Tony's Food 101: Italian Wine Biscuits

So as a general rule, I don't bake. I have to hear about enough science at work, I prefer my food to be more of an art. Maybe "craft" is more of an appropriate word, actually. But as with medicine and with everything, there are exceptions to every rule. Every once in a while, the spirit moves me, I get out my measuring cups and make an Italian biscuit. There are three types of biscuits you'll find in the Italo-American bakeries of my native Southern New England: Pepper, Egg and Wine. These are the foods I was raised on, along side red gravy (what most of the rest of the U.S. calls "pasta sauce") and crusty Italian bread. Among my mother and her two sisters, each of them excels at one biscuit. My mom makes pepper biscuits, her sister Donna holds claim over wine biscuits, and every Easter my aunty Elaine churns out enough egg biscuits for the whole family. I guess this is generational; my brother makes pepper biscuits that would make any Nonna cry tears of shame that her's aren't as good. Egg biscuits are way to sweet for my tastes, so I decided to take on the partially sweet, partially savory wine biscuit*. This is a recipe that I ripped off from an OLD very Italian Catholic parish's fund raiser recipe book that my mom had lying around.

* I tried making a batch for a road trip I'm going on this weekend, and apparently I'm a little rusty. The pictures I took of the process are fine, the end result looks nothing like the biscuits I've been making since college. Rather than rising, they totally flattened out into cookie-esque shapes. Another reason I prefer to avoid baking: if you don't do everything exactly right, it doesn't work.


Italian Wine Biscuits

• 4 cups of flour


• 2 cups of granulated sugar


• 4 teaspoons baking powder


• 1 cup of really bold red wine. I like Chiantis. Pour your self a glass to drink, this will make the process more bearable if you're a bake-hater like me.


• 3/4 cups vegetable/corn/canola oil.


• (Optional) One egg yolk, seperated from the whites. Save the whites and make an omlette for yourself tomorrow for breakfast. Tomorrow you will be grateful.
  

Prehead the oven to Bake 375. Mix together all of your dry ingredients, then stir in your wet ingredients. You will end up with an un-appealing purple mass. Incidently, this is the exact color of the first batch of risotto I ever made, and hence why my roommates wouldn't touch it (Figure 6.a).

Figure 6.a - An aerial view of something you probably don't want to eat just yet.

Pick up clumps of the dough and roll them into pencil sized pieces, like a kindergartener making snakes out of Play Doh snakes. (Figure 6.b).

Figure 6.b - Pencil sized Play Doh snakes - okay, it's a fat pencil.

Fold these in half and twist them into ring-shaped knot forms. If you're interested in having your biscuits shine like justice, brush the tops with egg yolk or milk. I used egg yolk this time around. Place onto a greased cookie sheet, or even better parchment paper on a cookie sheet and bake for about a half an hour. Give them some room, as they will rise... and expand sideways. Try to roll thinner pieces than I did, so that your biscuits look more like knots and less like turds (Figure 6.c). After they're done baking, allow them to cool so that they harden and turn really crunchy. When they're done, the purple color will have gone away, and they'll be light brown (Figure 6.d).

Figure 6.c - More like knots (bottom right) and less like turds (top right).

Figure 6.D - The finished product... which looks nothing like I had hoped for.

Store these in an airtight container to maintain crunchiness. This recipe will make about 30 biscuits, depending on how tired you get of making snakes and therefore how much longer and fatter than a pencil your snakes turn out to be.

Sorry about the missed post last week, and the lateness of this week's post. Life's been kind of hectic lately, but stay on board. Things will pick back up as scheduled next week!

Side Dishes 101: Fiery Cauliflower

Cauliflower. The word doesn't exactly inspire the same passions as the mention of other foods: Steak and chocolate it is not. Regardless, cauliflower is a beloved vegetable of mine, but the truth is it's pretty bland. I've seen cauliflower used in a variety of ways - deep fried, slow cooked, even crumbled as a vegan replacement for parmesan cheese. It's versitility comes from it's flavor, which reflects it's pale, non-descript color. Cauliflower is a blank canvas, like boneless-skinless chicken breasts. You can layer whatever flavor you want onto it, the native flavor of broccoli's albino cousin won't compete. Not only can you add bold flavors to cauliflower, you can serve it alongside big, hearty flavors again with little in the way of competition between them.

Here's something that I made up for my brother the other week when he came over to my appartment. My brother and I had this fiery cauliflower along side some slow braised short rib - a perfect dinner for the cold days in between winter and fall.

Figure 1A. Golden, but not quite with brown at the edges yet.

Fiery Cauliflower

• One head of cauliflower, cut into 1-2" florets. Make sure you wash this stuff well, dirt tends to make it's way in between the stems and under the crowns.


• Four or five good glugs of olive oil. Don't use anything special here, again Colavita makes a solid, affordable olive oil.


• Two to four teaspoons of sambal. Most grocery stores these days carry this stuff. If you can't find it, feel free to try using sriracha, korean soonchang or any other asian chili based condiment you can get your hands on.


• One pinch of salt.


• Grated Parmagiano-reggiano.

Preheat your oven to Bake 350. In a large mixing bowl stir or whisk the olive oil, sambal and salt together. Toss the cauliflower in this mixture until it's well coated. Spread the florets out in one layer on a cookie sheet and roast for about 30 minutes, until golden with a little brown at the edges (Figure 1A). Scoop into a serving bowl and finish off with the grated Parmagiano. Depending on how much sambal you decided to use, this may not be for the faint of heart.

Until next week!