This combination sounds odd, but it is a common antipasto in Italy’s Piedmont region, where I first had it at Da Guido, for years perhaps the finest traditional Piedmontese restaurant. The combination of flavors is ethereal—like a creamy tuna mousse wrapped in earthy roasted peppers. Matt Kramer, in his book A Passion for Piedmont, makes it a little differently, using half butter and half olive oil, leaving out the capers and substituting basil for parsley. That’s good, too. This dish requires good tuna, packed in olive oil. Under no circumstances try this with tuna packed in water.
6 SERVINGS
1 |
6-ounce can tuna packed in olive oil |
|
Olive oil |
4 |
teaspoons capers, with their liquid |
2 |
teaspoons chopped fresh parsley |
3 |
red bell peppers, roasted, peeled and cut in half lengthwise (see sidebar) |
|
Salt |
In a food processor, puree the tuna with 1 tablespoon olive oil until it is smooth. Scrape down the sides and continue to process, slowly adding another tablespoon of oil through the feed tube. The mixture should be almost completely smooth, with a light, foamy texture and a pale color. Scrape the mixture into a small bowl and stir in the capers and their liquid and 1 teaspoon of the parsley.
Place a pepper half on each of six small serving plates. Spoon 1 to 2 tablespoons of the tuna mixture in the middle, then fold over the top. Drizzle lightly with olive oil, sprinkle with the remaining 1 teaspoon parsley and sprinkle lightly with salt. Serve at room temperature.
Roasted peppers are utterly unlike raw ones. In the first place, roasting removes the thin skin of cellulose on the surface. That’s the difficult-to-digest part. And roasting gently cooks the meat, softening it and bringing out hidden dimensions. You can roast a pepper using any number of methods. Perhaps the simplest is just to throw it on the grill. This has the advantage of accommodating a large number of peppers at the same time. A regular 21-inch kettle grill will easily hold more than a dozen large peppers at once. Just keep turning them to hit every bit of skin (including the bottoms and the tops) and move them from place to place so every pepper gets its turn over the hottest parts of the fire. You’re looking not for browning here but for a definite blackening: go ahead and char them. So tough is that cellulose skin that even after this rough treatment, when you peel it off, there will be uncharred flesh underneath. Roasting peppers on the grill will take from 25 to 35 minutes, depending on the heat (it’s a good thing to do while you’re waiting for a really hot fire to die down enough to cook meat).
You can roast large batches even more easily in the oven if you’re willing to forgo that smoky grace note (indeed, in recipes such as Roasted Red Peppers Stuffed with Tuna (see recipe), a purer flavor is better). To roast peppers in the oven, arrange them on a jelly-roll pan and bake them at 400 degrees, turning them once or twice to keep them from sticking. That will take 20 to 30 minutes. Cooked this way, the skin will puff up like a balloon, without blackening near as much as it does when grilled. Then cover the peppers with a damp cloth and let them cool for 10 to 15 minutes. The steam will finish loosening the skin.
Some cooks recommend roasting peppers under the broiler or over an open flame on a stovetop burner. While both of these methods will work, they have significant drawbacks. The broiler cooks the peppers far too quickly and unevenly. The center row under the flame will be done while the next row is still practically raw. Doing them on the stovetop has the obvious disadvantage of letting you do only one or two at a time. And heaven help you if a roasting pepper pops, as they are wont to do, spilling their juices so they bake onto the stove.
Peel the peppers by rubbing away the charred skin with your fingers. For tough spots that might be a little underdone or are in hard-to-reach crevices, use the back of a knife. Though you may be tempted to rinse the peppers to get rid of the last little flecks of skin, don’t. The flesh is coated with a thick, delicious juice, and you don’t want to lose any of it. Be careful to dump the skins into the trash can; don’t put them down the disposal. Few things will clog plumbing faster than pepper skins. The pigment from red peppers is incredibly resilient, too, so it takes a lot of scrubbing to get the stain out.