{"id":1400,"date":"2018-08-31T12:59:06","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T12:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/premesso.com\/?p=1400"},"modified":"2018-08-31T20:29:42","modified_gmt":"2018-08-31T20:29:42","slug":"mm-enterprise-cooking-vol-iv-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/?p=1400","title":{"rendered":"M&M Enterprise Cooking, Vol. IV"},"content":{"rendered":"
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gli spaghetti all’amatriciana<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I took a break from cooking and eating as I had another stomach bug, the second in as many months. M&M Enterprise Cooking started as a way to avoid food-borne illness but there are a lot of ways to get sick. As a colleague asked, “did you touch a doorknob?” So as long as I’m able to handle it, M&M will continue. Today I went ahead with the plan to make spaghetti all’amatriciana<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Amatriciana<\/em>, like many simple regional dishes, has many variations and there are a lot of opinions about it: onions or not, white wine or not, pancetta or guanciale<\/em>, spaghetti or bucatini. I’ll leave it to the curious to look around the internet, although I’ll caution all readers against the New York Times article of January 2008, which exacerbates a number of ridiculous misconceptions about Italian cookery that American travelers have.<\/p>\n

This simple and inexpensive dish was a go-to for my Veneta wife and I when we were dating and first married, so I’ve used a variation of her recipe, which differs from stalwart Giallo Zafferano’s<\/a> in that she never reserved the guanciale\/pancetta. What can I say, she’s not from the south, but lived with meridionali<\/em> for a long time. I prefer to add a bit of wine, but it’s not easy or cheap to get alcohol here, so I forwent this time.<\/p>\n

As per usual, the first thing you always do for timing is put on the big pot of cold water to boil for the pasta.<\/p>\n

Unlike the wine, I\u00a0was able to obtain a 200 gram piece of pancetta tesa<\/em><\/a> from the ever-reliable Italian PX. I used somewhere between half and three-quarters of it, cutting off the rind and reserving it for a later bean dish. I cut it straight through, leaving a hunk of pink meat in the middle and fat on either side. I tossed that in some good EVOO and added some frozen onions (Italian PX, hard to get fresh here).<\/p>\n

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all manner of frozen goodness<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is where it gets tricky — the onions will burn quickly, and you want all the pork fat to cook off into the EVOO. I managed to avoid burning, but my onions got a little more caramelized that I’d normally prefer. I then added some organic red pepper flakes (these came from Amazon).<\/p>\n

Next, I tossed in a 400g can of good cherry tomatoes (Victoria<\/a>, \u20ac1.90, Italian PX). I turned up the heat a bit, now that I had some liquid to prevent burning, mashed the tomatoes and kept stirring till it all got to a good consistency.<\/p>\n

The Granoro spaghetti (half of a 500g pack, \u20ac1.50 at the Italian PX) cooked al dente in about four minutes (always undercook a little, as you’ll finish it all in the pan). As I was draining, I added some of the starchy water to the condimento<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I mixed everything, as one must do, while adding liberal amounts of Grana Padano (the PX has been out of the more authentic Pecorino Romano for the past two weeks).<\/p>\n

I plated it carefully, added a tiny bit more cheese, and tiny bit of the Zucchi EVOO (not what I used for cooking).<\/p>\n

The result was better than I expected. It all came together well in the mixing, and the pasta itself absorbed the wetter parts of the sauce. The peperoncini and pancetta conspired to make a smoky, earthy flavor. My only regret is that some white wine would have brought that out more, and pecorino even more.<\/p>\n

There’s still a hunk of pancetta left, so there’s a chance to revisit.<\/p>\n

Humanitarian note: don’t forget that Amatrice, the town the dish gets its name from, was hard-hit by an earthquake two years ago. There’s a festival promoting their local culture starting today<\/a>, if you’re in the region.<\/p>\n

Next up: cooking with frozen seafood, something the PX seems to never run low on.<\/p>\n

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I took a break from cooking and eating as I had another stomach bug, the second in as many months. M&M Enterprise Cooking started as a way to avoid food-borne illness but there are a lot of ways to get sick. As a colleague asked, “did you touch a doorknob?” So as long as I’m … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “M&M Enterprise Cooking, Vol. IV”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1401,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[471,396],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1411,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions\/1411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}