day 7 :

monday, 21 may

We woke up to a rainy, misty day. After a wonderful breakfast on the terrace above the courtyard, we piled on the bus and saw some of the vineyards of the Valpolicella region from a distance (since it was too wet to walk through them). Next, Jean-Carlos gave us the history of the St. Giorgio Basilica, and then we went to the Allegrini drying facility - huge, multi-million-dollar warehouses that store the grapes after the fall harvesting. Next was a tour of the Allegrini cellars and the enormous barrels used to age their wine. In the cellar, we enjoyed our antipasti and first wines for the day. This was followed by a wonderful lunch in a dining room above the cellars: homemade pasta with a choice of three sauces (we tried them all), tender veal, and homemade biscotti.

We had a short break after coming back to the Villa from our day trip, and then convened to discuss that evening's menu:

Monday Dinner

• Zuppa di porcini e ceci (Rustic soup with chickpeas and porcini mushrooms)
• Petti di pollo piccanti (Chicken breast fillets with caper, ham, and anchovy sauce)
• Carote alla parmigiana (Carrots sautéed with parmesan cheese)
• Pere all'Amarone (Pears in Amarone wine)

Giuliano generally works on preparing desserts first, so we started off with that. Rather than following the order of presentation in class, we'll present each evening's recipe tips in order, followed by cool tools you have to have for your kitchen!

• Zuppa di porcini e ceci
  • Porcini mushrooms: you can put them in the sauce without chopping them, but be sure to squeeze them out first. When adding the porcini water, you can strain it, or decant it (pour the water in slowly so that the sediment stays at the bottom of the bowl and never gets added).
  • Giuliano generally uses canned chick peas; he has no patience for the dry ones.
• Petti di pollo piccanti
  • Boneless chicken breast prep:
    1. Start with a whole chicken breast, otherwise you'll miss out on the best part of the breast, the tenderloin. This is usually mangled or missing on the boneless breasts you can buy in the store. You might have to ask your butcher nicely for this, as it's tough to actually get a whole chicken breast.
    2. Peel off the skin using your hands and a paring knife, until the skin is only attached to the center.
    3. Cut off the skin with your knife, starting from the shallow end.
    4. Cut off each breast and then cut off the tenderloins.
    5. Giuliano doesn't like pounding chicken, since it destroys the fibers of the chicken, so to make it thinner, you'll need to slice the breast. Put the breast, smooth side up, at the edge of a cutting board. Bunch it up, then put your fingers and part of your palm on top of the chicken. Start cutting with a large knife from the thick end of the chicken (by your fingertips), using smooth, even strokes back and forth.
    6. Check your cutting progress occasionally so that you have a nice, horizontal cut.
    7. Next, you need to remove the tendon from the tenderloin. Expose the tendon slightly using your knife, hold the chicken using the blunt edge of the knife, grab onto the tendon using a paper towel, and pull. It should pull out fairly easily.
  • Cooking:
    • When you put chicken in hot butter or oil, you need to move it back and forth regularly with tongs to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the pan.
    • Suggestion: Move your chicken pieces around so that longer-cooked pieces are always in one side of the pan. That way you don't have to keep track of how long individual pieces have been cooking.
    • If you get low on oil and need to add more, only do it when there is no chicken in the pan. Allow the oil to get up to temperature first, otherwise the chicken will just absorb the oil.
    • When you use heavy cream in a dish, you always want to reduce it so that you don't have a pool of it at the bottom of your plate.
• Carote alla parmigiana. No notes, fairly straightforward dish.
• Pere all'Amarone. This wonderful dish (perhaps the world's most expensive dessert?) doesn't have a written recipe, so we'll present it here in full.

Pere all'Amarone
by Giuliano Hazan
8 servings

2 Tbsp. butter
4 Barlett pears
2-3 Tbsp. sugar
3 large, fresh bay leaves
Amarone wine (or a similar, full-bodied red wine)

1. Prep the pears by peeling their skins, cutting them in half, and coring with a small spoon.
2. Melt the butter in the skillet. The butter is hot enough when it foams, and then the foam subsides.
3. Put the pears in the pan, sprinkle the sugar over them, add the bay leaves, and then pour in enough Amarone so that it comes up on the sides of the pears. Adjust the heat so that the liquid is at a medium simmer.
4. Cover and cook until tender. Remove the cover and reduce the sauce. Serve pears at room temperature.

Every evening, there would be a snack part-way through the lesson. Here's what the first night's snack included:

Monday Snack

• Prosciutto colto - "Cooked ham."
• Buffalo mozzarella - Dawn's favorite snack during the week - second freshest only to the mozzarella we had in Salerno in '97.
• Marscapone - A wonderful cheese that can actually be eaten when it's fresh (typically it is sold in plastic tubs and used in recipes). If eaten fresh, the cheese needs to be eaten within 48 hours of it being made.
• Mustard-apple sauce - Went well with the marscapone!
• Ciabatta - "Slipper" bread.

General things learned that night:

• Giuliano said he recently switched from All-Clad to the latest line of Calphalon cookware. He says that it cooks a little more evenly, and the handles don't get quite as hot.
• For many recipes, the amount of butter or oil you use depends not only on the size of the recipe you're making, but also the size of the pan you're using.
• Fry vs. saute: when you're frying, you want to heat your oil to a high enough temperature so that you create a crisp exterior. When you saute, you want to bring all ingredients to temperature together. This is why garlic or onion is often placed in the cold pan with the olive oil and then brought to temperature; if you threw the garlic into the hot oil, it would fry the garlic and seal the flavor in.
• Holding a cutting knife: keep your hand positioned all the way up to the blade, with your index finger on the side of the blade, touching the handle.
• Cutting with a chef's knife: you generally keep the knife in contact with your cutting board at all times; starting with the tip down, and then rock the blade back and forth to cut.
• Mushrooms: don't soak them in water to clean them, because they'll absorb the water. Instead, use a mushroom brush and, if necessary, some cold running water to clean them.
• Boullion cubes: Giuliano prefers the Knorr brand.
• Valpolicella wine: look for Classico or Classico Superiore when buying this kind of wine - this means it came from the original Valpolicella region.
• Capers: best if you buy the kind preserved in salt, not in vinegar, because the capers take on the flavor of the vinegar.
• Vegetable oil: when cooking with this, you're using it to raise the burning temperature of your sauce. Vegetable oil doesn't add any flavor, though. Olive oil and butter are used in addition to vegetable oil for flavor.

Cool toys:

• OXO mushroom brush
• OXO vegetable brush - Stiffer than a mushroom brush.
• OXO plastic bowls - Rubber ring on bottom so they don't move when mixing; pour spout.
• OXO rotary cheese grater - Best grater we've seen!
• OXO stainless steel Y-peeler - Not available for purchase yet. This peeler worked incredibly well. Giuliano provided feedback on the previous Y-peeler and helped create this new model.