Think On It

Carciofi 101

January 8th, 2007

Here is a start on artichoke or carciofi season for my friend Snowpea in Montreal.

This is the Violetta artichoke, and as you can see, it is very small. That is a teaspoon next to it, and even though the carciofo is closer to you than the spoon, and therefore looks bigger than it is, it still looks tiny. It has every bit of the flavor of its bigger cousins and is a bit easier to work with.

You start by snapping off the tough part of the outer leaves by bending them back with your fingers until they break, then peeling off the leaf and any fibers attached. You snap off leaves until you reach a point where only the ends of the leaves are colored. . Then you peel the stem with your trusty vegetable peeler, and it looks like this

If you haven’t many to do, you need do nothing else, but if you are cutting quite a few you need to toss them into some water with lemon juice in it to prevent oxidation, which makes them ugly and black. Then when you have them all trimmed, you must dry them, cut the end of the flower off to the lighter part of it, and then trim off at least an inch of the stem. Then cut the stem off about 1 cm from the blossom.

If you can only get the bigger globe artichokes where you live, you do the same thing, but when it is all trimmed up, you need to use your fingers to open the flower. Reach into the flower with a teaspoon and scrape away the fuzzy choke to bare the heart beneath. If some scraps of chokes remain, no worry.

In either case, once it is beheaded and de-stemmed, stand the flower onto its now flat head, and carefully cut it into thin vertical slices, like this. Cut the stem into thin diagonal pieces, too.

I worked pretty quickly, having done several hundred of these by now, so I didn’t acidify mine. I instead threw them as they were cut into a tablespoon or cucchiaio of olive oil in a hot frying pan. Once they are tossed around a bit, the oil keeps them from graying. What you see is two artichokes. I also salted them immediately, because it helps things sauté faster.

I started water boiling in which to cook pasta, which today will be sedano rigati, which means ribbed celery. I don’t see the resemblance, but it encourages me to develop one day a sauce made of celery so I can serve a food pun. These are slim and slightly ribbed macaroni that look like anorexic penne. I also grated a little more than an ounce or 30 g of Fontina cheese.

By tossing the artichokes around a bit for about 10 minutes, I eventually got them to this point.

The pasta was in and boiling, so I took a heavy half-cup of the pasta water and poured it into the artichokes, so there would be something to carry the flavors into the pasta. That continued to simmer until the sedano rigati were cooked al dente. You can give yourself no greater favor than learning how to get pasta cooked to the very instant after it loses its cardboardy texture. Practice. Bite and look at where you bit. Al dente means there is still a microscopic white line left which will disappear in the time it takes to get it to the sink to drain.

When my pasta was seconds from that point, I added an ounce of butter to the pan and squeezed in about 2 teaspoons of lemon juice. Start conservatively, because all lemons are not equal, and in this dish it is easy to use too much or too strong lemon juice and get an unbalanced dish. That is considered a bigger sin than adultery where I live.

Drain the pasta and toss it into the pan, stir it all around for 30 seconds, and taste it. If it needs more lemon, now is your chance. You must always balance salt and acid when working with lemon. When it is right, your tongue says, “Yes, that’s it!” Put the grated cheese (it does not have to be Fontina, but something not hard like Parmigiano) on it and serve it smoking hot.

The ingredients for 2 people were:
2 small fresh artichokes (or one bigger one)
Olive oil
Salt
85 to 100 grams of pasta, cooked to directions
1 ounce butter
2 teaspoons or more fresh lemon juice
1 ounce or 30 g meltable Italian cheese

Time to prepare it was about 20 minutes.

Now people will tell you that you simply can’t drink wine with artichokes, but I had half a glass of a young Tuscan red, I liked it and I am still here, half an hour later.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized, Food, Italy