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Food and WineI chased the flavor of a proper Tuscan ribollita for 17 years until I ate the genuine article again, finally, at Leonti, chef-owner Adam Leonti’s swanky new Italian restaurant in New York City. Leonti’s deeply savory version of the Tuscan bread and bean porridge was even better than the one I remember from a small hillside restaurant in Siena, Italy, so many years ago. (And that ribollita, which I ate on my first visit to Italy, was so perfect and nourishing that it made me forget for an hour that I was wearing my girlfriend’s puffy sweater because the airline had lost my luggage.) Leonti learned how to make ribollita from a restaurateur from Lunigiana, a three-hour drive northwest of Siena, paying close attention to the porridge’s humble elements: grassy-green, peppery olive oil; earthy, rustic bread; small, thin-skinned white beans; and most importantly, sofrito, the finely chopped, slow-cooked mixture of carrots, onions, and celery that gives ribollita its extraordinary flavor.At Leonti, sofrito is the foundation of ragù, and of the hot broth served to guests upon arrival—and it’s such a crucial ingredient that his cooks make about 75 quarts of it a week. Leonti used to laboriously chop his sofrito with a knife by using a rocking motion. “Then I watched Eat Drink Man Woman, and the best part is the beginning, with the Chinese chef chopping with big cleavers,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s the move!’”So, Leonti bought some large cleavers in Chinatown and a wood butcher block and set up a sofrito station in the kitchen, where today his cooks rhythmically chop and break down the whole vegetables into rubble using the same kind of chopping technique I saw a barbecue cook use at Skylight Inn BBQ in Ayden, North Carolina, to break down the meat of whole smoked hogs into a fine mince. The size of the mince matters—the smaller the better—Leonti says, because you’re multiplying the surface area of the vegetables by a thousand-fold. More surface area to caramelize in the pan equals more flavor.When I made Leonti’s ribollita at home in my Birmingham, Alabama, kitchen, I tried the double-cleaver technique but quickly switched to an efficient, two-handledmezzaluna after too many stray bits of onion, carrot, and celery fell to the kitchen floor. I followed his advice and sweated the vegetables in olive oil in a Dutch oven, slowly cooking the mixture, stirring almost as often with a wooden spoon as you would with a roux. After 30 or so minutes, I turned up the heat until I heard that rapid sizzle, signaling that the sofrito was beginning to caramelize, creating a massive amount of flavor. When you build flavor from the bottom of the pot like this, the flavors continue to transform, concentrating even further when you add then reduce aromatic liquids— in Leonti’s case, adding crushed tomatoes and white wine, which cook down to a tomato-wine-sofrito jam full of umami. That flavor base then gets rehydrated with water, then cooks down again with the kale, potatoes, and bread—the latter adds tangy flavor and disintegrates into the soup to add texture. Finally, cooked beans—both whole and pureed—go in, thickening and tightening the soup into a porridge.Leonti serves many of his courses in gold-rimmed Richard Ginori china to frame his food in the Tuscan context. His food is big city fine dining meets cucina povera, the Italian cooking tradition born of necessity that elevates humble ingredients into dishes fit for a king. I asked him about the restaurant’s tightrope walk between high and low. “What is luxury? Luxury to a few is foie gras or truffles,” he says. “But the ultimate luxury is time and space. Those are the two most expensive things on the planet. Ribollita is such an expense of time. It’s the ultimate luxury.”Especially when you’ve spent 17 years searching for a proper recipe. —Hunter LewisCook’s note: Decent bread and canned beans work fine here, but if you shop for the best rustic loaf baked with freshly milled flour you can find, and cook your beans in extra sofrito a day ahead—especially white beans sold byRancho Gordo—your ribollita will go from good to great.Food52It took us 47 emails to figure out what we’d serve. We bounced from side to main to starter and back to main, virtually piling chana masala on top of chard and Gruyère panade on top of broiled mushrooms and mozzarella. Someone had the enlightened idea to address cocktails circa email 25. (Pamplemousses, if you’d like to know.) We had a globally-confused menu yielding enough to feed 20 but destined for only our small group, but it didn't matter: It was a dinner party comprised solely of recipes from Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette. Excess was in order. But the story arc of our epic thread peaked high and early. Following are emails 11 and 12, edited for clarity: “YES BRAISED ONION SAUCE” “BRAISED ONION SAUCE" The reason why all capital letters was a justified choice is disguised in a very short ingredient list from an almost middle-aged book. This braised onion sauce comes from Beard on Pasta, authored by the same man who expects us to put sieved egg yolks in our shortcakes; who dares us to put 40 cloves of garlic in our chicken; and who requests that we make lovely little tea sandwiches and fill their pillow-y insides with nothing but butter and raw onion. It’s a member of the same class, this pasta–just strange enough for you to assume it will fail you, and made up of ingredients so run-of-the-mill they border on drab. Excepting the noodles, you’re asked to call on only six ingredients for this recipe. The yellow onions languishing in the dark corner of your pantry? You’ll need those. Madiera? You’ve got a dusty bottle on a high shelf somewhere, right? If you don't have pasta somewhere in your kitchen I can't help you. This is the political science prerequisite of ingredient lists. Are you still awake? But look a little closer: There’s a borderline obscene amount of butter. And you cook the onions for as long as you can possibly stand it–sautéing slow and low is nothing if not a tantric exercise–and then you cook them a little more, this time soaked in Madiera. What you’ve created is the highest form of caramelized onions known to man. Are you scared of the amount of butter pooling in the pan? Good. Add some more. Then overturn a skein of hot pasta in there, too, its carryover steam loosening everything up, keeping it limber. Toss, and like a couple in the early throes of infatuation, the onions and the pasta will tangle together: the former disappears into the latter, the latter into the former. You’ll detest them for their unabashed PDA, but only for a minute–they are sweet, they are a little salty, they are drunk on syrupy wine. Serve this at your next dinner party, like we did, and understand the capital letters, the exclamations, Beard’s well-known–and well-observed–idea that “pasta is not a mannerly food to eat.” If you make this with pappardelle, which you should, portions forklifted from the serving dish will stretch and stretch, much like the endless scarf trick the magician at your third grade party performed two times too many. Some unwilling strands of pasta will walk the plank and land smack on the table. Try to take a bite–half your plate will spiral onto your fork. You will abandon everything your mother taught you. And you’ll come back to it over and over again, because–despite your manners and those of your guests–this dish tastes worlds deeper than the ingredient list promises it will. And therein lies the genius of James Beard recipes: You scoff and then you love. You scoff and then you are put in your place. You scoff, and then you’ll want to scream this recipe from the rooftops–or into your keyboard, on email 12. Note: This recipe is lightly adapted from James Beard's "Beard on Pasta." He originally calls for two sticks of butter—which you are welcome to do—but I find (as Molly at Orangette has too) that it works just as well with less. I use pappardelle, but feel free to switch that up. It's only important that you make this dish often.Food52It took us 47 emails to figure out what we’d serve. We bounced from side to main to starter and back to main, virtually piling chana masala on top of chard and Gruyère panade on top of broiled mushrooms and mozzarella. Someone had the enlightened idea to address cocktails circa email 25. (Pamplemousses, if you’d like to know.) We had a globally-confused menu yielding enough to feed 20 but destined for only our small group, but it didn't matter: It was a dinner party comprised solely of recipes from Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette. Excess was in order. But the story arc of our epic thread peaked high and early. Following are emails 11 and 12, edited for clarity: “YES BRAISED ONION SAUCE” “BRAISED ONION SAUCE" The reason why all capital letters was a justified choice is disguised in a very short ingredient list from an almost middle-aged book. This braised onion sauce comes from Beard on Pasta, authored by the same man who expects us to put sieved egg yolks in our shortcakes; who dares us to put 40 cloves of garlic in our chicken; and who requests that we make lovely little tea sandwiches and fill their pillow-y insides with nothing but butter and raw onion. It’s a member of the same class, this pasta–just strange enough for you to assume it will fail you, and made up of ingredients so run-of-the-mill they border on drab. Excepting the noodles, you’re asked to call on only six ingredients for this recipe. The yellow onions languishing in the dark corner of your pantry? You’ll need those. Madiera? You’ve got a dusty bottle on a high shelf somewhere, right? If you don't have pasta somewhere in your kitchen I can't help you. This is the political science prerequisite of ingredient lists. Are you still awake? But look a little closer: There’s a borderline obscene amount of butter. And you cook the onions for as long as you can possibly stand it–sautéing slow and low is nothing if not a tantric exercise–and then you cook them a little more, this time soaked in Madiera. What you’ve created is the highest form of caramelized onions known to man. Are you scared of the amount of butter pooling in the pan? Good. Add some more. Then overturn a skein of hot pasta in there, too, its carryover steam loosening everything up, keeping it limber. Toss, and like a couple in the early throes of infatuation, the onions and the pasta will tangle together: the former disappears into the latter, the latter into the former. You’ll detest them for their unabashed PDA, but only for a minute–they are sweet, they are a little salty, they are drunk on syrupy wine. Serve this at your next dinner party, like we did, and understand the capital letters, the exclamations, Beard’s well-known–and well-observed–idea that “pasta is not a mannerly food to eat.” If you make this with pappardelle, which you should, portions forklifted from the serving dish will stretch and stretch, much like the endless scarf trick the magician at your third grade party performed two times too many. Some unwilling strands of pasta will walk the plank and land smack on the table. Try to take a bite–half your plate will spiral onto your fork. You will abandon everything your mother taught you. And you’ll come back to it over and over again, because–despite your manners and those of your guests–this dish tastes worlds deeper than the ingredient list promises it will. And therein lies the genius of James Beard recipes: You scoff and then you love. You scoff and then you are put in your place. You scoff, and then you’ll want to scream this recipe from the rooftops–or into your keyboard, on email 12. Note: This recipe is lightly adapted from James Beard's "Beard on Pasta." He originally calls for two sticks of butter—which you are welcome to do—but I find (as Molly at Orangette has too) that it works just as well with less. I use pappardelle, but feel free to switch that up. It's only important that you make this dish often.
