Mollusks of the Mediterranean

An informal group of Seattle restaurants was again promoting wild Alaska salmon from Bristol Bay earlier this month, with the argument that eating salmon is the best way to protect the endangered salmon runs. Similarly, eating local shellfish in the Mediterranean provides a reliable demand for the shellfish growers.

Venetians shopping at the city's main fish market

VENICE--The Mediterranean Sea -- under a million square miles, barely a mile deep -- is tiny compared to the world's great oceans. (The mighty Pacific is 65 times as vast, three times as deep.) It's as placid as a big lake, teeming with aquatic life -- 250 species of shellfish alone.

Along the Mediterranean coast of France, boats set out nightly to catch rockfish and eels for the local bouillabaisse, while oysters grow on the rocky reefs west of Marseille. Along the coast of Sicily, they go for prize swordfish, bluefin tuna, grouper, anglerfish, mullet, and sardines. Octopus and cuttlefish are everywhere. And in the northern Adriatic, where the Mediterranean dead-ends between the east coast of Italy and the west coast of Slovenia and Croatia, there's a thriving business cultivating shellfish (mussels, clams, oysters, scallops), especially in the shallow lagoons between Venice and Trieste.

Aurelio Zentilin.JPGWith a PhD in marine biology, Trieste-based Aurelio Zentilin runs the marketing arm of a thriving shellfish cooperative and writes an entertaining blog about mollusks. Fluent in Italian and French, he also hosts a YouTube series titled "Mollusk TV" that provides down-to-earth advice on selecting and cooking shellfish. Restaurant professionals regularly invite him to their gatherings, where he willingly shares his expertise and his recipes.

So let's start, as does Zentilin, at the retail fish markets of the Adriatic. The most active is in Venice: The Pescharia (officially known as il Mercato del Pesce al Minuto) on the Grand Canal, which has sheltered dozens of fishmongers in a red brick hangar alongside the Rialto bridge for centuries. If you find tourists here, they're snapping pictures of Venetians buying dinner. Caught in the surrounding waters: Squid, sardines, sea snails, and those shrimp-like creatures called canoce that Cornichon wrote about earlier in the year.

Razor clams at 40 Ladroni

Where to go for the freshest shellfish? We told you about one spot, the Antiche Carampane, this summer. Here's another: the Osteria ai 40 Ladroni (40 Thieves), on a quiet canal of the Cannaregio. To get there, you first cross the Campo del Ghetto. That would be the original Ghetto, or slag-heap, considered the least desirable spot to live in Venice, all bright and shiny these days with a Jewish museum. Keep going. The spot you're headed for, on the Fondamenta della Sensa, is sought-after by locals because it's well outside the San Marco-Rialto-Academmia tourist triangle and serves dazzlingly fresh seafood.

Pay no heed to the tourist comments on TripAdvisor and similar sites. They'll never be happy unless it's cheap and deep-fried; the worthwhile comments are in Italian ("A chi piace il pesce e la cucina casalinga questo è un posto assolutamente da provare, noi non vediamo l'ora di ritornare!" which translates to, "If you like home cooking this is a spot you must try; we can't wait to return.") Shrimp with polenta, a perfect scallop in its shell, calamari, a sublime cod fritter, the sweetest razor clams imaginable. Not a tourist trap, for sure.

Risotto with Mussels at Terra & Laguna

And one more spot, Zentilin's own favorite spot, Terra e Laguna. It's in Aquileia, a Roman crossroads that was once the second most important port in Italy. (Pope Benedict XVI stopped by to celebrate Mass in Aquileia's historic basilica six months ago.) Local white wines -- Riesling, Pinot Grigio -- are served slightly frizzante (tingling), as is customary. The clams and scallops are served raw; even the branzino from local waters comes out sashimi-style, dressed only with strawberries. Risotto with mussels and black rice is served cold.

The Adriatic, by the way, is the same temperature as Puget Sound, and a single mature mussel, Zentilin reminds me, filters 21 liters of 14-degree water a day -- over five gallons. Farmed shellfish, he's convinced, are the key to healthy waters, since they eat the same thing as shellfish in the wild. Compare that to farmed fin-fish, whose feed has to be imported, and whose waste has to be disposed of. And Zentilin's shellfish cooperative has the full support of the local government.

"There's a mutually beneficial relationship here between our shellfish industry and tourism," he says. Not American tourists, necessarily, but Germans above all. It's just a 300-mile hop across the Alps from Munich to the warm-water playground of the Adriatic, and Germans love mollusks.

Osteria Ai 40 Ladroni, Cannaregio 3253 (Fondamenta della Sensa), Venice, Italy (39) 041 715736
Terra e Laguna, via Minut 1, Aquileia, Italy (39) 0431 919444

Allegrini's Single-Vineyard Valpollicella

Allegrini's Palazzo della Torre outside Verona

The Allegrini family owns a splendid hilltop property outside of Vernoa, in the Valpolicella region of northern Italy, whose pergola-trained vineyards are planted mostly to Corvina grapes. On the flatlands, Valpolicella wines are light and acceptable for everyday drinking; it's on the hills that they have the potential for more character. Allegrini produces its best wines here: Amarone, using the traditional ripasso method, and a 65-acre, single-vineyard Valpolicella named for the estate's Renaissance villa, Palazzo Della Torre. About a third of the harvest isn't fermented right away but is kept aside until January, when the dried and highly concentrated grapes are added to the new wine and fermented again. The resulting wine is aged for 15 months in small casks.

As it happens, we saw this "passito" technique used in Emilia Romagna when we visited Italy in the fall of 2008. Here's what the grapes looked like, on the right.

You could think of the Allegrini wine, which retails for about $20 in Washington, as a "Baby Amarone." But it's a serious bottle on its own, as the winery's Marilisa Allegrini demonstrated at a culinary event this week. It was called "Cookoff for a Cause," and featured three chefs competing for their favorite charity.

• Sabrina Tinsley of La Spiga (where the event was held) prepared a duck breast stuffed with prosciutto and Parmigianno-Reggiano.
• Emran Chowdhury of Cantinetta wowed the guests (well, me, especially) with his braised oxtail and ethereal ricotta gnudi (dumplings).
• Mauirizio Milazzo of Barolo won the top prize ($5,000, for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) with a rabbit meatball braised in red wine.

Chowdhury, Allegrini, Milaszzo, Tinsley

More pictures, including the dishes, in the album. Thanks to Joe Kennedy for the camera!

Aperitivi and More at Artusi

Guests at Artusi

A year ago, I wrote features for both Crosscut and Cornichon about the ethereal, hand-cut pasta served at Jason Stratton's three-year-old, 30-seat Capitol Hill storefront, Cascina Spinasse. Since then he's doubled the size of the place and appended an entirely new venture, an Italian aperitivo bar called Artusi, where he continues to demonstrate levels of creativity and techinical prowess unique in Seattle.

Artusi occupies a quiet, signless corner at 14th and Pine. It has a high ceiling, a concrete floor, a neutral gray color scheme with bright yellow accent tiles and hand-rolled paper lampshades. There's seating for a total of 50 at two bars (one at the cooking station, one for cocktails) and a string of tables for two overlooking the sidewalk. The place is named for Pellegrino Artusi, a northern Italian silk merchant who wrote Italy's first post-unification cookbook ("The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well"), wildly popular in Italy at the end of the 19th century and only available in English since 1997.

Borlotti beans with egg

The concept is for folks to come into Artusi for a drink at one of the counters, a cocktail or maybe a glass or two of wine, maybe a stuzzatino (snack) of fried capers ($3) or a crisp semolina wafer with fresh ricotta ($6), then meander over to Spinasse when their table was ready. They way you would in Italy. An aperitivo and a bite in a caffè or bar, then dinner somewhere else. And some folks, to be sure, do just that. But no sooner do you think that Seattle gets it, gets the Italian lifestyle, than you learn that many more folks don't want to leave for dinner at all.

Gulp! Seattle wants more: bigger portions, more full-meal options. Sheesh! But Stratton's not a dogmatic chef, he's the soul of attentiveness to what his customers want . (Helps that he's got a great staff of business professionals working with him.) So dinner-size portions it is.

Bobby Palmquist

Which brings us to Stratton's dilemma. Can't put handmade pasta on the menu at Artusi, that's cannibalizing his own specialty. So instead he's doing some remarkable dishes that can be prepped in the Spinasse kitchen and finished on the induction cooktop at Artusi: duck leg with prunes ($15), lamb braised with olives ($16), and the single best dish I've had in months: tripe with bone marrow and local black truffles ($16).

A lot of people, needless to say, have negative experiences (or negative expectations) about tripe.

"There's something deeply satisfying about taking such an overlooked and even off-putting ingredient and transforming it into something delicious and tender," Stratton tells me. "I've had many guests be surprised at how much they like it."

Tripe with bone marrow & black truffles

Beginning to end, the tripe dish is a three day process. First, Stratton's crew blanches honeycomb tripe (from Nicky USA, a specialty purveyor in Portland) in a vinegary poaching liquid with white wine onions, garlic and spices. The pot goes on a very low simmer for about an hour, with a cook standing by to skim off the scum as it rises to the surface.

Most of the "funk" contained in tripe lies in the fat, and poaching helps render it. After the tripe is chilled, the honeycombs are scraped with a spoon to remove the rest of the fat residing in the folds and near the valves of the stomach. Then it's cut into thin strips.

Meanwhile the cooks prepare a brodo, a meat broth that begins with a soffrito of finely diced carrot, celery, onion, garlic, chopped rosemary and a little sage, pancetta and prosciutto rind. After it caramelizes and gets deglazed with white wine, the trips is added back and simmered for another three hours. When it's done, the brodo is thick and stew-like.

Stratton's line cook (Bobby Palmquist on a recent evening) finishes the dish with a slice of grilled bread, julienned black truffles from Oregon (sourced by Jeremy Faber of Foraged and Found), and discs of bone marrow (from Silvies Valley Ranch), seared in a hot pan and added at the last minute.

"This is sort of a Northwest ode to cooking tripe in the style of Piedmont, where bone marrow is often used to enrich tripe dishes," Stratton explains. In any event, the tripe is rich and flavorful, with the texture of sliced mushrooms. The best wine? Schiopettino from Friuli, Primitivo from Puglia, Negroamaro from Siciliy, Canonau from Sardinia, Barbera from Piedmont. It's really a dish that transcends wine.

Artusi, 1535 14th Avenue, Seattle, 206-251-7673

Ferragosto in Seattle

Ferragosto is Italy's big mid-summer festival, a combination of the Fourth of July and Labor Day. The actual date is always August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, and big celebrations are held in seaside towns where vacationing Italians gather to listen to music and watch fireworks on the beach. (Far more civilized than Seafair.) The tradition predates Christianity; the festival was named for Augusto, the Roman emperor. Adding to the festivities, Ferragosto is almost always the week of the Perseid meteor shower, so the main celebration is often called "The Night of the Stars."

(In other countries, in other cultures, Assumption is known as Maria Himmelfahrt, la Fête de l'Assomption or Asunción de la Virgen. In Italy, it's known simply as Ferragosto.)

Two big events in Seattle this year. The oldtimer is Osteria La Spiga on Capitol Hill,which launched the local version of Ferragosto three summers ago. Their solution to the scheduling issue (a scant three weeks after Capitol Hill Block Party, a week after Seafair) is now to call the thing "12th Avenue Neighborhood Festival." It will be the second year for this formula, which includes $5 bites from a dozen or more restaurants along 12th.

The Ferragosto newcomer is Enza Cucina Siciliana (where, yes, I occasionally serve as maitre d' and sommelier) on Queen Anne. "Mamma Enza" Sorrentino, whose extended family also operates restaurants in Magnolia and Belltown, will prepare a seven-course "Night of the Stars" dinner on Sunday, Aug. 14th, and I'll be on hand to pour matching wines.

The Pope of Prosecco

Meet Pierluigi Bolla, scion of one Italy's first families. They used to own the giant, highly respected Bolla winery outside Verona, which they sold in the mid-1980s, to their American distributor, Brown-Foreman. Pierluigi's brother until recently was chief executive of Barilla, Italy's largest pasta producer. And he himself runs Valdo, the fourth-largest producer of Prosecco, the iconic sparkling wine from the Veneto.

Prosecco is made from the glera grape, with the sparkle coming in a second fermentation that takes place in large, stainless steel tanks called autoclaves; it's known as the Charmat method even though it was invented by an Italian named Martinotti. Sparkling wine is made all over northern Italy, but it can only be called Prosecco if it comes from a delimited area of the Veneto; the best comes from two DOCG regions, Valdobbiadena and Conigliano. Valdo, founded in the 1920s and purchased by the Bolla family in the 1940s, makes more Prosecco, 10 million bottles, than all the fancy Franciacorta producers put together! (There are several posts on www.Cornichon.org from my visit to Franciacorta last December. I'd link to them if I could figure out how to do it on the iPad.) Ten million bottles is also substantially more than the entire output of the Collio, where I visited just last month.

Impeccably turned out in a Brooks Brothers blazer, blue Oxford button-down and tie, Dr. Bolla presided over an Italian-style lunch at Serafina (bruschetta, calamari, ravioli, tuna, espresso). "Our biggest export market is Germany, then the UK," he said. "We've only been in the US for the past year, but we have some wonderful new products coming into the market." Like many, he was seduced by the potential of China, but abandoned that market after 20 frustrating years. His best sales are still at home; Italians drink three out of five bottles of Valdo.

A Seattle Twist on Vitello Tonnato

Vitello Tonnato is a staple of summer across Italy: poached veal smothered in a tuna mayonnaise and capers. It's an amazing flavor combination, not at all "fishy." But good veal is expensive and hard to come by, whereas boneless pork roast is readily available.

So Steve Smrstik, the veteran chef in the kitchen at Jackie Roberts's Pink Door, has come up with this porchetta tonnata, $11 as an appetizer, through September.

The Pink Door, 1919 Post Alley, (206) 443-3241

Americans Love Their Pizza

This is a "loaded" topic, since everyone's got an opinion. "I'm from Noo Yawk," they'll say, "and I know pizza." Or "South Philly pizza's da best," or South Jersey's, or Chicago deep-dish, or Frank's New Haven "apizza," and so on. So, okay, you guys are all right, There's a whole lot of styles because each big city used to have a Little Italy, settled by immigrants from different regions, each bringing a unique culinary culture from the Old Country.

The pizza above, by the way, is from Tutta Bella right here in Seattle, part of a new menu for summer. They do everything they can to produce an authentic "Neapolitan" pizza, using imported 00 flour, DOP San Marzano tomatoes, and baking the pies in a 900-degree, wood-fired oven that's been certified by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, right down to the blisters on the crust. And Tutta Bella's founder, Joe Fugere, was recently named VP of the AVPN; he was also one of the Seattle business leaders invited to have lunch with President Obama earlier this year.

But we Merkins are a nation of culinary tinkers. We'll deconstruct something as straightforward as pizza and reimagine it six ways from Sunday: as flatbread, as tarte flambée, as pissaladière, as soca. There's pizza topped with doner kebabs in Sweden and a Pizza Hut outpost in Peshawar, Pakistan.

And then there's Chuck E. Cheese. Not a pizza chain (550 stores and counting) so much as family-fun destination (the corporate name is CEC Entertainment), and they've come out with a "new recipe" for their pies. Here's the video; note how the employees aren't so much cooks as equipment operators.




If you're still with me after watching that, ask yourself if it isn't worth $14 to have this prosciutto and porcini pizza at Tutta Bella, and not have to play Skee Ball. 

Tutta Bella, 4411 Stone Way N., Seattle, 206.633.3800 Additional locations in Columbia City, Westlake and Issaquah.

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