Polenta Crostini

Polenta Crostini with Asparagus

Imagine the crispy, butteryness of old fashioned kettle popcorn. The polenta crostino, which was basically invented as a way to use gelatinized, day-old polenta, is one of my favorite Italian foods. Maybe I have a thing with leftovers. Day-old pasta, baked to a crunchy delicious or fried into a frittata... Instead of basic bread bruschetta, pan-fried or baked squares of polenta are a sinful cushion for toppings including everything from lardo di colonata to grilled asparagus.

I first tried them at a truck stop sort of restaurant just outside of Florence, Osteria dei Giusti. We happened upon the place starving on our way back to Rome after a long Chianti-soaked weekend. The hangover was starting to break, leaving a searing hunger in its wake. While we waited for bowls of steaming ribollita and homemade fettucine with cinghiale (wild boar) ragu’, we sampled a plate of house crostini, which consisted mostly of basic bruschetta with tomato and basil or mixed mushrooms. There were only three polenta crostini and I pretended not to notice the difference and ate two of them. Then I asked for more.

Last night it was cold and rainy. I had a bottle of Barbera d’Alba, 2006 and still a little punchy. It called for something rich to balance the acidity, and plain old mushy polenta wasn’t going to cut it. I prepared it as usual, with some fresh sage leaves and butter, and spread the whole thing in a baking pan in the freezer for about 25 minutes.
Most recipes call for day-old polenta, or at least two hours of chilling, this seemed to work just fine. It was about a centimeter thick all the way across.

Recipe:
Makes about 25 crostini

Ingredients

Polenta:
8 heaping tablespoons of polenta
½ liter of water
a pinch of salt
4 fresh sage leaves chopped
A tablespoon of butter
olive oil

Topping:
10 asparagus spears
salt
fresh ground pepper
olive oil


Procedure:
Bring water to boil and sprinkle in polenta and salt. Add sage and stir over a low flame until it bubbles and thickens—about five minutes. Stir in the butter. Remove from heat and spread into a non-stick baking pan, about 9 x 9. Be sure to spread the polenta uniformly. Place in the freezer for 20-30 minutes or until cool and hardened. It should be just hard enough to slice into squares. Generously oil a non-stick baking pan and lay the crostini with enough space between them to turn easily. Bake at 300 degrees F (180 C) until lightly browned on one side. Turn and brown the other side. Cool on a paper towel to absorb any access grease and top with just about anything. I used pan-seared asparagus last night, and tonight an aged pecorino cheese infused with black truffle.

Enjoy!

Vineyard Visit: Casale Cento Corvi

On a recent assignment to create an itinerary for the Etruscan territory north of Rome, I thought I’d put my fresh sommelier expertise to the test and add a winery to my tour.

I chose Casale Cento Corvi, as they’d just deposited few trial bottles at the wine shop downstairs and had made a very friendly impression. The wine was pretty tasty too—I’m not gonna lie.

Costantino, the son of the winery owner picked me up at the train station and took me on an hour-long drive through the vineyards before heading back to the showroom for a full-on tasting.

Now these guys have been in the business for years, over a hundred of them to be precise. They, like many families in this part of Italy, have been making their own wine for generations. It's good too, with a distinct mineral quality and sprightly acidity. The vineyard lies just inland of the Tyrrhenian sea with a chain of hills to the east, which makes for a very specific microclimate. They’ve got a geological history packed rife with volcanic eruptions and receding sea levels that has been packing the mineral punch into native grape species since Etruscan times.

The Collacciani family is proud of this to the core, but in 2000 they decided to add state-of-the-art technology to tradition and put their town (Cerveteri) on the wine map.

If you saw him, you’d peg him as the next Latin lover. He’s got a crinkly-eyed smile and seems to know every woman in town. He walks with a comfortable swagger and dresses like a collage kid in loose low-rise jeans and a tee shirt that shows off a toned torso. But when he gets to talking about running around the vineyard as a boy, and tasting the results of his hard work, and the legacy of winemaking in his family and in his history, he glimmers from the inside.

He’s most proud of Giacché, a grape that Etruscans were cultivating on the same land 3000 years earlier, and was given up for extinct before the Collaccianis got their hands on it..

The grapes resemble fat, ripe blueberries and grow in sparse bunches. They yield a distinctive and nearly opaque dark juice that stains everything in its path, smells and tastes of wild berries and stings with savage tannins. The Collaccianis have “tamed the beast” if you will, and have produced both a dry and dessert version (which pairs divinely with ricotta and cherry cake).

This is their crowning glory, but the whole line of wines, all blends, represent the distinctive flavor of the area, and have a lingering salty finish that is just evident enough to be interesting and remind one that the sea is splashing nearby.


See the movie!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWMcBU5G3rM