Category: Polpo

Whole Sea Bream, Fried Green Tomatoes Two Ways, and Strained Ricotta and Blackcurrant Compote

July 30th, 2023

Time to build a dinner around garden-fresh green tomatoes! I decided to fry the tomatoes according to two different recipes: one from Lost Kitchen, the other from On Vegetables (tl;dr: Lost Kitchen wins even though it is easier.) For the main, I decided on a whole Sea Bream, which is available at New Deal Fish Market and feels appropriate for the dog days of summer. Finally, I got ahold of some fresh blackcurrants at The Mushroom Shop and decided to take a stab at a strained ricotta dessert from Nopi.

Whole Sea Bream (Polpo): This dish is super straightforward and delicious! Make extra herb-garlic oil and salt generously. Cook the fish to 135F-140F. Grill if possible. I roasted in the oven in preheated cast-iron at 435F; I’d recommend going even higher to crisp the skin next time.

Fried Green Tomatoes with Buttermilk and Dill (Lost Kitchen): I’ve made this recipe before and know that it is excellent! The recipe is straightforward. Just make sure you get/keep your oil hot enough so that it doesn’t get soggy and oily. I needed to move the oil to a larger burner to accomplish this.
Joe’s Rating: 7.5
Difficulty: 4

Fried Green Tomatoes, Burrata & Green Tomato Preserves (On Vegetables): This recipe features a spiced green-tomato-raisin compote that takes 2-3 hours to make (it only took me about 2 hours) and is served with burrata, basil, and a cornmeal breading. Opinions were divided on whether the grittier cornmeal improved the dish. I also thought the spiced compote was more of a fall flavor than a mid-summer one (although it was delicious.) I’d recommend adding a hit of acid to the compote and salting all components generously.
Joe’s Rating: 7
Difficulty: 6.5

Strained Ricotta with Blackcurrant Compote and Rhubarb (Nopi): The strained ricotta is sweetened and folded together with sweetened whipped egg whites (so an unbaked meringue) and then strained for two days. I can attest that quadruple-layered cheese cloth works but is a poor substitute for the muslin cloth here. We also found the strained-ricotta to be overly sweet. In the future, I would add more ricotta and cut the sugar. Serving with good vanilla ice cream was very appealing and outshone the ricotta. My rhubarb (not pictured) ended up stringy and chewy because I left it unrefrigerated for a couple of hours; it needs to remain super fresh and crisp for this to work.
Joe’s Rating: 6
Difficulty: 7.5
Mushroom Piadina, Pizzetta (Polpo) and Walnut and Fruit Crumble (Jerusalem)

July 21st, 2023

My friend Karen is a serious mushroom forager and had an assortment of lovely mushrooms to cook with (including a beautiful chicken of the woods!) I selected a mushroom piadina from my favorite Italian cookbook, Polpo. The recipes in Polpo are very simple and delicious, which is good for allowing the wild mushrooms to stand out. A piadina is a thin, folded flatbread from Romagna, if you were curious. To pair with this, I selected a fruit crumble from Jerusalem that I’ve always wanted to try because it features a guava-plum compote that sounds interesting. Finally, I used the extra dough from the piadina to make a pizzetta as well.

Mushroom Bounty!

Mushroom Piadina (Polpo): The flatbread uses the same dough as a pizza crust; this is convenient! The dough is also nearly identical to pitas as well as far as I can tell, so you have a lot of options when you make a batch of it. For the piadina, it is precooked on a stone (or in my case, a giant cast-iron pan), and then finished on a grill / grill pan. I have made this dough many times before, and it came out a bit more wet than usual, probably because of how I stored the flour (open in a hot, moist location.) I decided to leave it more wet and the resulting flatbreads were fine – so the bread shouldn’t be too sensitive to slight changes in wetness. The cookbook also makes a big deal out off rolling the dough thin, but I’ve never had a problem getting though dough thin enough; if anything, you want to make it a little thicker by starting each flatbread with a ball of dough that is a good bit bigger than the suggested golf-ball size.

The resulting dish was tasty but seemed to be missing a sauce. We added creme fraiche. I think an aioli would also go well here. We also experimented with adding a smoked miso; this was delicious, but definitely made the dish a bit rich for the heart of summer.

Joe’s Rating: 6
Difficulty: 5

Walnut and Fruit Crumble Cream (Jerusalem): The guava and plum compote was indeed very tasty (more tasty than the fig compote, which we also tried.) You can get guava in Hmart seemingly year-round. We were also big fans of the spiced mascarpone cream; I always like adding star anise to desserts! We were disappointed, however, that the crumble was baked and assembled separately from the fruit. I was hoping for more of a classic gooey American crumble. Be careful not to burn the crumble!

Joe’s Rating: 6.5
Difficulty: 5.5

Prosciutto & Rocket Pizzetta (Polpo): At this point I have made seven of the nine pizzettas in Polpo and I have loved all of them. Unlike most of the other Polpo pizzettas, this one has a tomato sauce and basic mozzarella cheese underneath the listed toppings. Unfortunately, I think this base took some of the magic out of it compared to the others I’ve cooked. I’d recommend skipping this one!

Joe’s Rating: 5.5
Difficulty: 4.5
Italian Pizzetta Dinner (Polpo)

December 21st, 2022

For a simple, special, and delicious dinner, pizza is an excellent and safe option. And for really good pizza, Polpo has us covered. The pizzas (or pizzettas) come out thin and small enough to make a meal for a single person (at most). The suggested toppings are great as is, but being so small, it is easy to try out 2 or 3 different combos with a single batch of dough. (for example, see the chocolate-yogurt pizzetta a friend and I made in January 2022). The dough is simple, yeasted, and has a flour to water ratio of 8:5 (which is classic for bread, generally). I think this might make it slightly dry for a pizza dough and perhaps is responsible for working well when very thing, although I’m not really sure about this. The pizza dough doubles as a pita dough too – just throw it on your stone or cast iron without any toppings and you are set.

If you have an extra-large cast-iron pan (15″ for a general pizza, but you could do 12″ for these pizzettas) then you don’t need a pizza stone. When using cast iron, my pizza making strategy involves flopping the rolled dough onto the preheated cast iron and quickly throwing on the toppings (a friend can help!) I think I got the cast-iron idea from Cooks Illustrated. In my experience, you can go as hot as your oven will allow.

Stracchino, Potato & Rosemary Pizzetta

I ended up visiting two Italian specialty shops looking for Stracchino. What I heard is that this fresh cheese (which the book says tastes like “spreadable cheese from a tube”) does not keep particularly long and so is often not kept stocked for that reason. Oh well. Taleggio is supposed to be an ok substitute. The resulting pizza was delicious! Notes: Don’t forget to blanch the potatoes!

Olive & White Anchovy Pizzetta

This was also nice, but we missed the fancier cheese. (This recipe just calls for the cheap grated mozzarella.) Maybe try mixing in some different cheese next time. Also, note that the recipe does not bake the anchovies or basil at all; these are added at room temperature after the pizza is removed from the oven, which seems like a decent idea for the basil, but I would not have thought of this for the anchovies.

Joe’s Rating: 7/6 (Potato / Anchovy)
Difficulty: 4/4