It’s springtime again, which means the Internet is running rampant with reports of ramps. Amidst all the gushing over this early allium, I read probably the best assessment of ramps ever written:

Most “spring” menus are cruel teases. The good stuff we really want, like local peas and asparagus, doesn’t turn up for at least another month. So impatient chefs smother us in ramps, the garlicky, leek-like wild onions that come out of the ground in March. They’re supposed to presage the glorious bounty to come. Instead, they remind us of winter’s bottomless pit of turnips and rutabaga. I’d rather eat wild grass on the High Line.

(The Gripes of Wrath by Steve Cuozzo. Thanks to Shefzilla for the link.)

In spite of a certain shared cynicism with Cuozzo, when I saw The Wedge had ramps from Harmony Valley Farm in Wisconsin, I more or less dropped what I was doing to head over and claim a bunch. After all, what kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t jump on the occasional bandwagon?

There are many possibilities for cooking up this wild stinkweed; risotto seems obvious for some reason, and they are a popular target for pickling. But I wanted to taste my ramps in all their oniony, burny goodness, so I wanted to kep them raw. How about pesto?

The beauty of ramp pesto is its simplicity; the ramps have the onion family more than covered, so no need to add garlic. I used:

• 1 bunch of ramps
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, toasted (or use whatever nuts are on hand)
• Sea Salt
• Black Pepper
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• ~1/3 cup olive oil
• ~1/2 cup finely grated parmesan cheese

The first step is to wash your  ramps, since ramps come from the dirt and dirt is gross. After that, the ramps should go into a mortar, at which point you use a pestle to grind a fear of God into them. Adding a little sea salt gives traction. Once the ramps are sufficiently broken down to allow space in your mortar for the nuts, add those and keep grinding. Eventually, your graceful, slender ramps will be reduced to a funky green paste.

With the ingredients ground to your satisfaction, you can stir in the lemon juice and enough olive oil to loosen the consistency up from paste to sauce level. Then add in the cheese and adjust the seasoning. Presto: pesto!

The flavor of ramps is hard to describe; they are close enough to garlic to satisfy my strong garlic appetite (and probably alienate any garlic haters), but they have a further green, grassy taste. In a good way, I think. Anyway, they’ll have to do until we get some real spring vegetables.

In mid-nineteenth century Italy, as power passed from one faction to another fighting to control the unification of the country, many lower-class people — ever ignored by political elites — resorted to brigantaggio, or brigandage, both as a means of securing a living and a form of resistance against occupiers foreign and domestic. In the United States today, the brevity of the Wikipedia article alone suggests the extent to which this movement has been forgotten. But where memory fades, food can preserve, and as we are talking about Italy it is only appropriate that the memory of the brigantaggio be preserved in its very own pasta shape: cappellacci dei briganti (brigands’ hats).

I discovered this shape while browsing through Oretta Zanini de Vita’s excellent Encyclopedia of Pasta, published last year in English by the University of California Press, which I received from Martha for Christmas. After introductory essays covering the significance of pasta in Italy and the methodology of her research, Zanini jumps into a comprehensive, alphabetically organized listing of pasta shapes, both home and factory-made. Many of the descriptions are accompanied by sketches, although as this is not a cookbook — something the author and translator both insist upon — the level of detail provided is generally insufficient to reproduce the pasta at home. Cappellacci dei briganti did feature a sketch, however, as well as the following description of how to make them:

The flour is sifted onto a wooden board and kneaded long and vigorously with a few eggs, water, and salt. The dough, which should be firm and smooth, is left to rest, then rolled out with a rolling pin into a very thin sheet. An inverted liqueur glass is used to cut small disks from the sheet. Each disk is wrapped into a cone around the tip of an index finger and the edge sealed, then one side is folded back like the brim of a hat. They are air dried and then boiled in plenty of salted water. (64)

Between the distinctive sketch and the intriguing history, I couldn’t help but try to make some brigands’ hats at home.

I started by making my all-purpose pasta dough, using a technique from Cook’s Illustrated. First, I put two cups of flour in the food processor and pulsed it a few times to distribute the flour evenly. I then added three eggs and allowed the machine to run until the mixture was granulated. To finish the dough I add water teaspoon by teaspoon with the processor on until it comes together in a single mass. Then I kneaded the dough a few times, shaped it into a ball, and let it rest in the refrigerator for a half hour. I suspect this method, utilizing a food processor instead of a hundred-year-old flour-soaked board, would be upsetting to Zanini and her sources, but it’s a clean and fast way to produce reliable pasta dough.

When the dough had rested long enough to be workable, it was ready to be divided in quarters and passed through the pasta machine (another gift from Martha, from a few years ago). Using a small wine glass, I cut circles out of the thin sheets of pasta.

The next step, which sounded so easy in the description from the Encylcopedia, required quite a bit of trial and error. Eventually I figured out exactly where to put my index finger — slightly off from the center to get a slanted cone — and how much of the dough needed to be folded over itself in a triangle to form the cone. This is definitely a place where fifty years of pasta-making experience — as opposed to 5 minutes of reading a book — would have paid off.

With a slightly off-center cone to work with, folding the brim of the hat was more straight-forward. The long part of the cone is simply folded up. The only trick to this was initiating the folds with the piece of pasta upside-down; trying to do it from the side resulted in a slightly crushed hat. Although I suppose in the line of duty, a brigand’s hat might get a little out of sorts.

After using all my dough to fill two sheet pans with hats, I boiled them for just under five minutes.

Anybody a little familiar with the Italian ways of pasta knows that at least as important as its shape is the sauce it’s served with. For cappellacci, nothing but a lamb ragú will do. Luckily, Clancey’s was able to provide a beautiful piece of lamb for a slow braise in a sauce consisting mainly of tomatoes canned during the height of the season last August — which tasted mercifully of summer and not botulism.

Though the brigands of Italy are long defeated and perhaps even forgotten, their hats — transformed into pasta and covered in a delicious ragú — deserve to live on.

I mentioned in one of my more recent posts that I’ve come a long way in the past couple of years with the help of a couple of cookbooks and someone named Tom. You can tell from our postings (I think) that my core of inspiration centers not around dinnertime but around the dinner table, the chairs we sit in, and the plates we eat off of… all things for the home.

But! That doesn’t mean I can’t share cooking tips, too. It just means that you probably already knew the ones that I share, vs. some of the more crazy-advanced-wow-factor ones from another writer on this site. In this case, it might even be just an excuse to share a colorful photo with you all.

Below you’ll see just about everything that went into a minestrone that I made this time last year. Soup is usually a great example of a “one pot meal,” but in order to assemble this mise en place (French for you should probably read that recipe and prep a few things before you start cooking), I dirtied a bowl or two as well:

I share this picture because the Amelia in me wants you to know: before you cook, check that part of the recipe—the ingredient list—where it tells you what you’ll be using for your task. Notice how it says “1 cup x, _______ed.” That verb after the stuff tells you that you have to do something! Chopped, minced, zested, boiled, etc. True, this is probably obvious to most, but when I was first making things I tended to begin where step one was located in the recipe—heat 2 T of olive oil over medium heat, set the oven to 450 degrees? Sure! This led to me reaching points a few paragraphs later with a hot kitchen, burning fat on my hands, and words flying that I won’t mention here because—uh oh—what I’m making actually has to refrigerate overnight and dinner is supposed to be ready in an hour. I’m now officially committed to reading a recipe through in its entirety at least once before I leave the blocks. Reading it a couple of times? Double plus good.

I’m not a fan of the lazy bread movement. All the no-knead breads that are so in vogue right now for me miss the basic fun of breadmaking, not to mention the satisfaction. I enjoy taking the time to plan my bread formula, mix the ingredients, knead the dough, allow the dough to rise for as long as it needs and to bake the bread in a pre-heated hearth set up. Using natural yeast only prolongs this process. But it also makes the final bread feel more like your own.

Good bread takes time. It can take up to three days from start to finish to make a loaf of my standard wild-yeast bread, from refreshing the starter to waiting for the yeast to decide to rise to finally getting the loaves out of the oven. That’s fine if you’ve planned ahead, but what happens when it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon and you need bread that night? Even No-Knead bread uses an overnight rest in the refrigerator to develop gluten. Some people might reasonably say, “you go buy some,” but I have managed to develop a pretty strong guilt complex about buying bread. Instead, inspired by this post at The Paupered Chef (via Serious Eats) I decided to test the limits of lazy, carefree bread with focaccia in less than three hours.

Focaccia is a rustic bread, which means it should be made from very wet dough. My target hydration was 80% and I wanted to use 16 oz of flour, so I was looking for 12.8 oz of water, which I rounded to 12 3/4 oz due to limitations of my scale. After whisking my pound of flour with about a teaspoon and a half of salt and two teaspoons of instant yeast, I added in my water and stirred to combine. The dough looked like this:

At this point the dough would probably have benefited from some kneading. This could easily be done in a stand mixer (as in the Cook’s Illustrated ciabatta recipe) or, less easily, by stirring with a strong arm. But since I was shooting for lazy I left it like that, covered the bowl and put it in the oven, where I figured the pilot light would give my best chance of a rapid rise. I headed to the store to get the rest of dinner.

The oven rising worked wonderfully; in about an hour the dough looked ready to pan. I spread a thick layer of olive oil in a smallish sheet pan and pressed the dough out. At this point, it was behaving like any other dough, albeit a very wet one.

After about another hour the dough was looking bubbly and puffy, like focaccia should. I had already preheated my oven to 450° with my stone in place. For toppings, I decided to follow the Paupered Chef and use parsley, as well as sea salt and a lot of olive oil.

After 25 minutes in the oven (about two and a half hours since I began the project) it was golden brown and crispy. I let it cool for a half hour and then it was ready to slice and eat.

How was it? Well, definitely not bad. All the olive oil I used ensured that it had a crunchy, crackly crust as well as big flavor. The texture was pretty solid but not as chewy as I would have liked. This was pretty obviously going to happen since it was never kneaded nor really allowed to rest; the gluten never stood a chance. You can see the lack of gluten development in the crumb, which is extremely tight for such a wet dough. If I had kneaded or rested this more, there would be the nice big holes that I like so well. But I just didn’t have enough time to make this bread perfectly, and for three hours from flour to mouth on a lazy Sunday, I’ll take it.

When I was looking for a recipe for spinach lasagna, Tom’s archival memory located the exact back issue from his collection in which such a recipe appeared. This one comes from the March & April 2004 issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. 

My lasagna didn’t come out looking quite so spinach-y as the picture in the magazine, but as anyone who complains about a CI recipe will ultimately reveal… I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. I changed things up a bit by making two smaller, square lasagne instead of one big 13×9. I usually do this when making lasagna as it is basically the same effort, and I get two dinners out my time instead of one. Lasagna #2 is already in the freezer waiting for the next time I don’t feel like cooking.

A few last words…

As it says in the article, “…use Italian fontina rather than bland and rubbery Danish or American fontina…” I found Italian fontina at the Wedge and I was glad I did. I passed up the Wisconsin variety (Don’t be fooled by Bel Gioso’s name… it’s Americano.) at Rainbow for the good stuff and it smelled sooo good when I took the cheese out of the plastic wrap today. No more non-Italian fontina!

Tom’s first words when coming in the door after work: “Smells like shallots!” I used to think “5 shallots” meant five of the shallot-shapes that come lumped in twos sometimes. I have known since I got some schooling from Tom a while back that 1 shallot is whatever the unit is BEFORE you take the skin off. I’m glad I know this now as my 5 large shallots that I picked out equalled exactly 1 cup—just as the recipe said they would when minced. 

Giving no-boil noodles a soak for 5 minutes in hot tap water makes for a WAY better end result. I used Barilla as CI suggested and did this soak that they talked about in a “Key Step” caption with photo. What a difference. As they said, “A five-minute soak… dramatically reduces the baking time for the no-boil noodles, allowing the spinach to remain fresh looking and tasting.” Try this the next time you use no boils… and don’t forget the foil on top!

Freshly ground nutmeg is awesome. I was reminded of nuez moscada en croquetas as I was grating it into the béchamel with my Microplane grater. If you don’t have one of these already (I know that most of you do), you should get one. Nothing is better for ultra-fine parmesan grating, chocolate shaving, nutmeg grating, and citrus zest creation!

The hardest part? Waiting the 10 minutes after it came out of the oven for it to cool before I could cut it and EAT.