La Cucina Siciliana (e Italiana)

Pictures and descriptions of food from Sicily (and especially Pantelleria). More interested in geology? Go here.

Pistu Pantiddirìa (Pantelleria-style Pesto)

Pasta chî sardi (Pasta with sardines) [My attempt at a homemade version]

Ravioli cu menta e ricotta (Ravioli with mint and ricotta)

Sicilian Beer!

Passito (Pantelleria Wine)

La Favarotta (Trattoria in Khamma, Pantelleria)

Pizza and Sfincione

Tomatoes

Garlic

Aglio e Olio

Puttanesca

Links

 

Pistu Pantiddirìa

"Pasta cu pistu e pisci rustutu chi sarmenti"

Pantelleria-style pesto (pesto Pantesco) is a tomato-based pesto: a fresh sauce that is excellent on pasta, pizza, or roasted fish.  This type of pesto (similar to the better-known pesto Trapanese, or Tràpani-style pesto) is common in western Sicily.  The best we had was Silvio’s homemade version in Palermo, which was served with rotini.  In Pantelleria, we had it served with spaghetti, and on pizza with anchovy, capers, and mozzarella.

Here’s our version:

Bring a pot of water to a boil. While you wait for the water to boil, toast a handful of raw almonds in a dry skillet on the stove.  When they’re nicely browned and aromatic, transfer them to a food processor.  Add two to four cloves of garlic—whatever you like.  The restaurant varieties we ate took it easy on the garlic; Silvio, however, cranked up the garlic for his "Pesto alla Trapanese"—and that’s how we like it, too.  So: two for “restaurant style”, three or four for “Silvio style”.  At this point, I go ahead and put the lid on and get the almonds and garlic well-pulverized.  Then add a small bunch of parsley, and a small bunch of mint.  You can also use basil, fennel, or whatever you like, but I recommend mint: save the basil for some pesto Genovese and the fennel for chi sardi.  Add a big pinch of oregano (Pantelleria oregano, if you’ve got it), a pinch of red pepper flakes, and a little salt (Tràpani sea salt is pretty easy to find… but salt is salt.)  When the water starts to boil, take the tomatoes, one by one, and dip them into the water until they start to peel.  Remove the tomato, finish peeling it, cut it open, remove the seedy pulp (throw it in the compost), and put the tomato in the food processor.  Repeat until all of the tomatoes are in the food processor.  If you’re going to have pasta with your pesto, good news: the water’s ready!  Salt the water, add the pasta, and set the timer for one minute LESS than the lowest minute suggested on the box (e.g., 8 minutes for spaghetti).  Turn your attention back to the food processor: turn it up and let it pulverize, slowly adding olive oil until it achieves a nice pesto-like consistency.  When the pasta is done, drain it, turn it into a serving bowl, and immediately start stirring in pesto—as much or as little as you like.  Also, if you like, stir in some capers that have been well-rinsed.  You can serve this with cheese, but you don’t really need to.

See the Links at the bottom of this page for a few other versions of pesto Pantesco and Trapanese.

Shopping/garden list

600 g very ripe tomato
50-100 g raw almonds
2-4 cloves of garlic
a large bunch of herbs: I prefer mint and parsley, but you can use whatever is available in any combination (fennel fronds, basil, etc.)
dried oregano
crushed red pepper
olive oil
salt

optional: capers (salt-packed, that have been soaking in water the entire time you’ve been cooking, and then well-rinsed.)

Pasta chî sardi

"Pasta with sardines" is the official pasta of Palermo: It's an awesome, ancient dish with a HEAVY Arabic/Moorish influence usually served with bucatini (my favorite kind of pasta) and made with lots of sardines (duh) with anchovy, onion, saffron, pine nuts, passas (small rasins), wild fennel (finucchiu sarvaggiu), and olive oil. (Here's a great description elsewhere on the web.) It's so super-awesome, I ate it for lunch (at Trattoria ai Normani) one day and then had to eat it for dinner (at Trattoria Primavera in Piazza Bologni). Here's a picture of that dinner:

Fresh sardines and octopus at "Il Capo" market in Palermo:

William at "Il Capo", eating fragoline di bosco and checking out the seafood:

Pasta chî tunnu a Palirmitana

This is not a reproduction of something I've eaten or even seen on the menu in Sicily: it's simply my attempt to make something very similar to Bucatini chî sardi (see above) with ingredients available to me in Kentucky (or in some cases, with ingredients I've acquired elsewhere and stockpiled!) The biggest obstacle to making Pasta with sardines here is the lack of fresh sardines*--those are replaced with tuna: hence Pasta chî tunnu a Palirmitana, "Palermo-style pasta with tuna."

The annotated shopping/garden list:
500 g Bucatini (available at Liquor Barn in Lexington),
2 Cans (284 g) Cento canned tuna in oil (also purchased at Liquor Barn),
200 g Finnocchio Selvatico, blanched and chopped (from the garden, as seen below),
50 g Pasas, soaked in warm water (puchased at "Il Capo" market in Palermo for €0.50 for a 100 g bag),
50 g Pine nuts, toasted (purchased from Sam's Wholesale, imported from China, of course),
1 Onion (from the garden),
6 salted Anchovies, soaked and rinsed thoroughly (purchased at an Italian market in Dallas that my brother David found),
1 pinch Saffron, crushed and dissolved in warm water (purchased from a market in Madrid),
Olive oil (Wal-mart), Salt (Trapani), White Pepper (Madrid), Breadcrumbs

First, "Finnocchio Selvatico": literally "Wild Fennel," this is also sometimes called "Mountain Fennel". It's a type of fennel that does not produce an edible bulb, and grows as a common roadside weed throughout Sicily, including Pantelleria:

In Kentucky, the fennel doesn't grow wild... but I'm working on having it grow wild in my backyard by sowing seeds every spring. Despite our relatively cold climate (Zone 6, officially, but probably closer to Zone 7 near my house), we are starting to see fennel come back in our herb garden every year. Here is William (wearing his ubiquitous Palermo soccer jersey) with about 200 g of fennel fronds harvested from our herb garden (with pineapple sage, nasturtium, and heavenly blue morning glory in the background):

To make this dish, we set a large pot of water on the stove to boil and seasoned the water liberally with salt. Once it came to a boil, we added all of the fennel fronds and stems, reduced the heat to medium, and let it simmer for about 15 minutes. While we waited for the water to boil, we engaged in a bit of food prep, including: (1) soaking the pasas in warm water, (2) soaking the whole, salted anchovies in warm water--and frequently rinsing and changing the water, (3) chopping up the onion, (4) toasting the pine nuts, and (5) enjoying a Campari and soda.

As soon as the fennel was blanched, we removed it from the water and let it drain in the collander, turned the heat back up on the now-greenish water to high to bring it back to a boil, and began to saute the onions in olive oil on the skillet. As soon as the onions were soft, the six (now very thoroughtly chopped) anchovies were added. (Sometime during the sauteeing of the onions and anchovies, the water probably made it back to a boil: the bucatini was added and the timer was set to 9 minutes--a bit short of the 10-12 minutes recommended on the bag.) After the anchovies have melted into the oil, the tuna, toasted pine nuts, and soaked (and drained) pasas were added. As soon as this was done, the fennel fronds were chopped up very finely, the saffron was ground to a powder in a mortar, some of the hot pasta water was added to the saffron, and both the fennel and saffron were added to the onion-anchovy-tuna-pine nut-passas sautee. As soon as the pasta was done, it was drained, and tossed together with the sautee in a bowl, seasoned with pepper, and served. Sprinkle on breadcrumbs as you would grated cheese.

*Sardines Update! They are occassionally available here! In early February 2010, William and I found them at Whole Foods in Lexington:

But note the price of these ($9.99/lb) compared to the price at Il Capo in Palermo (€3.90/kg... or less than $2.50/lb); we're paying four times as much for these bony little fish, which were delicious, by the way, stuffed with a mixture of breadcrumbs, onions, pine nuts, and pasas and served with a side of broccoli and Risotto Milanese (thus uniting north and south Italy! We'll call this one the Garibaldi platter...) The risotto is flavored with our Spanish saffron, white pepper, vermouth, parmagiano-reggiano, and broth made from anchovy salt, bay leaves, and the sardine heads:

(That's a small plate, by the way.)

Ravioli cu Menta e Ricotta

My absolute favorite primi from Pantelleria is Ravioli with mint and "tumma", a local cheese. William and I make this a couple of times a year at home: it's a great opportunity to clean the kitchen, trash the kitchen, and yell at each other. We make the dough in a food processor by combining 2C of double-naught (00) flour with three large eggs, and pulsing with the dough blade until a smooth paste is formed (we usually have to add a little cold water). The paste is formed into a disk, wrapped in Saran Wrap, and placed in the fridge until we're ready to roll. The filling is really simple: a pound of ricotta (tumma, alas, cannot be found in Kentucky), a dozen leaves of mint (we use Kentucky Colonel Mint from the garden) chopped finely, and egg mixed together. When it's time to roll, we clean up the kitchen, cut the pasta disk into fourths, fasten our Imperia pasta machine to the counter, and I feed the machine and turn the crank while William pulls the sheet and places it on the floured counter. We run it through the thickest setting three times, folding the dough in thirds after each pass to help knead the dough, and then reduce the gap by one and pass it through, continuing until we're passed the dough through the thinnest setting (I actually prefer the second-thinnest setting, but I'm apparently alone with this opinion.) Then it's just dish a small amount of ricotta mixture, fold over, press, cut, save, and repeat until all the pasta has been turned into ravioli. (Meanwhile, of course, the pasta is boiling and earlier that day I made Salsa di Pomodoro.) Once the pasta is made and the water is boiling, I salt the water, turn the heat down to medium, and boil the ravioli just about ten at a time for only two or three minutes. Basically, as soon as they start floating, I pull them out of the water and drain them. Serve with salsa di pomodoro, cheese, chopped parsley, and... that's it! Here's William enjoying the fruits of someone else's labor in Pantelleria:

Birra del Sole

According to my field notes, I first tried Birra Messina on May 17, 1998, at a pizzeria in Milazzo where I described it as "Strongly reminiscent of Lone Star." Well, if Birra Messina is Mediterranean Lone Star, then their Birra del Sole is Mediterranean Pearl--and thus an appropriate beverage to enjoy on Pantelleria, the "Black Pearl of the Mediterranean". (N.B., if you take a class from me, you will see this slide and hear this joke, or some variant; please feel free to chuckle politely. Note also the price: 0.90 Euro [US$1.20] for 66 cl [22.3 oz]!)

Nastro Azzuro (Peroni "Blue Ribbon"), brewed way up in Lombardia, is what you're going to get in Pantelleria, or anywhere in Sicily, most of the time when you order an unspecified "Birra". Jennifer claims she doesn't like it, but I don't believe her:

We all agree that Birra Moretti (in Rome for this pic) is pretty good. Moretti--a Heineken brand--is also brewed in Lombardia.

Passito di Pantelleria

Passito is a wine made from "pasas", sweet rasins made by drying Zibbibo (the local name for the Moscato d'Alexandria) grapes. The resulting wine has a very delicious, robust flavor that is both very sweet and very strong (14-18 vol% alcohol)! The Panteschi are rightfully very proud of their local wine--whether or not you order some at the end of a meal, you can often count on getting some for free, too. Here I am at "La Favarotta" in Khamma Fuori enjoying some:

Here's a typical Pantelleria vineyard. The grapes are severely pruned and kept trained low--inasmuch as one might need to train a stump. No posts, no wires.

La Favarotta

Speaking of La Favarotta, here's William with our waiter (left) and the owner (right):

Interior of La Favarotta. It's empty because the restaurants don't open until 8:00 and nobody shows up until 9:00--except for us. We are there promply at 7:59.

We had a vegetable antipasto (which included zucchini with mint) and ravioli with mint for our primi.

Zucchini with mint is simply thickly sliced zucchini that has been roasted, cooled, and tossed with olive oil, mint, and garlic.

Our contorni (vegetable side dish) for this meal was Insalata Pantesca (Pantelleria salad). I have several versions of Isalata Pantesca; the way we make it at home is this: Chop up about six cloves of garlic, six anchovy fillets, a large bunch of parsley, a big pinch of oregano, and about 1/4 C of capers (soaked and rinsed of salt), and toss this with some higher-quality olive oil. Let this coast while you steam a kilogram of chopped potatoes. When done, toss everything together. Some versions have sliced red onion and green olive, but no anchovy. The only constants seem to be potatoes, capers, some specie of Allium, oregano, and olive oil.

For segundi, William had pescespada (barely seen at the top of the photo), and I had the house specialty--roasted wild rabbit (coniglio alla pantesca):

Tomatoes (Pomodoro)

Around mid-February, we start growing our tomatoes indoors. Although we usually grow a couple of plants from a handful of varieties, most of our tomato crop consists of San Marzano and San Marzano "Redorta" varieties. These are the absolute best for canning and sauce-making. Below, the canning process begins--a quick dunk in boiling water until the skins split, followed by a cold water bath, peeling, seeding, and pressure canning. We routinely harvested ~30 lbs of tomatoes each week from our twenty-four San Marzano plants (with plans to double that in 2010!) during the late summer:

Jars and jars of canned, homegrown San Marzano tomatoes!

Garlic (Aglio)

The "Science Farm" in Richmond (KY) where William is displaying some of the results of our very successful (and 100% organic) garlic crop! He is holding three examples of "Music", a hardneck garlic, we grew--planted the day after the first frost (late October 2008) and harvested on June 21, 2009:

Our Music crop--from one pound of seed cloves, we harvested this much:

Aglio e Olio (e Peperoncino) (e Rucola)

Speaking of garlic: What does one do when one grows that much garlic? Why, make Jennifer's favorite pasta, Aglio e Olio (Garlic and Oil), of course! This is a very simple dish that takes only as much time to make as it does to boil water and cook pasta. After you get your pot of water on the stove, finely chop up an entire head of garlic. After the water has come to a boil, add salt and spaghetti and boil for about nine minutes. As soon as the timer has been set, but the garlic into a wide skillet with about 3/8 C. of olive oil and cook over medium heat. By the time the pasta is done and drained, the garlic should be just toasted. Toss the spaghetti into the garlic and oil mixture and serve with a little cheese. That's it! Of course, it's much more than likely that instead of making plain ol' aglio e olio, we're making Aglio e Olio e Peperoncino by adding either one whole chopped habanero or one tablespoon of dried red pepper flakes to the pan with the garlic. And if we've got some arugula (rucola) growing in the garden, as we usually do in the spring and fall, we throw a big bunch in with the spaghetti for the very last minute during the boil. (If you go this far--garlic, oil, pepper, and arugula--you should just call it "Spaghetti con rucola". And if you use broccoli raab (cime di rapa) instead of arugula, and orecchiette pasta instead of spaghetti, you've made the Pugliese classic "Orecchiette con rapini".)

Shopping/garden list

1 lb Spaghetti or Orecchiette
4-6 cloves of garlic (one whole head of Music)
olive oil (about 3/8 C, or 6T)
salt
And optionally, but recommended:
a small bunch of arugula or broccoli raab
crushed red pepper (1T) or one chopped habanero (the orange flecks in the picture)

Jennifer has sought this dish out in Italy, but it is rarely found on the menu--it is instead more common homemade fare, slapped together as a quick evening meal. Ironically, she did finally get to try it at a restaurant... at Da Gennaro's in New York City's Little Italy--located at the original site of Umberto's Clam House.

Puttanesca

Last, but certainly not least, the overall favorite at our house: Spaghetti (or Bucatini) alla Puttansesca! Jennifer prefers aglio e olio, William likes vongole, and I like chi sardi, but this is definitely our consensus pasta. It is claimed by both Rome and Naples, but it doesn't matter--it's a great mix of our San Marzano tomatoes, our garlic, and these other oft-mentioned Sicilian kitchen staples:

Anchovies!

Capers!

The ingredients--one whole head of Music garlic, an approximately equal volume of anchovy (well rinsed of the salt), some red pepper (here, a single habanero), tomatoes (two jars), capers (soaking in water), beer (for drinking while you cook), olives (not shown), and olive oil (I guess I'm not showing olive products):

The procedure is easy, and the sauce can be prepared well within the time it takes the water to boil and the pasta to cook. Chop the garlic and anchovy together, and as fine as you can, and place this in a skillet with olive oil. Bring it to medium heat and cook until fragrant and the anchovy has "melted" into the oil. Chop up the pepper (or use 1T crushed red pepper), and add it with the tomatoes and their juices all at the same time. Turn the skillet up to high and let it cook until the sauce turns a dark, glossy red. When it's fully cooked, and nice and thick, hit it with your stick blender to make it smooth--or eat it chunky-style, which is how I like it. Chop some olives and add them along with the capers to the sauce just before you add the cooked pasta. Stir to toss and eat! Top with chopped parsley and cheese, if you'd like.

 

Links

Typical Pantelleria Recipes (in Italian)

The Cuisine of the Aeolian Islands and Sicily (in English)

Mario Batali's version of Pesto Pantesco

Mario Batali's Pesto Trapanese

All Things Sicilian and More (Blog)

Ammogghiu (Pesto Pantesco)

The brand of pasta you should be using!

Pantelleria capers and a recipe for Insalata Pantesca (PDF).

How to make fresh, homemade ricotta.

 

Last Updated: March 03, 2010 at 04:48 pm