Gluten Free

I love a fish in meat’s clothing, and that’s what this is: a mild-flavored fish cooked in a rich veal jus. I got the idea for it at a restaurant called Ribollita, in Chiusi, the nearest large town to my house in Italy. There, they wrap a pork filet in lardo and then smother it with green peppercorn sauce. Eventually the lardo found its way onto fish instead of pork. We use veal stock that we have left over from making the Veal Breast Stracotto (page 235), but if you haven’t made that dish recently, you can substitute any quality veal or beef stock.

For me, a “tell” for a restaurant I probably don’t want to eat in is seeing a Caprese salad on the menu when tomatoes are out of season. I knew I wanted to serve a Caprese at the Pizzeria, both because everyone loves it and because it is an icon of a casual, inexpensive Italian restaurant. Since we opened in November, when tomatoes were no longer in season, I took it as a challenge to figure out how to present these flavors in a way that was every bit as good as a Caprese made with sweet, vine-ripened summer tomatoes, even when such tomatoes were nowhere to be found. This adaptation, which I first named Winter Caprese, consists of fresh burrata cheese, basil pesto, and cherry tomatoes on the vine that have been slow-roasted to concentrate their sweetness and flavor. I changed its name to Mozza Caprese when winter ended, tomatoes came into season, and it had become so popular that I could not take it off the menu. I suggest you serve it with Fett’Unta (page 65) to sop up the wonderful, juicy flavors left on your plate. The recipe for slow-roasted tomatoes makes enough for six or more of these salads, and the pesto recipe will give you more than enough pesto for that many. So, to expand the number of servings you make, just increase the amount of burrata you buy.

For these beautiful, sweet tomatoes on the vine, we start with Sunsweet tomatoes, which you can find sold in plastic boxes in grocery stores. I love the delicate, organic look of the small tomatoes dangling from the long stems. This recipe makes more than you will need for four servings of the Mozza Caprese. We did this to tailor the recipe to the size of the boxes the tomatoes are sold in and because you are sure to lose some tomatoes to anyone who walks by after they are out of the oven. If you can find tomatoes on the vine at your local famers’ market, even better.

I am a red wine drinker, so any fish preparation that can be enjoyed with red wine, such as this one, which is served with a rich lentil stew and pickled red cabbage, is a winner for me. Sea trout is a freshwater fish that drifted into the sea, so although it is trout, it looks and tastes like it wants to be salmon with pink flesh and the same moist, oily quality that you get from really good salmon. Sea trout is much more consistent in quality than salmon and also less expensive, so I hope you will enjoy this salmon alternative. Sottaceto means “pickled” in Italian. The cabbage here is slow-cooked in balsamic vinegar, so it’s like a pickle, which cuts through the richness of the lentils and the fattiness of the fish. The recipes for the cabbage and lentils both make more than you will need for four servings of fish. You can double the number of fish fillets you prepare, or serve the remaining cabbage and lentils on the side. Since the cabbage is pickled, it will keep, refrigerated, for at least a week.

The first time I ate at the Atelier of Joël Robuchon in Paris, I saw a whole fish delivered to another customer that I could tell had been boned and deep-fried. The skeleton had been removed but the head and tail, which flipped up so nicely on the plate, had been left intact. I watched in awe as the diner carved into the fish and ate it head to tail, without any of the usual fuss required to eat around the bones of a whole fish. I was so impressed that I told Matt I wanted to put something like that on the Osteria menu. He chose to grill the fish rather than fry it, but it’s the same idea. We chose to use orata, also called dorade or sea bream, a classic Mediterranean variety, because you see whole branzino on every Italian menu from California to Campagna, and we wanted to introduce our customers to something different. We wrap the fish in a fig leaf in the fall and a radicchio leaf the rest of the year before grilling it in order to contain the herbs stuffed inside the fish. Boning the fish is the most difficult part of making this dish—and I won’t lie to you: it is tricky. I promise that with patience, a good sharp knife (preferably a fish knife or a 6-inch boning knife) and fish tweezers, you will be able to do it.

This is a classic olive tapenade spruced up with the zest of oranges and lemons, and I have to say that it’s the best version I’ve ever had. Note when buying olive purée to look for a product that has just olives or olives and olive oil, such as the olive pâté made by Rustichella d’Abruzzo.

Americans think of vanilla as “plain” ice cream, the connotation often being that it is boring. But vanilla, if it’s done well, is neither plain nor boring. Although they are expensive, it’s worth the extra money to buy large, plump vanilla beans, which will impart significantly more flavor than lesser-quality beans. My favorite are Tahitian.

Toasting pine nuts brings out their subtle, nutty flavor. Because they are so small and oily, they go from toasted to burnt in no time, so keep a close eye on them. Pine nuts turn rancid very quickly so try to buy them from a source with high turnover and store them in the refrigerator.

When we started working on this book, I had a battle with Matt and Carolynn about whether to ask for the various pestos that we use to be made using a mortar and pestle or in a food processor. I always make pesto using a mortar and pestle, and I feel strongly that pesto tastes better this way. That said, as Matt was so kind to remind me, when I make pesto, it’s usually because I’m in Italy in the summer, where it gets light at five, dark at ten, and I have all the time in the world. At the restaurant we make pesto in such volume that we have to do it by machine; it would not be practical for us to make it by hand. “This is a restaurant cookbook,” Matt said, “and how we do it at the restaurant is in a food processor.” I’m sorry to say that Carolynn took Matt’s side. “Save that for the Lazy Days in Panicale cookbook,” she said. Although here they gave you instructions for how to make it in a blender, I’m hoping you’ll prove me right by taking the extra time and using elbow grease to make yours with a mortar and pestle from time to time.

Like the Butterscotch Budino (page 272), this gelato marries the sweet flavor of caramel with a touch of salt, a combination I love. It is the base of the Caramel Coppetta, a sundae composed of Marshmallow Sauce and Salted Spanish Peanuts (page 296). Even made in a home ice cream maker, it comes out dense and creamy, and I would say one of the real successes of a long gelato-making project involving a team of gelato-obsessed taste testers.

Bacon-wrapped dates—a more elegant version of rumaki, the 1950s appetizer of chicken liver wrapped in bacon with a water chestnut in the middle—have taken Los Angeles by storm ever since Suzanne Goin started serving them at her restaurant, AOC. I didn’t want to copy hers, but I like them so much that I wanted to make a version for Mozza using figs, which are so abundant in my town in Italy that you almost forget they are a delicacy. Although I’ve never been served anything like these in Italy, I certainly didn’t invent the idea of contrasting the sweetness of figs with something piggy and salty: figs and prosciutto is a classic. At the Osteria, we serve these as an antipasto on a tangle of wilted dandelion greens, but they also make a great bite-size snack for cocktail hour, which is how we have presented them here.

When we decided to take on the challenge of making real Italian gelato for the restaurants, olive oil was the first flavor I knew I wanted to make. It’s one of the most talked-about and raved-about flavors at Mario and Joe’s pizzeria, Otto, in New York. Plus, I love the flavor of olive oil so much that there was no way I would pass up an opportunity to use it in a dessert. The olive oil isn’t even cooked here, so you’ll really taste the flavor. Pull out all the stops when choosing the olive oil—and use olio nuovo when it’s available.

We serve this mayonnaise alongside many dishes, including the Bacalà al Forno (page 215) and, mixed with spicy red chile paste, Mussels al Forno (page 109). The goal in making it is to form an emulsion, and there is only one way to do this: by whisking vigorously as you add the oil as slowly as humanly possible. When it looks like you have successfully formed an emulsion, you can begin to add the oil a bit more rapidly, but not quickly, by any means. If you get impatient, just remember: it’s easier to go slow than it is to fix a broken emulsion.

When the Pizzeria first opened we hosted a book signing for Lidia Bastianich’s book Lidia’s Italy, and we served Lidia’s peppers as an antipasto. I found myself nibbling on them all evening. Shortly after, I spotted tiny, bright-colored peppers in a grocery store. They were so pretty, with red, yellow, and orange colors mixed in one bag. Motivated by those peppers, I decided to put a version of Lidia’s peppers on the Pizzeria menu. For the stuffing, we start by poaching tuna in olive oil, but you could use quality olive oil–packed tuna. If you don’t want to make 48 peppers, save the excess tuna stuffing and serve it on a salad of arugula dressed with lemon vinaigrette.

Stracciatella comes from the verb stracciare, which means “to tear apart.” Italians use the word for several foods, including the inside of burrata cheese, a soup in which the egg is dropped into hot broth, and this gelato, which consists of plain gelato, known as “fior di latte,” or “flower of milk,” with dark chocolate “shreds” strewn throughout. Ariana Flores, the assistant pastry chef for both restaurants, is always happy when this flavor goes back into rotation. It’s her favorite to eat, but I also think she likes the process of drizzling the chocolate over the ice cream to make the shreds. I love how plain stracciatella is—that it’s basically just milk, without even egg yolks or vanilla, which American chocolate chip ice cream generally contains—and I like the bright white color of it. If you want to make fior di latte, an Italian classic, simply omit the chocolate portion of this recipe. I especially like it topped with toasted pine nuts (page 63).

Meyer lemons are thought to be a hybrid between lemons and Mandarin oranges. They have a sweet perfume and a sweeter flavor than regular lemons. They’re originally from China, but those of us who live and cook in Southern California consider them our own. I get so excited every January when I spot these smooth-skinned citrus at the farmers’ market.

I love alcohol-flavored gelato because the alcohol cuts the richness of the dairy and also allows the gelato to get super-cold. But because alcohol doesn’t freeze, if you add too much to the gelato it won’t freeze at all. After making many versions with varying amounts of booze, we determined that the recipe below contains the maximum amount of alcohol that will freeze in a home ice cream maker. If it’s still not boozy enough for you, do as I do: drizzle a few drops of bourbon over the top.

The key to this gelato is to use super-ripe bananas—the blacker the better. Liz Hong, one of our line cooks who tested this recipe, let the bananas ripen for over a week before they were as black as we wanted them. Roasting the bananas before puréeing them is a little trick I use to prevent the bananas from turning brown when they’re added to the base.

The difference between thick, creamy Greek yogurt and the yogurt you see most often in this country is that Greek yogurt has been strained, separating the yogurt from the whey, the liquid that often sits on top of conventional yogurt. It makes all the difference in the richness and flavor of this gelato. Fortunately you can find Greek yogurt today in most grocery stores. Unlike the commercial frozen yogurts that contain a long list of ingredients whose names you can’t pronounce (none of which is yogurt), our frozen yogurt consists of nothing but yogurt and sweeteners (sugar and corn syrup) and a pinch of salt. Yogurt isn’t a traditional Italian ingredient, but in the years that I’ve been going to Italy, yogurt gelato has begun appearing in gelato cases and is now almost as likely to be seen as pistachio or stracciatella.

Another pure product, this sorbetto consists of nothing but coconut milk and sweeteners. My favorite way to eat it is alongside Chocolate Sorbetto (facing page), or with Hot Fudge Sauce (page 316) and toasted almonds, so it’s like the frozen dessert version of an Almond Joy candy bar.