Seasoned Fresh Bread Crumbs

These keep well in the freezer for quite some time, so make a batch every so often to have on hand. If you want to tame the heat of the peppers, shake the seeds out of dried chilies before you crumble them. Or use milder ground red peppers such as piment d’Espelette or Spanish pimentón.

MAKES 2¼ CUPS BREAD CRUMBS

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

⅓ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

2 dried serrano, de árbol, or other not-too-hot chilies, crumbled

2 cups coarse fresh bread crumbs

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and cook until just lightly browned, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and combine in a bowl with the parsley and chilies. Stir in the bread crumbs. Return the bread-crumb mix to the skillet and set over high heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until the bread crumbs are crisp, 5 to 7 minutes, being careful not to let them burn. Transfer to a bowl to cool, then store in a sealed container in the refrigerator or freezer until ready to use.

HELPFUL TECHNIQUES

PEELING FRESH TOMATOES

Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil and drop in each tomato for about 15 seconds, then remove to a colander in the sink. When all the tomatoes are done, peel them with a small, sharp paring knife, just lifting the skins off and discarding them. To seed or not to seed? Sara thinks seeds add unwelcome bitterness to the sauce, while Nancy likes their slightly acerbic touch, especially since she learned that the antioxidant lycopene is concentrated in the gel surrounding the seeds, and is in fact made more bio-available by cooking. Seed the tomatoes, if you wish, cutting them in half horizontally and gently squeezing to extract the seeds, but keep in mind that you will be losing some valuable nutrients.

PREPARING FRESH ARTICHOKES

In Italy there’s a limited autumn harvest of artichokes, but most of the crop bridges the gap between winter and spring. In Castroville, California, the source of most of the artichokes consumed in the United States, it’s a little different and the season runs from March through May. Millions of the fat, spiky globe artichokes are shipped out from the town that calls itself, with happy disregard for truth, the Artichoke Capital of the World. Still, one of our favorite Maine farmers has small, sweet artichokes on sale at her farm stand in July, and there’s no reason why more market gardeners around the country could not grow them as well.

Often, as with most fruits and vegetables, the local supply has a fresher, more intense flavor than anything shipped in from distant places. We’re told that artichokes grow best close to the sea, so farmers in New Jersey, Maryland, and farther south, down along the Carolina coast, should be growing artichokes for the national market just as those around Monterey Bay are.

Preparing artichokes looks daunting until you’ve done it once or twice, after which it’s just a “normal” kitchen chore—and worth it for the delightful tastes that emerge. Try to buy artichokes with a couple of inches of stem attached—they’re usually better quality and the stems are full of good flavor. Buy ones that are fairly compact and feel dense and heavy for their size. You’ll find lots of information about preparing whole artichokes in recipe books and online. Here we’re talking about getting them ready to use in a pasta sauce.

Most important: Have ready a bowl of acidulated water, cool water to which you’ve added the juice of half a lemon. Use the other lemon half to rub over the cut surfaces of the artichokes as you work in order to prevent them from oxidizing and turning black. If the artichoke has a stem, cut it back to the tender part, about 1 inch of stem. Cut the stem off at the base and peel it as if it were an apple. Slice into 2 or 3 pieces and toss in the lemon water. Remove the tough outer leaves, or bracts, by simply bending them back until they snap off. If necessary, use a paring knife to clear away any dark green bitter bits that remain. As you work, remember to rub the cut surfaces with the reserved lemon half. When you get down to the pale, tender inside of the choke, slice off the top inch or two. Then cut the artichoke in half and, if necessary, using a serrated spoon, scrape away every bit of prickly spines or choke, just above the heart. (Note that very fresh, young artichokes may not have spines, but most of the commercial ones available in U.S. markets do, and getting rid of them is crucial to enjoying artichokes.) Toss the halves in the lemon water and continue with the rest. If they’re very large, you might cut them in 2, 3, or more pieces before proceeding with the recipe.

What about using frozen artichoke hearts? We’ve done this with excellent results in almost any pasta sauce. Since they are usually parboiled before freezing, you can just toss them into a sauce and let them heat up. Larger ones, of course, will benefit from being cut in half or quarters. As for canned artichoke hearts, we have never found anything we like at all.

ROASTING PEPPERS

This is best done over a charcoal or gas outside grill (charcoal contributes wonderfully smoky flavors). Second best is over a gas flame on your stovetop. Least satisfactory is to roast peppers under the oven broiler.

With an outside grill, simply lay the peppers on the grill and, using tongs, keep turning them as their surfaces blacken and blister. With a gas flame, use a long-handled kitchen fork and hold each pepper over the flame to blacken and blister it all over. With the oven broiler, turn the broiler on high and set the peppers on a grid over a roasting pan, turning them as they blacken. But with the last method, they will never get as satisfactorily blackened as they do with the other two. Don’t try to get every single speck of pepper surface blackened. Do the best you can, then remove the peppers from the heat, drop them into a paper bag, and roll the bag up. Set them aside for 30 minutes or so. The heat in the peppers will continue to work its magic and loosen that thin pellicle of skin on the outside of the peppers.

Now, using a small paring knife, split each pepper in half over a bowl to capture the flavorful juices. Cut away and discard the seed cluster inside each pepper, along with the whitish membranes. Then scrape away the blackened, blistered surface. Don’t be tempted to do this under running water, as you will wash away a lot of flavor. A quick rinse at the very end, to get rid of any excess blackened surface, is fine, but nothing more than that.

PREPARING MUSSELS AND CLAMS

Unless you harvest them yourself or buy them directly from a forager, most of the mussels and clams available in markets are farmed. Shellfish aquaculture is one of the most sustainable methods of fish farming and it has added benefits for the cook because the bivalves have been purged of the sand and grit that are often pervasive in wild specimens. A quick rinse in cold running water should be sufficient to get rid of any surface detritus.

Mussels and clams must be alive before cooking. Any that are not should be discarded.

Mussels don’t need soaking, but you should go over them carefully, discarding any with broken shells or that feel suspiciously heavy (an indication they may be full of mud). Most cooks pull away the “beard” that clings between the shells, but we have never found that to be necessary unless it’s particularly heavy—it’s basically a cosmetic question. Tap any open mussels against the side of the sink and discard any that don’t close up in a minute or two. Also discard any that have not opened at the end of the cooking time.

Most clams do need soaking, and even if they appear to be pristine, it’s a good idea to soak—nothing ruins a cook’s mood faster than discovering that the sauce for spaghetti con vongole is too gritty to eat. As with mussels, examine them carefully, discarding any with broken shells or that feel suspiciously heavy. Then set the clams to soak for an hour in cold water in which you’ve dissolved plenty of salt (a cup or more of salt to a gallon of water). Lift the shellfish out at the end of that time, swishing them through the water as you do so. (If a lot of sand is left in the bottom of the bowl, you might want to repeat this process.) Again, as with mussels, any that don’t open by the end of the cooking time should also be discarded.

A FEW SPECIAL INGREDIENTS

TOMATOES

In the Summer selection of recipes, we offer plenty of ideas for sauces using the fresh, ripe products of your own or neighbor farmer’s garden. But our pasta kitchen also depends to a large degree on tomatoes in their preserved phases, the result of techniques that maintain the fresh, bright taste of summer tomatoes throughout the year. Following are some of the ways you’ll find tomatoes in Italy and imported to North America.

Pelati: The Italian term for any kind of canned whole tomatoes, the word simply means “peeled,” presumably because most tomatoes are peeled before canning. We happily use canned tomatoes when fresh ones are not in season. But what kind of canned tomatoes? San Marzano is the instinctive answer, the famous pear-shaped preserving tomatoes from the area around Naples, now safeguarded by its very own DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or protected denomination of origin).

Alas, despite the DOP, the name alone can be deceptive. Not all San Marzanos are true to the breed. In fact, one notorious American brand is actually called San Marzano, its label painted the red, white, and green of the Italian flag, but the spherical little tomatoes inside are grown and canned in California. If it’s truly San Marzanos you want, then you must look for DOP Pomodori San Marzano dell’Agro Sarnese-Nocerino on the label. (Incidentally, these are the only tomatoes allowed for La Vera Pizza Napoletana, which also has its own DOP.) The very best San Marzanos, in our opinion, are those produced by the Gustarossa cooperative and available through www.gustiamo.com. If the label simply reads “certified San Marzanos,” without the prestigious DOP, it means nothing.

But that’s not the end of the story. There are other tomatoes besides San Marzanos, and other, less expensive brands that offer a good, full-flavored tomato experience, if you will. Among our favorites are Academia Barilla’s pomodorini pelati, sweet-tart peeled cherry tomatoes; Muir Glen from California (certified organic); and even, perhaps surprisingly, good old Hunt’s, a favorite of our mother and grandmother. If you get serious about the quality of your pelati, it’s a good idea to organize a taste test with some friends and see what you conclude. Be sure to taste the raw, straight-from-the-tin tomato and then the same tomato heated up—the taste can change remarkably.

Keep in mind that when we refer to a 14-ounce (or 28-ounce) can of tomatoes, we mean whole tomatoes, not crushed or diced, with nothing added but a little salt and citric acid. Any other flavors should be added by the cook.

Passata di Pomodoro: Often called for in Italian recipes, this is simply a puree of tomatoes, nothing more. It can be raw (cruda), made with ripe tomatoes fresh from the garden, or cooked (cotta). Passata is easy to produce on your own, by simply draining a can of best-quality tomatoes (reserving the juice from the can) and either putting them through a food mill or using a handheld blender to reduce to a puree. If necessary, stir in some of the reserved juice from the can to reach the right consistency. A 28-ounce can of pelati, drained, yields about 2 cups passata. Passata is also available as a commercial product. The best known is Pomi, imported from Italy and called “strained tomatoes”—a useful product for the pantry shelf.

Pomarola: This is the term used in Tuscany and central Italy for tomato sauce, made at home and preserved for the winter in the farmhouse dispensa, or pantry (see the recipe and directions for making your own here). It could be just plain tomatoes, but it is more often tomatoes to which various aromatics have been added—garlic, onion, carrot, basil, rosemary, parsley, any or all in combination.

Doppio Concentrato, aka Estratto: Tomato paste ideally is a thick concentration of all the summertime goodness and sweetness of tomatoes. Some cooks think of it as a crutch, but we follow generations of Italian home cooks and restaurant chefs alike in finding it an invaluable flavor booster, to be used with caution and in small quantities. (The idea of mixing a can of tomato paste with boiling water to make a pasta sauce, recommended in earlier American cookbooks, is anathema.) The finest kind, we think, comes from Sicily, where sweet, ripe tomatoes are crushed, then the pulp spread out to dry in the late-summer sun over many days while flavors concentrate into a thick, dark paste called ’strattu or estratto di pomodoro, tomato extract. This Sicilian product can be found online from several sources, among them www.markethallfoods.com, where the paste is made by Maria Grammatico, the legendary pastry chef in Erice, and www.gustiamo.com, whose ’strattu is made by olive oil producer Lorenzo Piccione from his mother’s recipe. These are worth seeking out. They are expensive, but they will last a long time. After using a small amount, smooth over the surface in the little jar and spoon a thin layer of olive oil over the top, then refrigerate to store. Mutti is a very good, more commercial brand of tomato concentrate, with the advantage that it comes in a tube so you use what you need and keep the rest sealed in the fridge.

ANCHOVIES

So many people rush to say, “Oh, I really hate anchovies,” and then it turns out that they’re eating them all the time without even being aware of it. Good restaurant chefs know that a hit of anchovies in the very beginning of a sauce will give that sauce great depth of flavor, especially with pasta. And yet, people go on saying, “Oh, I really hate anchovies.”

If you’re one of those people, we recommend you try a sauce like, for instance, Roman-Style Artichokes with Mint and Garlic (here)—add anchovies to half the sauce, leave them out of the other half. Taste both and we think you’ll agree—anchovies are important and must be in your pantry.

Nancy believes in buying salted anchovies and boning and rinsing them yourself. This is traditional in Italy, where a big can of salted anchovies sits in the deli case and shoppers buy one or two as needed. Sara has come around to buying oil-packed fillets, which are potentially just as good and remove one step from the cooking process. She buys Italian or Spanish anchovies in olive oil, either in small glass jars or in flat cans. Two brands we like are Ortiz and Roland, both widely available. (Don’t confuse oil-packed anchovies with the white, lightly pickled kind; the latter are fantastic as an appetizer but not suitable for cooking.)

If you want to use salt-packed anchovies, rinse the salt off under running water, then soak in cold water for 30 minutes to get rid of the salt. Pull the fillets off the bone and rinse briefly in a bit of Italian white wine vinegar. Use immediately or store for a week covered in extra-virgin olive oil in the fridge.

AROMATICS

Italians call them odori, and they are the backbone of flavor in Italian sauces, soups, braises, and so on, even providing a bed on which meat is roasted, or chopped together to stuff into the cavity of a fish for grilling. “Odori, signora?” says our Signora Benigni when we finish our Saturday market shopping, and she extends a little bundle of carrot, celery, parsley, maybe a sprig of rosemary or sage—her offering for the gift of our business. We always accept, of course, and take the bundle home to use in different combinations, maybe just a simple chop of garlic and parsley, or perhaps a more complex mix including sage, bay leaf, and maybe a little prosciutto fat as the basis for a ragù, cooked out and simmered slowly with water and tomato paste before the meat is even added. The odori that go into soffritto are never precise, and if you find you’re missing one or two of the aromatics called for in a recipe, don’t despair, just go ahead without it. The important factor is the flavor base and not any scientifically specific ingredients.

Celery: North American cooks tend to think of celery as a salad vegetable, not an aromatic, but in the Mediterranean, dark green, unblanched celery adds a deep flavor to many preparations.

Chili peppers: Outside of Calabria, which actually sports a chili fest in the town of Diamante every year, Italians swear they don’t really like the heat of hot chili peppers. To a large extent it’s true; chili is tolerated as a faint note, not a dominant one, in the overall flavor of a recipe. Italian cooks buy small dried red chili peppers called peperoncini and crumble them into whatever they’re cooking. That said, the Calabrese are very proud of their spicy food (and personality!), and whenever we find their little dried red chilies, or their chili-hot ’nduja sausage, we pick them up; they’re spicy enough to use with caution, but they have a lot of flavor. In North America we also look for not-too-hot, medium dried chilies—de árbol and New Mexico are two preferred varieties. Piment d’Espelette and some Middle Eastern peppers (Aleppo pepper, for instance) can also be used.

Fresh and dried herbs: Basil, rosemary, parsley, sage, thyme, chives, savory: All these should be used fresh. The best way to have them on hand is in an herb garden, even just a single row in front of your house or on a window ledge. Failing that, buy these fresh, whether at a farmers’ market or from a supermarket produce section. Oregano and bay leaves, on the other hand, are better dry than fresh. The best oregano comes from Sicily or Greece, where it’s called rigani. If you can buy oregano on the branch, it’s best of all. Most ground, dried oregano sold in North America is Mexican, with a stronger, more pronounced flavor than sweet Mediterranean oregano. If you buy dried herbs or spices, write the date of purchase on the bottle, keep the herbs or spices in a cool, dark pantry cupboard, and toss them after a year.

Fennel pollen: Wild fennel pollen is a bit of a misnomer as it is not really pollen but the flowers of the wild fennel that grows all over the Mediterranean. It’s a very common ingredient in our Tuscan territory, considered critical for seasoning pork, and we always assumed it was a pan-Tuscan aromatic, but in fact it is very specific to our Arezzo region and into neighboring Umbria. The rest of Italy uses the feathery fresh greens of wild fennel, most memorably in the Sicilian classic pasta con le sarde (see the recipe here), but also to stuff the belly of a fish grilled over charcoal or roasted in the oven. Wild fennel also grows all over California, but unless you know what it looks like, don’t pick it; apparently it’s very similar to poison hemlock.

Parsley: We want to stress the importance of parsley. The kind used throughout the Mediterranean is flat-leaf or Italian parsley. With its sweet, almost licorice flavor, it goes into just about everything. If you don’t have room for anything else, you really should have a big pot of parsley growing on a sunny kitchen windowsill. Some time ago, a chef friend pointed out that the tender stems of parsley should never be discarded—that’s where the sweetest flavors lie, he said, and he is right.

Sea salt: We are convinced that Sicilian sea salt from the ancient salt flats on the west coast of Sicily around Trapani is the only sea salt worth bothering with. Dried by the hot Mediterranean sun, often using technology that goes back to the Phoenicians who first settled there, it has a purity of flavor that nothing else comes close to. We have coarse Sicilian sea salt for seasoning the pasta water, and fine Sicilian sea salt for everything else.

BEANS, DRIED AND FRESH

With dried beans, the problem is, curiously, freshness. Too often we’ve bought dried beans only to find that no amount of soaking and simmering will soften them up. That’s because the big bean counters, the Goyas and their ilk, buy up as many beans as they can when the price is right, storing them for three years or more to avoid the vagaries of nature. Because they are rarely date-stamped, it’s impossible to know how old those beans are, and by the end of that time, they are inevitably hard, stale, and impossible to cook to an ideal creamy tenderness. For that reason, all things being equal, we buy from local co-ops and health food stores since these are places with fairly rapid turnover. In Maine we get current-season dried beans at our local food co-op and elsewhere we rely on Rancho Gordo (www.ranchogordo.com) in Napa, California, and their amazing range of freshly dried beans, which they will ship anywhere. Those Maine and Rancho Gordo beans cook up easily in 30 minutes or so with a delightfully soft, almost creamy texture that will make you swear off old stale supermarket beans forever.

Without knowing how fresh dried legumes are, it’s difficult to give precise cooking times for them. This is one area where “cook until done” is the only thing that applies. That said, keep in mind that chickpeas (aka garbanzos or ceci) take longest to reach a tender stage, while some lentils can be done in as little as 20 minutes.

Apart from lentils, most legumes benefit from an overnight soak in water to cover to give them a sort of pre-softening. Sara soaks them right in the pot in which she plans to cook them, adding a couple of unpeeled garlic cloves and a sprig of fresh herbs. Nancy drains them after their overnight soak, then covers them with fresh water to cover to a depth of 1 inch, adding garlic and other flavorings (a small dried red chili pepper, a sprig of rosemary or sage, a bay leaf or two, perhaps some freshly ground black pepper) at that point. Whichever you decide to do, bring the beans to a simmer over medium heat, then turn the heat way down once the water is simmering, cover the pot, and cook very slowly until the beans are soft, adding a little boiling water from time to time if necessary. No salt, however, until the beans are almost done—this can take from 40 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the size and age of the beans.

When the beans are done, remove the garlic cloves and squeeze the soft pulp into the bean liquid. Discard the other seasonings. Strain out the beans but don’t discard the bean liquid. If not required for the recipe you’re making, keep it, frozen if necessary, until you’re making any kind of hearty, country-style bean soup to which it will add lots of flavor.

One pound of dried beans makes about 2 cups; when simmered in water until tender, they will yield 4 to 5 cups cooked beans.

We are not big fans of canned beans of any kind. Most of the time they seem to have an unpleasantly metallic taste. Only for emergencies do we keep canned garbanzos, cannellini, or other beans in the pantry. If you must use them, we recommend buying reduced- or no-sodium beans and then draining, rinsing, and reheating in plain water with garlic, bay leaf, and a hit of olive oil.

Another treat that is delicious in any bean pasta recipe is freshly picked shell beans. In Tuscany in the fall, the markets fill with sgranati, beans for shucking, which are still in their pods. The pods are often rather unappetizingly withered and dry looking, not like young fresh green beans, but the beans inside will still be delicious. Look for fresh shell beans in late summer or fall in your local farmers’ market and shuck them yourself. They will be a fine substitute for dried beans in any of our recipes, though remember that they will cook up in a shorter period of time.

FRESH FAVA BEANS

We confess to being impatient with the widespread American idea of peeling individual fava beans after they have been shucked from their pods. It was never done traditionally in the Mediterranean, where the beans are harvested when they are no bigger than a thumbnail. In Italy, where fava beans (aka broad beans) are one of the great spring vegetables, home cooks and restaurant chefs alike would refuse the fat, overly mature beans that are presented in most North American markets. What they look for instead are small, tender beans, no bigger around than an index finger or at most a slender thumb. Inside the pod, the beans are equally small and very sweet. The idea of peeling each individual bean is unheard of. Restaurant chefs and food writers in the United States probably adopted the idea of peeling each individual bean because all they can get are late-season, overripe beans. We insist that our suppliers bring us only small, tender beans, but if the fat ones are all you can find, you will have to peel them individually. Here’s how:

First shuck the beans from their pods while bringing a pot of water to a rolling boil. Plunge the shucked beans in the boiling water for just 5 minutes, no longer; drain and shock the beans with cold water, after which the outside peel or skin will easily slide off.

And if for any recipe you can’t find fava beans, just add peas.

BOTTARGA

Bottarga is the salted, pressed, and air-dried roe of either tuna (bottarga di tonno from Sicily) or gray mullet (bottarga di muggine from Sardinia). We have also recently had a delicious bottarga, called poutargue, from the South of France. You can buy it as a whole piece, either vacuum packed or sealed in wax, or as crumbled bottarga in a jar. We prefer the whole piece—you just peel back the wax or the plastic packaging and, using a Microplane, grate as much as you need over the pasta, then seal the package back up again or wrap it in fresh plastic wrap, and it will keep for several months in the refrigerator. It should be a bright orange color and have some pliancy—but not too much.

Much like anchovies, bottarga adds a briny, salty, fishy flavor that we love—but it is definitely not to everyone’s taste. Sara’s first experience with it was a huge lobe of bottarga di tonno that Nancy brought back from Sicily to the Tuscan winery where Sara was teaching cooking. Sara had no idea what to do with it, but a Sicilian who worked at the winery quickly stepped up and showed her how to grate it and mix it with lemon zest and toasted bread crumbs to dress a spicy pasta with garlic and olive oil. In Sicily we’ve also eaten it on dark Castelvetrano bread, sometimes toasted, with just lemon and butter. These days we don’t use bottarga di tonno since the dwindling bluefin tuna population that congregated off Sicily’s west coast is poised for extinction thanks to predatory commercial fishing practices. Instead we use Sardinian bottarga di muggine and enjoy it in the same ways.

CAPERS

We use salt-cured capers from the Mediterranean, usually the Sicilian islands of Pantelleria or Salina, although there are also good-quality salted capers from Greece. Small to medium capers are best. They must have the salt rinsed off before adding to any dish or sauce or salad. A quick rinse under running water, followed by a long soak in cold water for a couple of hours, changing the water every half hour or so, is how they should be prepared. Leftovers can be kept in a jar in the fridge with fresh water to cover and should be good for at least a week, though we’ve occasionally let them go much longer without any ill effects.

CHEESES

Ricotta: The word means “re-cooked.” Traditional ricotta is made from the whey left over from cheese making. It is re-cooked (in Italian, ri-cotta), heated to a higher temperature, which causes residual proteins in the whey to come together in little clumps. All too often what is offered to us in North America is simply milk that has been coagulated by the addition of vinegar or lemon juice. It may taste good, but it is not really ricotta.

If you cannot find a local cheese maker who produces real whey-based ricotta, you can purchase it online from Paula Lambert’s Mozzarella Company in Dallas, Texas (www.mozzarellaco.com). If you are in Northern California, Bellwether Farms in Sonoma County also makes ricotta from whole Jersey cow’s milk that has been naturally acidified, as well as another ricotta made from whey. Failing all that, a good commercial brand of ricotta is Calabro, which is widely available, at least on the East Coast, and quite preferable to the soured milk product.

Ricotta salata: When ricotta is salted, pressed, and aged for about three months, it becomes ricotta salata, a very useful firm, white cheese from Sicily and southern Italy. It’s a curious cheese in that it is nothing on its own but really adds a great deal when grated or shaved over pasta. It takes the place of parmigiano-reggiano or grana padano in many southern pasta dishes—and it’s usually much cheaper than the two more prestigious cheeses too. It is de rigueur for Sicilian pasta alla Norma.

Parmigiano-reggiano: The greatest cheese in Italy and one of the greatest in the world. Nancy calls it the Marcello Mastroianni of cheese, but unfortunately a lot of people don’t even know who he was anymore. But most people do know and recognize the greatness of parmigiano-reggiano, the controlled denomination cheese from the area around Parma, Reggio, and Modena in the Po valley region of Emilia-Romagna. To qualify for its DOP, parmigiano-reggiano must be made from raw, partially skimmed milk of cows raised on grass and hay in the region. It is made in huge forms that start off at close to one hundred pounds and, after two years of aging, weigh about eighty-four. A hard cheese that fractures easily with the help of a special blade, parmigiano-reggiano is recognizable first of all by the distinctive brown lettering branded into the rind of the cheese, then by its clean, nutty fragrance and flavor, and finally by its crystalline structure—the nuggets of cheese almost crackle between the teeth. It is superb for grating on pasta but should by no means be dismissed as just a grating cheese—it is terrific at the end of a meal, accompanied by apples or pears or walnuts, all of which complement it beautifully, as does a drop or two of aceto balsamico tradizionale, the real stuff.

Grana padano: But parmigiano-reggiano is expensive, and an exceptional wheel, perhaps one made from the milk of the heritage breed of vacche rosse (red cows), should no more be grated into mac and cheese than a fine estate-bottled extra-virgin olive oil should be used to fry onions. Enjoy that rare cheese on its own with a glass of amontillado sherry and instead try grana padano to grate over your pasta. Grana padano is also a DOP cheese, similar to parmigiano-reggiano, and follows similar strict protocols. But it is made in a much larger geographical area, using the milk of Holstein Friesian cows, and not usually aged for the same length of time. And it generally costs less.

Pecorino: The name tells it all. Pecorino is made from the milk of sheep (pecore). But that’s only the beginning of the story. Sara says there are as many different pecorinos as there are churches in Italy, and she may be right. South of the Po valley, cows start to disappear and sheep take over; thus pecorino is made all over peninsular Italy, in Tuscany and Umbria, in Lazio and the Abruzzi, in Puglia, Campania, Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia. Each region’s pecorino has a slightly different flavor profile. One of our favorites is an aged pecorino from the island of Sardinia, made for and imported by Academia Barilla, called Gran Cru.

Pecorino toscano is another favorite that we love because it comes in several different iterations, from a young fresh creamy cheese, to a medium-aged wheel that’s full of flavor, to a very aged cheese that can be used for grating; look for pecorino toscano wrapped in walnut leaves for a special treat.

Pecorino romano (curiously, despite its name, mostly made in Sardinia) is another one we mention because it is often confused with a North American cheese called romano that has nothing to do with good cheese.* Avoid sour-tasting romano, but do seek out pecorino romano, a salty, pungent cheese that is delicious on its own or grated over pasta and brings a taste of authenticity to typical Roman pastas.

Pecorino cheeses in general range from small three-pound forms in various stages of maturity, the oldest being what’s used to grate, to large cheeses like Gran Cru, aged to the exacting specifications of a parmigiano-reggiano. The flavors can vary from jaw-achingly sharp to mild and buttery to practically rancid tasting. We don’t have easy access to all this variety here in America, but we encourage you to learn about and taste the differences among, say, pecorino romano, toscano, siciliano, and sardo. Then make a decision on what you like best and use that.

As much as possible, we use specific regional cheeses to match a sauce: Abruzzese cheese with a chitarra pasta, for example, or an aged Tuscan pecorino with a Tuscan wild boar sauce, and of course Sicilian ricotta salata with pasta alla Norma. Before the 1960s, when some of the regional divisions that have always existed in Italy began to dissolve, most people grated on their pasta whatever local cheese was available, and parmigiano-reggiano or grana padano were reserved for city folk who were buying cheese in a shop or city market rather than just eating what was produced locally.

Mozzarella: Properly speaking, the name refers only to a fresh stretched curd cheese made from the milk of water buffalo, mostly in the Campania region north and south of Naples. A similar fresh, stretched curd cheese made from cow’s milk is called fior di latte. However, nowadays, even in Italy mozzarella is a catchall term for any stretched curd cheese intended to be eaten when no more than a couple of days old. So you have to distinguish between mozzarella di bufala and mozzarella di anything else. Unfortunately, we don’t have much buffalo milk in this country, so most of our mozzarella is made from anything else. For a price, it is possible to get imported buffalo milk mozzarella when it’s still just twenty-four to forty-eight hours old. In many cheese shops, especially in old Italian neighborhoods, it is also quite easy to find the anything-else variety, freshly made and sitting in its own brine. Just don’t confuse it with the rubbery product tightly wrapped in plastic that is sold in many supermarkets—it bears no relationship to the real thing.

CURED PORK PRODUCTS

The Italian tradition of salting and air-drying pork in various guises goes back at least to the Romans about two thousand years ago and possibly to the Etruscans, a thousand years earlier. It was and is a way of preserving meat throughout the year. Prosciutto is the most famous example, but over the centuries, each different region of Italy has developed diverse methods and individual names for the various parts of the pig and the various combinations of salami, from spicy ’nduja, a soft, spreadable sausage from Calabria that is popular in the United States, to lightly cold-smoked hams from the Alps called speck. In Tuscany pancetta is the salted, spiced flat belly of the pig, and in Rome guanciale are similarly treated pig’s jowls, both products that are cured along with prosciutto and salame. In Puglia, Locorotondo’s famous capocollo is made from the pig’s neck and upper shoulder, cured in wine must. In Umbria, mazzafegati are sausages made with pork liver, and in the marble mountains of Carrara, it’s slabs of fatback that are aged in herbs to make the regional specialty lardo.

All these pork products have critical roles to play in Italian cooking, adding richness and complexity, even in small quantities, to a diet that is, on the whole, quite sparse in terms of meat consumption. For this reason alone, it’s important to get the different varieties straight—even though, in many cases, they can be switched around with equanimity. Unfortunately, many of them cannot be found here, but the list of cured pork in the Italian style that is available in North America, whether imported or made on site, grows longer each year.

Prosciutto, of course, is well known as the salted, air-dried hind leg of a mature pig. The best is prosciutto di Parma or prosciutto San Daniele, both of which are imported from Italy, usually boned—which is too bad, as the bone, once the meat has been sliced off, can be a great addition to any sort of bean dish. More and more prosciutto is being made in North America to Italian specifications, but it varies enormously in quality. The best way to tell whether it’s any good or not is to ask for, or to buy, a small sample to taste.

Much of the time, when you order prosciutto in an American shop, it is sliced paper-thin. That’s fine if you’re planning to serve it draped over a fresh wedge of melon (a wonderful summertime antipasto), but for use in sauce recipes, ask to have the prosciutto sliced in one piece so that you can more easily dice it to add to the rest of your ingredients.

Don’t throw the prosciutto fat away. In the Italian tradition nothing goes to waste, so the scraps, the fatty bits that might be cut off when prosciutto is served as part of an antipasto, are used in the same way as pancetta or guanciale, bits of seasoned fat in which to cook out the vegetables that form the base of a ragù. Sara jealously guards all those scraps at her restaurants, reserving them until she has enough to sweat out in the pan when she begins a ragù. She also saves salami scraps and grinds them up in a meat grinder for a ragù base. And if you are lucky enough to come upon a prosciutto bone, it makes a great addition to the soup pot.

There is a great deal of argument over whether guanciale or pancetta should be used in any given dish, but if you think of the two as meaty flavoring agents, it doesn’t really matter which you use. Guanciale is generally fattier and probably more adapted to tomato-based sauces where the acidity will balance it out, but on occasion in desperation we have substituted bacon, a different flavor for sure, but one that still fills the role of porky supporting character. Even ten years ago, the prospect of finding Italian-style cured meat in America was dismal at best, but that situation has changed as more and more Italian and other chefs have discovered larder basics as the foundation of good cooking. Not only do we have great American-made, Italian-style salume and cured pork products from Fra’ Mani (www.framani.com) in California and La Quercia (www.laquercia.us) in Iowa, there is also a renewed interest in our American heritage with delicious dry-cured hams from Benton’s in Tennessee (www.bentonscountryhams2.com) and Edwards (www.edwardsvaham.com) in Virginia. These won’t be exactly the same as what we taste in Italy, but again they will work the same, adding more flavor and richness to whatever you are making. Seek out real Italian-style pancetta, guanciale, and prosciutto for sure, but also check out local farmers’ markets and traditional shops in your own region.

EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL

This is the only kind of oil that we use, and we use it profusely. Yes, it is expensive, especially the fine estate-bottled oils that we use for garnishing. Most of these are Italian, but there are some superior Spanish and Greek oils as well, and at least one French oil that is in this category, not to mention a couple of excellent California oils. Nancy’s book Virgin Territory is a great resource for information about all these different oils.

Olive oil, even the finest kind, degrades naturally with exposure to light and heat, so in general, what you want to look for is oil packaged in dark, light-proof bottles or tins with a recent harvest date. Not all oils carry a harvest date, but more and more quality producers, recognizing the market value of this information, are including it on their labels. (Note that the use-by date may be very different and is not always a reliable indicator of quality.)

Spanish, Greek, French, and Italian oils may carry a DOP (protected denomination of origin) or IGP (protected geographical indication) stamp from the European Union, a further indication of quality, although if the olive oil is very old, it doesn’t really matter if it has a DOP. The best advice we can give you is to buy from reliable purveyors. Some of the best are online: www.gustiamo.com, www.olio2go.com, and www.dipaloselects.com, for Italian oils; www.markethallfoods.com for Californian and Mediterranean oils; and www.zingermans.com for oils from most of the olive oil–producing areas of the world, including Chile, Tunisia, and South Africa.

But don’t ignore the cheaper, somewhat more mass-market extra-virgin oils. Many of these are great to use for cooking—not Bertolli and Carapelli, which are industrial packagers of oil from all over everywhere—but solid, well-produced oils, often from specific regions. Academia Barilla has four or five different oils from different parts of Italy (Liguria, Sicily, and so forth) as well as “100% Italiano,” all of which are quite widely available. In her restaurants, Sara uses Iliada, a very good Greek oil. We also like California Olive Ranch for an all-purpose extra-virgin, as well as Olisur from Chile.

Do not believe those who claim you cannot cook with extra-virgin olive oil. It is not true that it has a low flash point or smoke point or burn point. The smoke point for extra-virgin olive oil is around 410ºF, which is way higher than you would want for any sort of frying. Most of the time you will be cooking at around 310º to 350ºF. Moreover, because of its high concentration of polyphenols, extra-virgin olive oil is actually more stable at high temperatures than many other oils.

We do not recommend using plain olive oil (that is, not marked extra-virgin) because it is highly refined and, apart from the fact that it’s a monounsaturated fat, has little going for it. You might as well use canola.

FLOURS

Italian flour is rather different from the types of flour available in North America. The first distinction is between bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), called grano tenero, and durum wheat (T. durum, or T. turgidum ssp. durum in some taxonomies), grano duro. The kernels of bread wheat (despite its name, bread wheat is widely used for pastries and fresh pasta) crush to a soft, talcumlike flour; durum wheat has vitreous kernels that crack when milled and make a gritty flour—think cornmeal grits.

Here’s a quick rundown on what you might find in an Italian supermarket:

00 flour (called doppio zero—“double zero”—in Italian): Made from soft wheat (T. aestivum); roughly equivalent to North American unbleached all-purpose flour.

0 flour (zero): The same as 00 but with a somewhat coarser grind.

Semola: Made from hard durum wheat (T. durum), semola is required by Italian law for commercial pasta secca; it is also used in the Italian south to make many breads and fresh pasta by hand. Confusingly, this is called semolina in North America.

Semolina or semola rimacinata: Also from hard durum wheat but milled a second time to make a finer flour that is easier to work with by hand. We have found that many southern Italian cooks make their pasta fresca (for example, orecchiette) with semola rimacinata—the name tells it all, “re-machined semola.” Durum flour, such as that available from King Arthur Flour, is the American equivalent.

Farina integrale: As in North America, this can mean either what is conventionally called whole wheat flour, meaning it is processed in roller mills and some (but not all) of the bran and germ are added back after milling; or (and this is far and away the best) the whole grains are milled in a stone gristmill. This will never be as fine in texture as more commercial flours, but it makes up for that in its nutty, wheaten flavor.

Northern Italian cooks generally use their soft wheat 00 flour for making fresh egg pasta, while southern cooks swear by hard durum wheat flour, as semola and as rimacinata. Most American cooks, we’ve found, use regular unbleached all-purpose flour for both, but over the years we’ve found that it makes more sense to use durum flour, either entirely or mixed roughly fifty-fifty with all-purpose flour to get the best results. Whatever you decide to do (see here for more pasta information, including recipes for making your own), we highly recommend King Arthur Flour, not only for the quality of their flours and other bakers’ and pasta makers’ implements but also for the copious amount of information about all of these, made available on their website (www.kingarthurflour.com). Incidentally, they’re located in Norwich, Vermont, with a great shop plus ongoing classes in baking and pasta making.

MUSHROOMS, DRIED AND FRESH

Farmers’ markets are a great resource for fresh wild mushrooms in season, from morels in the spring to chanterelles and black trumpets in summer, to dark, earthy porcini (aka cèpes or boletes) in autumn. If you want to go foraging for mushrooms, look for a local mycological society and sign up for an expedition. (Your local Cooperative Extension Service should be able to help with this.) There are many, many delicious edible wild mushrooms, but there are also some that are toxic, even fatal; be sure of what you harvest.

Fresh mushrooms should be brushed free of all dust, earth, bits of straw, and so forth, using a damp kitchen towel. It is best not to wash them since most mushrooms absorb water like a sponge. However, if necessary, give them a very quick rinse and shake them dry—but only just before you are to use them. Examine the mushrooms and cut out any wormy bits, then slice or chop depending on the recipe.

Fresh wild mushrooms make great pasta sauces. And if no wild mushrooms are available, use the cultivated mushrooms in your supermarket produce section. You should easily find shiitake and oyster mushrooms, but even button mushrooms or cremini will be tasty if you add to them a few reconstituted dried porcini to boost the flavor of the sauce.

Here’s how to reconstitute dried mushrooms: Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl and cover with very hot water. Set aside to steep for about 30 minutes, or until the mushrooms are softened. Remove the mushroom slices but do not discard the soaking water, as it is full of flavor. Pat the slices dry with paper towels, then chop or leave whole, depending on the recipe. Strain the soaking water through a fine-mesh sieve and add the water to the recipe whenever it calls for liquid. (If you don’t use the soaking liquid in the recipe, save it and add it the next time you make a stock or broth.)

OLIVES

They come as black, green, or mixed; large or small, plump or wrinkled; Niçoise, Gaeta, Moroccan, Kalamata, and so on. Each one fits a different flavor profile from strong and bitter to sweet and mild. Sara’s favorites are Gaeta from the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy south of Rome, small, black, soft-fleshed, and very flavorful olives that are easy to pit, and the large green Sicilian olives called Castelvetrano. If possible, always ask for a taste before you make up your mind which olives to buy. We tend to steer away from olives flavored with herbs or spices as the additional aromatics interfere with the flavor of the sauce we’re focused on, and all too often the added flavors are there to mask the fact that these are inferior olives. Similarly, prepitted olives are probably never of the best quality. The salt-cured dried olives from the south of France and North Africa are often overpoweringly strong in taste, and the lye-cured bella di Cerignola olives from Puglia are much too mild to bother with. Both of these are fine to offer with a glass of wine, but we avoid adding them to our pasta sauces, believing they have either too much or too little to contribute. One other olive we avoid: so-called California-style olives, the kind of soft, flabby olives your mother (or my mother at least) put out for cocktails.