One of the best pre/post dinner wines I’ve ever had is one I never would have expected to be so versatile. It is the one I pull out when I have a wine novice at my house who is fearful of the flavorful reds I usually serve but wants to try something. Yet even wine aficionados enjoy its friendly fruit and gentle bubbles. Moscato d’asti will always be a favorite of mine.
Moscato d’asti is a sparkling white wine made in small batches from Italian moscato grapes in the southeastern region of Piedmont. Not to be confused with asti spumante, which is a more traditional style of sparkling wine made in the same region, moscato d’asti is much less effervescent and is described instead as “frizzante” or fizzy. The nose makes me think of peaches, apricots, pears, and is ever so slightly floral. The tiny bubbles lighten the sweetness of the wine so that it is not at all syrupy but quite easy to drink, acting a bit like a palate cleanser with each sip.
I first tried a moscato d’asti at the annual Kohler Food & Wine Experience in a wine and cheese pairing event led by master sommelier Andrea Immer. At the time, my husband was immersing himself in learning about wine. I was not quite as in love with wine as he was at that point and was drawn to this particular event for the artisanal Wisconsin cheeses, which ranged from mild to quite funky. That was where I fell in love with strong and funky cheese . . . and moscato d’asti. While Immer identified some ideal pairings between the different wines and cheeses in front of us, she kept returning to the moscato as a good match for all of the cheeses. It wasn’t until later that I came to learn that it went well with desserts, particularly lighter cakes and pastries. In fact, moscato d’asti is often listed with the dessert menu, but I have found that it works well with light appetizers as well.
The alcohol content in a moscato d’asti is relatively low compared to other wines, making it a great wine to sip while cooking or entertaining. It also serves as a good starter wine before proceeding to bolder selections, as it will prepare your palate rather than overpowering it. Proceed with caution, though. We bought several bottles of the wine we tried in Kohler, the Michele Chiarlo Nivole Moscato d’Asti, and several weeks later served it with cheese, crackers and crudite while preparing Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family. Given the long preparation time for the meal and the fact that the wine was so easy (and delicious) to drink, those of us who were cooking dinner were feeling quite festive (and feeling no pain) by the time dinner was served.
Try a chilled moscato d’asti this summer as your starter wine for the evening, or enjoy it any time of year as a great cheese or dessert course accompaniment. I like mine with a strong bleu cheese, while my husband prefers his with a sharp cheddar. Either way, since it does not retain its fizz well once open, share it with friends and enjoy.
One bottle of Michele Chiarlo’s Nivole Moscato d’Asti was sacrificed in the writing of this article.
Copyright 2010 Pythia LLC. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Improvised Italian Sausage & Potatoes
When I eat something wonderful in a restaurant but can’t pry the recipe out of the chef, I often jot down some notes about it so I have a shot at recreating it myself. Many of these notes do nothing but accumulate until I or, more often, my husband tosses them as part of a much larger pile of papers. This afternoon I perused some notes I’d made on my iPhone and came across the following list of ingredients from a tapas dish I’d once eaten:
chorizo, red potatoes, red wine, onions, tomatoes, parsley?
I had an image of the dish in my mind, but I couldn’t remember the details. Then I recalled that I had purchased mild Italian sausage at the grocery store yesterday and had red wine and onions. And beautiful red potatoes were in every grocery store now. This was a great opportunity for my own interpretation of the dish, since I couldn’t remember the original perfectly anyway.
I ran to the grocery store for red potatoes and found some baby reds that looked especially good, plus a bunch of fresh Italian parsley.
What I came up with was a sort of hash that resembled the dish we’d had in the tapas restaurant but with a distinctly Italian twist. The verdict: Thumbs up all the way around. So here it is:
Italian Sausage & Potato “Hash”
Serves 4 with leftovers
2T canola oil
1-1/3 lb. Italian sausage (without casings, or remove casings if you purchase sausage links)
1-1/2 lb. baby red potatoes
1 lg onion, diced
1 red and 1 orange bell pepper, diced
3 tomatoes, roughly seeded and chopped
3T red wine (I used a nice Chianti. Save the rest to drink with dinner.)
Salt & pepper (to taste)
2-3T chopped fresh parsley
2 tsp dried Italian herbs or 2T chopped fresh cilantro and basil
Heat large pan over medium heat. Add oil and tilt pan to coat. Add sausage and brown thoroughly.
While the sausage is browning, slice the potatoes in half and place into a microwave-safe dish with about 2T water. Cover and microwave for 5 minutes to steam the potatoes.
When the sausage is browned, add onions and peppers to the pan and sprinkle with salt. Sauté until onions start to become translucent. Remove from pan into a dish, retaining as much oil in the pan as possible, and keep the mixture warm.
Return the pan to the heat. Add potatoes and toss them in the oil. Allow the potatoes to brown, then add tomatoes and wine to the pan and scrape up the bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the sausage mixture back to the pan and mix well. Sprinkle the herbs into the mixture and stir well. Bring everything up to temperature and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with bread.
chorizo, red potatoes, red wine, onions, tomatoes, parsley?
I had an image of the dish in my mind, but I couldn’t remember the details. Then I recalled that I had purchased mild Italian sausage at the grocery store yesterday and had red wine and onions. And beautiful red potatoes were in every grocery store now. This was a great opportunity for my own interpretation of the dish, since I couldn’t remember the original perfectly anyway.
I ran to the grocery store for red potatoes and found some baby reds that looked especially good, plus a bunch of fresh Italian parsley.
What I came up with was a sort of hash that resembled the dish we’d had in the tapas restaurant but with a distinctly Italian twist. The verdict: Thumbs up all the way around. So here it is:
Italian Sausage & Potato “Hash”
Serves 4 with leftovers
2T canola oil
1-1/3 lb. Italian sausage (without casings, or remove casings if you purchase sausage links)
1-1/2 lb. baby red potatoes
1 lg onion, diced
1 red and 1 orange bell pepper, diced
3 tomatoes, roughly seeded and chopped
3T red wine (I used a nice Chianti. Save the rest to drink with dinner.)
Salt & pepper (to taste)
2-3T chopped fresh parsley
2 tsp dried Italian herbs or 2T chopped fresh cilantro and basil
Heat large pan over medium heat. Add oil and tilt pan to coat. Add sausage and brown thoroughly.
While the sausage is browning, slice the potatoes in half and place into a microwave-safe dish with about 2T water. Cover and microwave for 5 minutes to steam the potatoes.
When the sausage is browned, add onions and peppers to the pan and sprinkle with salt. Sauté until onions start to become translucent. Remove from pan into a dish, retaining as much oil in the pan as possible, and keep the mixture warm.
Return the pan to the heat. Add potatoes and toss them in the oil. Allow the potatoes to brown, then add tomatoes and wine to the pan and scrape up the bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the sausage mixture back to the pan and mix well. Sprinkle the herbs into the mixture and stir well. Bring everything up to temperature and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with bread.
A scone is a scone is a scone . . . not so much
I have loved scones for years, from the first “real” ones I tasted with clotted cream in England, to the pumpkin scones at Starbucks, to the power scones I sometimes buy when I’m in Milwaukee. I love them all, but each one is distinctly different from the other. Some are crumbly and dry, others are more like a triangular muffin or even have a sugar-cookie-like crust.
For the past few years I have made power scones for my family, trying to provide a healthful breakfast item and snack by loading it with whole wheat flour, flax seeds, and plenty of fruit. It’s my own recipe, one I created using a combination two sources: the list of ingredients from a favorite power scone we’ve had in the past (the bakery gave us the list of ingredients but not the recipe), and modeled after another recipe that had some similar ingredients. I went through numerous batches to tweak the recipe to incorporate fruit and lighten it from the hockey-puck texture of the original, and my family loves them.
Last week I had the luxury of attending Baking Boot Camp at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. One of our four days was focused on scones & muffins. I was excited to make more traditional scones and see how different it was from what I made. The CIA’s recipe incorporated eggs and cream, two ingredients completely missing from my recipe.
The CIA recipe and my power scone recipe are quite different from each other, and the contrast in ingredients is a wonderful illustration of the effects of gluten and fats on the texture and flavor of baked goods. Gluten is the substance in flour that reacts to moisture and activity to create strands like elastic bands that ultimately create the structure for your scone (or bread or cookie or cake). Different flours have different levels of gluten in them, ranging from cake flour at the low end, followed by pastry flour, all-purpose flour is somewhere in the middle of the range, and bread flour at the higher end of the range. In addition, the more the flour is “worked”—kneaded, stirred, etc.—the more gluten is activated, which will serve to tighten those elastic strands and provide more structure and, if overworked, stiffness. Whole wheat flour includes the bran from the wheat, which is sharp and actually cuts some of the gluten strands. This is one reason why items made with whole wheat flour are often more dense than their counterparts made with regular flour.
The traditional recipe from the CIA calls for pastry flour (less gluten in it than all-purpose flour), eggs and cream. Together they should provide a light, delicate texture to the final product. My power scones use whole wheat flour paired with bread flour, which has more gluten to help overcome the effects of the sharp bran and give the scones structure and lift. They also use yogurt instead of cream, and no eggs at all. I also add ground flax seed for additional nutrients. Both recipes use ample amounts of butter.
The results: The traditional recipe created a light, tender scone with a desirable amount of crumbling. The whole wheat flour and flax seeds in the power scones resulted in a darker-colored scone, but the bread flour did an effective job of lightening the end result and the berries added plenty of flavor.
As for my taste testers—three kids and four adults so far—they’ve had mixed opinions, but the power scone so far is in the lead five to one.
What’s your vote? Test the recipes yourself and let me know what you think!
Power Scones
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup bread flour
½ cup oatmeal
6 tbsp sugar
¾ tsp baking powder
¾ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
2 tbsp ground flaxseed
10 tbsp cold, unsalted butter, shredded in a cold food processor
1 tsp lemon juice
1 to 1-1/2 cups berries or fruit (dried, fresh or frozen)
6 oz vanilla yogurt
1-2 tbsp skim milk
Turbinado sugar
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.
Combine ingredients up to (but not including) butter and mix well. (These ingredients can be premixed and kept in the freezer.) Mix in shredded butter and fruit, integrating flour mixture into the butter with your hands. Do this quickly so that the butter does not melt. Gradually stir in the lemon juice.
Stir together the yogurt and milk and pour into the main mixture. Stir lightly until the dough comes together. Scoop dough onto lightly floured surface and knead twice. Divide the mixture into 2 balls, place onto parchment paper-lined sheet and press into a disk. Sprinkle tops with turbinado sugar. Slice into triangles using a pastry cutter or board scraper. Bake for 25-35 minutes until browned and set.
Recut along original lines. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes on the pan, then cool on a rack.
Scones—CIA Recipe
17 oz pastry flour
2 oz sugar
.75 oz baking powder
.25 oz salt
7 oz butter, cold, cubed
12 oz diced apples
0.25 oz cinnamon
1.5 oz egg yolks
1.25 oz eggs
10.25 oz cream
Turbinado sugar (to taste)*
Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon in a bowl. Add the butter and apples and work the butter into the dry ingredients with your hands, piecing the butter out until you have chunks the size of large peas.
Combine the eggs, egg yolks and cream and add the mixture to the dry ingredients. Gently mix together (OK to use a standing mixer on low speed) until just combined into a dough.
Pat the dough into a square or rectangle approximately ¾” thick on a parchment-lined sheet pan. Cut the dough into triangles/wedges. Sprinkle sugar on top.
Bake at 375 degrees F until browned on the bottom and along the edges. Recut along original lines. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes on the pan, then cool on a rack.
Copyright 2010 Pythia LLC. All rights reserved.
For the past few years I have made power scones for my family, trying to provide a healthful breakfast item and snack by loading it with whole wheat flour, flax seeds, and plenty of fruit. It’s my own recipe, one I created using a combination two sources: the list of ingredients from a favorite power scone we’ve had in the past (the bakery gave us the list of ingredients but not the recipe), and modeled after another recipe that had some similar ingredients. I went through numerous batches to tweak the recipe to incorporate fruit and lighten it from the hockey-puck texture of the original, and my family loves them.
Last week I had the luxury of attending Baking Boot Camp at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. One of our four days was focused on scones & muffins. I was excited to make more traditional scones and see how different it was from what I made. The CIA’s recipe incorporated eggs and cream, two ingredients completely missing from my recipe.
The CIA recipe and my power scone recipe are quite different from each other, and the contrast in ingredients is a wonderful illustration of the effects of gluten and fats on the texture and flavor of baked goods. Gluten is the substance in flour that reacts to moisture and activity to create strands like elastic bands that ultimately create the structure for your scone (or bread or cookie or cake). Different flours have different levels of gluten in them, ranging from cake flour at the low end, followed by pastry flour, all-purpose flour is somewhere in the middle of the range, and bread flour at the higher end of the range. In addition, the more the flour is “worked”—kneaded, stirred, etc.—the more gluten is activated, which will serve to tighten those elastic strands and provide more structure and, if overworked, stiffness. Whole wheat flour includes the bran from the wheat, which is sharp and actually cuts some of the gluten strands. This is one reason why items made with whole wheat flour are often more dense than their counterparts made with regular flour.
The traditional recipe from the CIA calls for pastry flour (less gluten in it than all-purpose flour), eggs and cream. Together they should provide a light, delicate texture to the final product. My power scones use whole wheat flour paired with bread flour, which has more gluten to help overcome the effects of the sharp bran and give the scones structure and lift. They also use yogurt instead of cream, and no eggs at all. I also add ground flax seed for additional nutrients. Both recipes use ample amounts of butter.
The results: The traditional recipe created a light, tender scone with a desirable amount of crumbling. The whole wheat flour and flax seeds in the power scones resulted in a darker-colored scone, but the bread flour did an effective job of lightening the end result and the berries added plenty of flavor.
As for my taste testers—three kids and four adults so far—they’ve had mixed opinions, but the power scone so far is in the lead five to one.
What’s your vote? Test the recipes yourself and let me know what you think!
Power Scones
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup bread flour
½ cup oatmeal
6 tbsp sugar
¾ tsp baking powder
¾ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
2 tbsp ground flaxseed
10 tbsp cold, unsalted butter, shredded in a cold food processor
1 tsp lemon juice
1 to 1-1/2 cups berries or fruit (dried, fresh or frozen)
6 oz vanilla yogurt
1-2 tbsp skim milk
Turbinado sugar
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.
Combine ingredients up to (but not including) butter and mix well. (These ingredients can be premixed and kept in the freezer.) Mix in shredded butter and fruit, integrating flour mixture into the butter with your hands. Do this quickly so that the butter does not melt. Gradually stir in the lemon juice.
Stir together the yogurt and milk and pour into the main mixture. Stir lightly until the dough comes together. Scoop dough onto lightly floured surface and knead twice. Divide the mixture into 2 balls, place onto parchment paper-lined sheet and press into a disk. Sprinkle tops with turbinado sugar. Slice into triangles using a pastry cutter or board scraper. Bake for 25-35 minutes until browned and set.
Recut along original lines. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes on the pan, then cool on a rack.
Scones—CIA Recipe
17 oz pastry flour
2 oz sugar
.75 oz baking powder
.25 oz salt
7 oz butter, cold, cubed
12 oz diced apples
0.25 oz cinnamon
1.5 oz egg yolks
1.25 oz eggs
10.25 oz cream
Turbinado sugar (to taste)*
Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon in a bowl. Add the butter and apples and work the butter into the dry ingredients with your hands, piecing the butter out until you have chunks the size of large peas.
Combine the eggs, egg yolks and cream and add the mixture to the dry ingredients. Gently mix together (OK to use a standing mixer on low speed) until just combined into a dough.
Pat the dough into a square or rectangle approximately ¾” thick on a parchment-lined sheet pan. Cut the dough into triangles/wedges. Sprinkle sugar on top.
Bake at 375 degrees F until browned on the bottom and along the edges. Recut along original lines. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes on the pan, then cool on a rack.
Copyright 2010 Pythia LLC. All rights reserved.
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