NAPLES, SIENA and YUCATAN

Heirloom Pigs and Tomatoes

I am astonished at how far the supplies of raw materials for the feeding of America have come in the last 25 years. But there is still one area that America has failed.

Pigs. Heirloom on a scale that is available to all.

Not so with the pigs outside my Italian window a while ago who didn’t seem to mind looking thin. And they don’t taste as if they are. Perhaps because they are very chic. Gucci or Armani could not have designed them better. They are the “Cinta Senese” or “Queen of the Italian pigs.” A domesticated breed of wilder ancestors, midnight brown bordering on black, with a strawberry pink bordering on red stripe on their front haunches down to their legs and hooves. 

Almost a handbag.

Photo Courtesy of Fine Dining Lovers

I guess the best part of the breed is that it has not been tampered with since the Middle Ages. Except when in the 1950’s when breeders tried to get them to be more fertile. Coming to their senses recently, the people who put fences around these pigs have let them go back to their usual free-range less reproductive rutting, and now just charge more when the pigs head for market.

The best market I know for tasting these superb critters is the Antica Macelleria Falorni in Greve in Chianti, with its own breeding farm in nearby San Piero di Uzzano. Don’t get me wrong, I am not bragging here. About a million or so of each Germans and Americans know about this famous butcher. But I just thought I would let you know in case Greve is on an itinerary soon, and you thought that such a famous place was worth avoiding because it is so famous. Like restaurants with a spectacular view. 

To avoid the butcher would be cutting noses and spiting faces. As would it be if you avoided the hotel on the un-famously chic side of Florence, in the neighborhood above the Porta Romana side of the city. A hotel called Torre di Bellosguardo. With a view that doesn’t spoil it.

Just as those pigs look best with a fine coating of Tuscan dust, so this hotel has the perfect amount of shabbiness. If you can count a seemingly unrestored Renaissance palazzo shabby. It is not just the fact that any hotel with parrots in an enormous loggia would win my heart instantly. Or the fact that if you are submerged in its rose-surrounded garden pool the next thing you see other than the water is the Duomo. Or that there is no restaurant (oddly a recommendation for me), only smoked salmon sandwiches around the pool, served with fresh white peach bellini.

Or breakfast on the terrace.

This is a discrete place, no TV, no 24-hour room service, just total peace above the madness below.

Its fate was sealed in my heart when they brought, on request, some rigatino “steso” from the above-mentioned macellaria. From the Cinta Senese with a layer of fat. 

Photo courtesy of Facebook

The meat is cut with the pigskin, making thin lines from which the slab of pig gets its name. Its belt, seasoned for four months on wooden boards “aromatized” with lots of salt, pepper, and “wild spices” which are probably secret. For me, around the pool, it was sliced tissue thin and heated briefly on top of foccacia. Not since I was the first customer of the new spa of the Paris Ritz on its first day, when cold champagne flowed to my chaise in quantities that would have filled up the enormous pool, have I known such contentment. Perfect food and a world-class view. 

Antica Macelleria Falorni says they ship around the world:  www.falorni.it or email at info@falorni.it

Or you can make a trip to the Yucatan and taste the Pelon pig, bread from local wild ones and the elegant Cinta Senese.

Photo courtesy of Woontheater

I am not sure what tomatoes have to do with pigs, even though I wonder what the pork would taste like if fed on real sundried ones. At Chez Panisse we fed our Amador County pigs on garlic for the Zinfandel festivals. To great success. Those Italian tomatoes from the soils of Vesuvius around Naples still way outrank any from the U.S.

Those that inhale the sun on racks or still on the whole plant hanging up outside a south-facing kitchen doors.

HOW TO PEEL TOMATOES FOR CHOPPING OR SLICING

One can eat tomatoes with the skin on, slicing them for summer tomato salads with perfumed extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper ground over the top both 30 minutes before serving. But the texture of the tomato without the skin is more tender and, somehow, with a more pleasing flavor.

Whatever cook was fortunate enough to get a job at Stars was soon unfortunate on their first day to face 10 double layer boxes of ripe tomatoes that had to be peeled. There would be mumbled threats from the prep crew about ‘whatever you do, don’t screw up the tomatoes.’ After the chef would check the first dozen, the cook, if good, would quickly figure out that enormous judgment and skill was required for this task.  Not all the tomatoes were of equal ripeness so would have to be in boiling water more or less than the others. How quickly would the ice melt in the cold bath, and would it cool the tomatoes equally fast enough. How many to do at once to have them all consistent – which they certainly were not to begin with.

Much better to take a few minutes to check out the tomatoes, separate them into equally ripe and sized batches, make sure you have plenty of ice, then go for it. Once the cooks figured all that out (and squeezing out the seeds and chopping them with each piece the same size), they were ready to cut and trim 50 precious artichokes.   

Make a water bath with ice in a bowl large enough to hold at least half of the tomatoes you want to skin. Remove the cores of ripe tomatoes and put in boiling water for 10 - 15 seconds, and then into the iced water bath. Leave for another 10 seconds, remove, and slip the skins off. Cut the tomatoes around the equator or circumference, and squeeze the halves, cut side down, over a sieve on top of a bowl to capture the tomato water. Then chop the tomatoes coarsely or finely, depending on the use. Use the tomato water in light vinaigrette type sauces or your Bloody Mary.

FRESH TOMATO, LEMON, AND OLIVE OIL SAUCE

This sauce is easy to make and can be an obsession. and on a warm pasta, pasta salads, grilled fish hot or cold, asparagus hot or cold, meats, and grilled garlic bread as a snack. The explosion of herb perfume when poured over hot vegetables or pasta is for me what summer is all about. Don’t assemble the sauce until 30 minutes before using it. The sauce is better very loosely mixed, not as an emulsion. If using fresh rosemary, chop it very finely.

When Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics came out in 1985, the US was at the height of the public and journalistic outcry that there was never enough time to cook at home. This sauce had been invented a few years before at my Santa Fe Bar & Grill restaurant because there was never enough time in the restaurant to make time-demanding sauces. And then on every stop on the book tour I made this sauce in 15 minutes, the exact time in which the pasta was cooked. So there it was: dinner on the table in 20 minutes. My spiel was: “When you get home first put on a large pot of water to boil. Pour yourself a glass of wine. Take a shower, pour another glass, put the pasta in the salted water and start chopping the tomatoes. By the time the pasta is cooked, the sauce is finished. Drain the pasta, toss it while hot with extra virgin olive oil, and then pour the sauce over it. Open another bottle if there is someone else around.” No one in the audience believed the sauce until they tasted it. 

Serves 4

1 cup 1/8-inch chopped tomato

¼ cup mixed fresh herb leaves, such as basil, rosemary tarragon, thyme, coarsely chopped

¼ cup fresh lemon juice

Zest of one lemon

1 large clove garlic, peeled, finely chopped

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

Pinch of salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix briefly.

AVOCADO WITH WARM SHRIMP SAUCE & ARUGULA SALAD

For variation, replace the shrimp with cooked and coarsely chopped mussels, tender clams, cooked crab or lobster meat, using whatever juices from the shellfish in the sauce. Or cook oysters the same way as the shrimp – just a couple of minutes – until they are firm, chop them coarsely, and use the sauce to pour over hot linguine. Meyer lemons, Rangpur limes or, if you can ever find them, Key limes add very special flavors. And look in Philippino markets for Kalamansi limes. Here the garish is arugula salad since avocado and arugula are one of those culinary marriages made in heaven.

This sauce is also perfect on spaghetti, on potatoes baked in a fire, baked eggplant, razor clams, served over hot polenta. Or on bread. Slice a baguette lengthwise, spread it with olive oil, bake it until crisp, and then pour this sauce over it. Carve it into portions right there in front of everybody on the kitchen counter while the rest of the meal is cooking.

Or you can just eat the sauce by itself with vodka as a cocktail the morning after. 

Serves 4

2 cups of the fresh tomato sauce above.

1 pound uncooked medium shrimp

1 cup lightly salted water

4 ripe Haas avocados

1 cup small arugula leaves, coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons nut oil (hazelnut, walnut)

Put the tomato, herbs, lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil in a bowl, mix, and then season with the salt and pepper.

Simmer the shrimp in the salted water for 3 minutes and strain, saving the liquid. Let the shrimp cool, peel them, then chop the shells coarsely and add them to the saved cooking liquid.

Simmer the shells for 10 minutes. Strain the liquid from the shells, discard the shells, rinse out the saucepan, and return the liquid. Reduce by half. 

Add the liquid to the tomato sauce. Chop the shrimp into ¼-inch dice and add to the sauce. Keep warm for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, slice the avocados all the way around from top to bottom, and take out the pit. Scoop out each half of the avocado flesh with a spoon the same size as the half. Put each half, cut-side down, on a board and slice them across in fine slices. Scoop up each half with a spatula, and place on a warm serving plate. Fan them out. Spoon the warm shrimp sauce over each avocado half.

Spoon a little of the sauce liquid onto the arugula in a small bowl. Add the nut oil, season, and place some arugula in the middle of each avocado.