com/store/Tipo-00-Pizza-Flour/ It makes a crustier and more flavorful dough. Ratios for this recipe depend on the humidity in my kitchen on any given day, but my basic pizza dough recipe is as follows:

4–5 cups 00 flour

1 cup tepid water

1 Tablespoon salt

1 packet Italian pizza yeast

a squirt of extra virgin olive oil

I mix all the dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer, then slowly add the water as it mixes. After the ingredients are well mixed, and the dough pulls from the side of the bowl, I remove it to a floured board, where I knead the dough by hand for another 5 minutes, until it is smooth and elastic, shaping it into a ball. I rub a little olive oil over the ball of dough, place it in a bowl covered with plastic wrap, and let it rise for 2 hours, punching it down after that, and letting it rise another 2 hours again.

The sauce…

I’ve written a previous blog about real and fake cans of San Marzano tomatoes. I feel that San Marzanos make the best sauce, but not all cans of San Marzanos are created equal. The only way you can be guaranteed you have a real can of these beauties, grown in volcanic Italian soil in the shadow of Mt Vesuvius, is by the D.O.P. designation on the can. (D.O.P. stands for “Denominazione d’Origine Protetta,” and signifies that it’s the real deal.) Anything else that says San Marzano may not be.

San Marzanos are so amazing, that all I do is puree them in a food processor, pour the sauce into a pan, and let it reduce until it has thickened. No spices or additions of any kind.

The cheese…

I don’t need to go super-fancy with mozzarella di bufala (cheese made from the milk of the water buffalo) …but I don’t use the mass-produced supermarket stuff, either. Whole Foods has fresh mozarella from Maplebrook Farms in Vermont, and it is excellent.

The toppings…

A matter of choice. I wrote a while ago about how I make my own guanciale, a cured meat that comes from pork cheeks. Chopped and fried, that is one of my daughter’s favorite pizza toppings.

But my signature pizza that wows my dinner guests is my marinated beef tenderloin and fried chive blossom pizza. I marinate and grill a piece of beef tenderloin, slicing it thin. And in the springtime, when my chive plants are budding like crazy, I snip the blossoms before they open and place them in Ziploc freezer bags to use all year long. When it’s time, I grab a handful of the blossoms and fry them in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and sprinkle them over the top of the beef tenderloin pizza. A touch of Fleur de Sel on top seals the deal.

My signature marinated beef tenderloin and chive blossom pizza.

The oven…

Many professional pizza ovens reach a temperature of 1000 degrees. My home oven only reaches 500, but it does the trick. I do use a pizza stone, and place it on the center rack of the oven, and let it heat up thoroughly before sliding a pizza onto it for cooking.

Recently, I’ve also started cooking pizzas on my barbecue grill (using a special stone for the grill) to add a smoky component. The grill gets hotter than my home oven, which is great, but it’s obviously a more work to set-up and clean.

 

My favorite pizza?

There are only a few pizzerias that I know of—all in NYC–that make pizza montanara, and for my money, it’s the best I’ve ever had. It’s a small, rustic pizza margherita using mozzarella di bufala and simple tomato sauce, garnished with a basil leaf. What makes it magical is the fact that after they stretch the dough–but before they put the toppings on it–they fry the dough in deep fryer with olive oil for just a minute. It puffs up like a pillow. Then they put the toppings on and quickly bake it in a very hot oven. The end result is a non-greasy, absolutely heavenly pizza cloud…the most delicious I’ve ever had.

I’ve actually had some great success recreating this pizza at home, frying the dough in a very large skillet of olive oil. The challenge is removing this giant piece of dough out of the skillet and into a pizza pan without dripping olive oil all over my stove and setting my house on fire! So far, so good!

FRESH TOMATO AND CORN RECIPES BEFORE THE SEASON FINALLY ENDS

Posted: September 27, 2012 in corn, Food, Recipes, tomatoes
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SUMMER ISN’T OVER YET!

OK…at least I refuse to think so.

It’s still not too late to enjoy the fresh fruits and veggies that our local farmers have to offer. Soon, we’ll be forced to go back to the supermarket to buy our produce. But until then, we can enjoy the bright, fresh flavors that only our local farmers can provide.

Oven roasted plum tomatoes

These are not sun dried tomatoes. These are seasoned and slow roasted, so that their sweet flavors concentrate, but the moist, chewy texture remains.

Ingredients:

12 to 18 halved, seeded plum tomatoes

Extra virgin olive oil

Sugar

Freshly ground pepper

Fleur de Sel, or other finishing salt

Pre-heat oven to 250.

Line a baking sheet with foil and rub it with olive oil.

Arrange halved and seeded tomatoes on the baking sheet in a single layer, cut side up. Drizzle evenly with ½ cup olive oil, sprinkle with 2 tablespoons sugar, and season with pepper to taste.

Baked the tomatoes until they are still juicy but slightly wrinkled, about 3 hours. Transfer to a platter and let cool slightly.

Just before serving, sprinkle tomatoes with Fleur de Sel, and garnish, if you like, with mint, parsley or basil.

 

BABY BELL PEPPERS WITH FRESH CORN STUFFING

Bags of these baby bell peppers are appearing everywhere on supermarket shelves this season. Recently, I had about 100 people over for a party, and I came up with this tasty bite to serve as an appetizer.

Ingredients:

Baby bell peppers

1 dozen ears fresh corn, boiled for just a couple of minutes, then removed from the cob…or organic frozen corn

1 Vidalia onion, peeled, quartered, grilled, chopped

Juice of 1 large lime

¾ cup mayonnaise

20 shots of Frank’s Red Hot or Tabasco

1 lb Queso Fresco, crumbled

Salt

Fresh cilantro or parsley, finely chopped

Cook the corn for just a couple of minutes to keep it crisp. If using corn on the cob, cut corn from ears and place in a bowl.

Peel and quarter the Vidalia onion, and throw it on a hot grill with a little olive oil to get some nice grill marks on it, leaving the onion still crispy, not soft. Remove, let cool, then place in a food processor and pulse until the onion is chopped into small bits, just smaller than the corn kernels. Add onions to corn.

In a separate small bowl, combine mayonnaise and Frank’s Red Hot. Pour in crumbled Queso Fresco and mix well. Pour into corn and onion bowl and mix well.

Add lime juice to the bowl and mix well again. Taste mixture and season with salt.

Cut the baby bell peppers in half lengthwise, and remove the seeds and membrane. Stuff the peppers with the corn mixture and garnish with cilantro or parsley.

If preparing ahead of time, refrigerate until ready to eat, but allow some time for them to warm up a little bit. You don’t want to serve them ice cold.

SAN MARZANO TOMATOES: REAL OR FAKE?

Posted: September 17, 2012 in Food, Italian, san marzano, tomatoes
Tags: , ,
2

If you do your share of Italian recipes, a common product that you can find in just about any store has many people confused: San Marzano tomatoes. Most good cooks agree that San Marzano tomatoes are some of the best canned tomatoes you can buy.

But unfortunately,  the label can say “San Marzano tomatoes” even if they are not real San Marzano tomatoes.

 

San Marzano is a region in Italy near Naples and Mt. Vesuvius, and the special combination of climate and volcanic soil make these plum tomatoes world famous. They have less water, fewer seeds and are picked off the vine when perfectly ripe and processed the same day.

 

But San Marzano is a variety of tomato, too…and so you can have a can of San Marzano tomatoes that are not from San Marzano. And to add to the confusion, there’s actually a brand of tomatoes called San Marzano, with tomatoes grown in the United States. You can bet that the sellers of these tomatoes are counting on us not to know the difference!

Sold everywhere, but not the real deal. Grown in the USA.

 

Real San Marzano Tomatoes are a very old variety, extremely limited in quantity, grown and produced exclusively in the San Marzano region of Italy. Because production is so very limited, the Italian Government and the European Union have formed a way of protecting consumers from fraud by having San Marzano tomatoes tightly controlled. DOP, or denomination of protected origin, is the mechanism that the government is using to tightly control the production and marketing of genuine San Marzano tomatoes. Labels for DOP products must be individually numbered and manually applied to each and every can in specific lots and government officials must oversee this application. So here’s the deal: unless you see “DOP” on the label with a hand-stamped number on the can, it’s not a San Marzano tomato.

 

Real San Marzano tomatoes. Cento also sells non-certified San Marzano’s, so always look for the DOP on the can.

Another way to tell when you’re in the market is simple. Check the price. Your average can of tomatoes will be in the $2 range. Real DOP San Marzano tomatoes: about $4–$5 a can. It’s all about quality.

 

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