eating abroad

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cacio e pepe

A little over a year ago we were wandering the streets of Rome in the blazing heat of an August scorcher. It’s a far cry from where I am sitting writing these words in a suburban strip mall Starbucks as the first flakes of snow for the season fall outside the window.

It was hardly a food focused vacation, but I as whenever I travel, I had my heart set on trying new and interesting local dishes, from the unique and interesting to—of course—the typical and regional tropes. One evening, after a long walk through the narrow streets in and out of tourist shops and a museum or two, and maybe I think we strolled under the dome of the Pantheon that morning, we succumbed to the call of a barker who was standing at the entrance to the patio of a street restaurant and took a table for a mid-evening dinner. We perused the menu, ordered a bottle of wine, and noshed on some breads. It all looked great, but my eyes went to the cacio e pepe, a (literally) cheese and pepper pasta that is everywhere in Rome. 

Properly made, this is basically a creamy pasta sauce of pecorino cheese melted over pasta and peppered with a hearty kick. Italian food likes to label itself spicy, but personally I find even the spicier Italian offerings generally on the milder side compared to Asian or, say, Mexican cuisine. But, I do find cacio e pepe, at least the offering I tried, ranked pretty high on the spicy scale. Peppery spicy, obviously,  and not melt your face off spicy, but certainly reach for the water hot.

I hadn’t thought much about cacio e pepe since that evening Rome until, at work, I cracked open a case full of ready to serve pasta sauce that had arrived on the back of a delivery truck. This isn’t meant to be a brand specific review, so I won’t bother writing a run down of the quality or taste or any of that. Chances are you have your own brands at your own stores in your own countries anyhow. But I will say that I spun up my discount one evening last week and bought the ingredients to reconstruct a fresh-from-the-jar version of that Roman evening.

The Kid hated it. She likes her share of spice these days, but hasn’t warmed up to pepper apparently. We had half a bottle of chianti left over from the previous weekend and so over some pasta secce cooked al dente we followed the jar directions and recreated a quick and easy cacio e pepe at home. 

Couldn’t you have made it from scratch, you ask?

Well, sure. But that’s kind of the thing isn’t it? It is very easy to leap to these home cooking solutions, reaching to achieve great feats of regional recreation from your own kitchen post-vacation. Sure. But I also am a strong believer in incremental steps. Jarred sauces are not great, but often they are pretty good and set a base line for what a dish should be aspiring towards. I like to think of it as bracketing. I had tried a version in a Roman street cafe and I had tried a version poured from a  jar purchased from a local grocery store. I won’t put a stake in the ground and say those were the top and bottom of the scale, heck no, but they certainly have now given me some solid context for the flavours intended for this probably-famous dish.

The same thing happened to us in Milan. We stopped in a little restaurant and tried a Milanese risotto, a dish heavy in saffron spices, creamy and rich and oddly enough reminding me of an upscale mac and cheese. Then, when we came home back to Canada, we bought a couple packages of rice and spice “just add wine and water and heat” mixes from the local Italian food market and made our home version of it. 

In both cases, cacio e pepe and Milanese risotto, I now have a kind of bracketed expectation of taste and preparation and final result from two very different sources. And I suddenly have the confidence to, maybe when I have some time to cook, make each from scratch.  Ambition, in my heart of hearts, blossoms from familiarity and confidence in the pursuit. Both of these things are bolstered by, yeah travel blah blah blah, but also shortcuts and incremental steps. A bag of rice and spice, or a jar of sauce—both cut a path to a bolder effort to make these from rawer ingredients. After all, that store of mine doesn’t just sell jars of ready to serve sauce, it sells pecorino cheese, too.

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the great pasta kerfuffle

Eating pasta on the streets of Rome

I alluded to this in my most recent post on brand loyalty: the great spaghetti sauce change up of 2024 and the “kerfuffle that caused” in our house.

First of all, we’re not Italian. So when I write about “spaghetti sauce” I need to be exceptionally clear that we are basically talking about the red bolognese-ish sauce that we concoct on our stove top and pour over top of spaghetti pasta noodles boiled from a box. It is a Canadian-slash-North-American bastardization of traditional Italian pastas prepared out of raw convenience, and as I wrote in my previous post, a lot of brand habit and loyalty.

Second, I’ve tasted great pasta sauces. We have been to Italy and I have eaten cacio e pepe and ragù alla bolognese, both on the narrow street cafes of Rome, and I know—I know—that what we make at home is not even a knock off, but rather a work night meal distant cousin-by-marriage thrice removed alternate version of these dishes.

What we are very poorly copying is a kind of bolognese sauce, probably better known in Italian as a ragù alla bolognese or more simply something like a ragù bolognese.

The difference is that for fifteen or so years our version involved a little powdered spice pack that got mixed into some browned ground beef with a can of tomato paste and a couple cups of tap water and rehydrated into a chemical after-tasting red sauce that took about fifteen minutes from fridge to table and was “good enough” to make it through the meal rush on average once per week.

But then we went to Italy, as I mentioned, and I had some time on my hands over the winter and I started thinking to myself that I probably could use some of that time on my hands to come up with a better version of our weekly sauce hack that (a) was just as simple and cost effective to prepare, (b) didn’t come from a spice envelope via the grocery store and (c) sure, still wasn’t an Italian sauce but probably tasted a bit closer—maybe a first cousin, only once removed kinda thing.

So. This is my new recipe.

bardo’s sausage ragu

400 grams of spicy Italian sausage meat
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 large can of tomato sauce
1 small can of tomato paste
2 solid glugs of olive oil

Brown the sausage meat. I like to break it into hearty chunks, but you can crumble it, too. Either, or. Add the onion and garlic to soften. Add the tomato paste and sauce as well as the olive oil, and simmer it all for a while. Serve over pasta.

In that previous post I wrote about the habits connected to this thing I was thinking of as brand loyalty. We were stuck in this rut of bad spaghetti sauce from a powder for years simply because there was a lot of cognitive load to go from that weekly routine and the ingredient list we had memorized over to this updated version.  I started cooking this new version, and yet the groceries would appear after a shopping trip with the ingredients for the old version. I would make a trip to the store to buy the stuff for the new version and then the wrong one would get made, or a broken version of the new one would get made (missing an ingredient or two) and then feelings would be hurt on both sides because “we knew the old one” and “you’re complicating things” and “but this version is nicer” and “yeah, it’s good but you need to update the shopping list so we buy the right stuff.” It was a kerfuffle. 

Six months later we’re pretty locked in on the new updated recipe, but seriously—it took some leaping and jumping and planning to break the old habit—to break the loyalty to the old, easy way.

And that is what I was getting at in my last post: walking into a grocery store and trying to unravel the list you might have built into your brain about how to make simple daily meals for yourself and/or your family is not as simple as picking up a new brand of ketchup or a new cut of meat or a different vegetable you’re not used to cooking with. It’s an extra step. And that’s a challenge when you shop while traveling, or just checking out a new food market—hopefully you’re the kind of person who is willing to step up to that kind of challenge.

Posted on episode 335

Sourdough Bagels, New York Style

It’s been a couple weeks since we got back from our trip to Manhattan. While my daughter loved Broadway, I really got into the food, in particular hunting down a couple good bagel bakeries and sampling their authentic wares.

Of course, this left me yearning for some New York back home, and wondering if I could replicate them in my own kitchen. And, this particular recipe seemed to do the trick:

New York Style Sourdough Bagels

200g active sourdough starter (stiff)
430g cold water (less for looser starter)
30g maple syrup
750g all-purpose flour
10g salt
15g baking soda (for boiling)
15g brown sugar (for boiling)
150g toppings, eg sesame seeds

First, you should know that I use a fairly stiff starter with about 70% hydration. If you have a looser, wetter starter, your measures should calculate for less water. Bagels tend to target a stiffer dough with a hydration of around 60% so definitely account for that in your water percentage or else you’ll make breadier, lighter, maybe-not-bagels. For example, with a wet starter, say 90% hydration, you probably need about 100g less water.

Otherwise, you’re going to mix up these ingredients — starter, water, syrup, salt and flour –into a nice stiff dough that you can rest for a few hours to a couple days. Longer rests are going to develop the flavours better, of course, but work with the time you have.

After you’ve rested the dough, divide into eight (8) equal pieces, rolling these into balls that you can rest for another ten minutes or so. These balls eventually need to get shaped into the bagels which is an effort that involves rolling out a log that is 20-25cm long and then looping and pressing the ends together into that familiar bagel shape.

Because this is sourdough, you’re in for another 6-8 hours or rise time on your freshly shaped bagels, but when they have risen (which because of the stiffness of the dough is going to seem a bit less than you might get with bread) you can set up your cooking assembly line: a pot of boiling water with the baking soda and sugar dissolved, a plate or shallow dish with your toppings, and a cooking sheet with some parchment.

Boil the rings for about 20 seconds on each side, then as you pull them from the water dip or sprinkle on the toppings and set them onto the baking sheet with a little room to rise (so they don’t stick together!)

Bake at 450F for about 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

My results on the first try were fairly authentic from my week in New York. Tasty. Fresh. Firm on the exterior and chewy-soft on the inside. They cut and toasted beautifully.

My biggest problem is that I’m gonna need to go find myself a vat of whipped cream cheese to schmear atop them.