Simmer

Vegetable stock is an essential ingredient in many vegetarian soups, but it also provides incomparable flavor to many well-loved vegetable (but not necessarily meat-free) soups such as this one. Minestrone has become so familiar in the American kitchen that it might be easy to forget its Italian origins. But the name—minestre is the word for soup, while the suffix (-one) indicates bigness—hints at its universal appeal as a simple pantry-based soup that is also hearty and substantial. The foundation of flavor, called a soffritto, is a common element in soup-making: a trio of celery, carrots, and onion is sautéed first, then stock and more vegetables are added and slowly simmered to coax out their flavors. Beans are what distinguish minestrone from other vegetable soups; the type varies by region, as does the addition (if any) of pasta or rice (this version has neither). The beans are also what give the soup such heft, making it a good option for a meatless one-pot dish (if you leave out the prosciutto) that can stand as the centerpiece of any casual dinner. The beans need to soak overnight in the refrigerator, so plan accordingly. Then they need to boil for at least a half hour, so use that time to prepare the rest of the ingredients for the soffritto and soup.

The most well-known pea soups are made with green split peas and flavored with pork, but this lively vegetarian version features split peas and Indian seasonings. Though the end result tastes remarkably different from the classic, the method for making any split pea soup is virtually the same; you start by building a flavor base with sautéed aromatics, then add peas and water and cook until the peas fall apart. For split pea soup with ham, you would add a ham hock to the pot along with the peas, but for this version, spices are fried at the end and stirred into the soup to finish—a technique borrowed from many classic Indian dishes.

For true vegetarian soups, stews, and other dishes (such as risotto), vegetable stock is a flavorful alternative to water and meat-based stocks. Some recipes call for the vegetables in the mirepoix to be added to the simmering liquid without first cooking; others call for them to be sweated first, without browning. In this recipe, the vegetables are lightly browned to give the stock intense flavor. The resulting richness and complexity are particularly important when there is no base of flavor provided by chicken, beef, or fish. You can vary the flavor by increasing the amount of garlic, replacing the carrots with parsnips, or changing some of the fresh herbs for others. Or add any of the following: dried mushrooms, such as porcini or shiitake (no more than two or three, since they can be overpowering), a few corncobs, some chopped tomato (seeded, if desired), or thinly sliced leeks. If the stock will be used to make Italian dishes, add a rind of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese once the water has been added. If making a vegetarian dish with other vegetables, use the scraps to flavor the stock, such as beet greens for beet risotto. But be careful to avoid adding anything that is less than fresh or that has too strong a flavor, such as most cruciferous vegetables (including broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage).

Fumet is a white stock made from fish bones and aromatic vegetables, which are first “sweated” (cooked until soft but not taking on any color), then simmered in water. That initial step is a crucial building block, eliciting a touch of sweetness from the leek and developing the flavors for the next step, though it will produce a stock with less clarity than when the aromatics are simply brought to a boil with the rest. (To achieve that result, follow recipe for Basic Chicken Stock on page 41, bringing the fish bones and heads to a boil, then adding vegetables, bay leaf, and peppercorns and simmering 30 minutes before straining.) With its concentrated flavor, fumet is ideal for making fish soups and stews, or for steaming shellfish, such as the Clams in Herbed Broth on page 219. Like other stocks, fumet can be altered for different effects. Increase the ratio of bones to water and you will have a stock with more pronounced fish flavor. For a Mediterranean-style stock, chopped garlic and fennel (and its fronds) can be sweated with the other aromatics, then crushed tomatoes, crumbled saffron, and a few parsley stems added and simmered in the pot along with everything else.

One of the best reasons to make your own basic brown stock is that it means French onion soup from scratch is within easy reach. (You can also make the soup with white beef stock, page 42.) Like many other bistro classics, French onion soup has humble origins as a staple of thrifty households, where a pot of stock—itself born of frugality—was the foundation for many family meals. Even those with limited resources could make soupe a l’oignon since it calls for little else: pounds of inexpensive and readily available onions, a crusty baguette (providing a way to use up day-old bread), and a chunk of sharp Gruyère cheese, grated to turn a little into a lot. Because there are so few components, each one is enhanced in some way to contribute to the final dish. The homemade stock provides both color and robust taste, as well as ensuring a silky consistency. Caramelizing the onions gives them a wonderful sweetness (and more dark brown color). Toasted bread adds a textural note, while gratinéed cheese introduces another pleasing component. Similar to the burnt-sugar shell atop crème brûlée, the molten, golden crown invites tucking into with a spoon. This recipe can be halved, but since the soup freezes well, it is worth making the full amount.

Brown stock gets its color—and its flavor—from the initial step of roasting bones and vegetables, often with a bit of tomato paste added to promote browning and impart a caramelized flavor, as well as a touch of acidity. After the contents of the pan are transferred to a stockpot, the pan is deglazed (either with water or red wine) to incorporate all the flavorful browned bits, which then, too, get added to the pot. In classical French cooking, brown stock is made with veal bones to produce a delicate-bodied soup. In the recipe that follows, beef is added for deeper flavor, but you can replace the beef with more veal bones (or veal stew meat) for the traditional version. Brown stock can also be made with chicken (see variation); this would be ideal for using in more robust dishes, such as braised meats. Heed the general rules for making all stocks, including simmering very gently, skimming frequently, and keeping enough liquid in the pot so that everything is submerged at all times. Brown stock is also the basis for other classic preparations, including demi glace and glace de viande (see page 52).

Unlike other chicken soups that begin with water, this Mexican version starts with chicken stock; the resulting broth is richer and more complex than for basic chicken soup (page 43), since stock will impart flavor to (and be fortified by) the chicken. To make the soup, a whole chicken is simmered in chicken stock, which is then strained and combined with a fiery puree of dried chiles, charred tomatoes, and sautéed onion and garlic. Before being pureed, the chiles are toasted in a dry skillet to enhance their smokiness, then soaked in water to soften, a process that is widely used in Mexican cooking as a building block for many types of dishes (this is comparable to the way spices are toasted in Indian cooking as a flavor-building component for masalas and curry pastes). What distinguishes tortilla soup is the way it is served, since the garnishes are essential to the overall flavor; plus, they are incorporated at the table—not in the kitchen—so that each guest has a hand in creating and customizing the final dish. The garnishes suggested below are traditional and offer a nice balance of taste and texture, but sliced jalapeños (seeded for less heat) or radishes, diced fresh tomatoes, or other types of cheese (such as queso fresco or queso blanco) are also authentic, as is a dollop of crema (Mexican sour cream) or sour cream.

If soup-making is an indication of a cook’s talents, chicken soup is the truest test, since the soup should ideally offer warmth and nourishment as well as flavor. It is, after all, the ultimate comfort food. Once you’ve committed this basic soup technique to memory, the possibilities for variations—and other meals—are limitless. Making the soup is essentially a form of poaching chicken in an aromatic broth. The chicken should always be just covered with liquid—in this case, water—which should remain at a gentle simmer. Skimming the surface is critical to the soup’s success, since the impurities from the chicken would cause the broth to become cloudy. Straining out the aromatics will also help produce a cleaner broth; the vegetables will have become very soft and lost much of their individual flavors by this time, so it is necessary to replenish them with “garnish” vegetables, added at the end. The variations below provide flavorful alternatives to the basic soup recipe—one with matzo balls and the other with springtime vegetables, including green beans, peas, and watercress.

The first lesson in stock making is also the simplest: everything (bones and aromatics) is covered in a pot with water and gently simmered, yielding a stock with a pure, clean flavor. This technique can be applied to making stock with chicken, meat, fish, or only vegetables. Of these, no stock is more versatile and flexible than white chicken stock, which is flavorful but not overpowering, lending itself to a vast array of uses: white sauces, such as velouté; any number of soups (it is the default choice for many); and many stews and braises, among other dishes where there are layers of flavor (think risotto). White beef stock is equally classic, and a better option in dishes such as Wine-Braised Short Ribs (page 188). For this stock, there are several ways to alter the outcome, depending on how it will be used. The longer the stock simmers, the stronger it will taste. Simmer for 1 1/2 hours for vegetable soups or other delicate dishes (including white sauces), longer for more robust sauces and soups. To give the stock a more pronounced chicken flavor, add 1 1/2 pounds chicken thighs along with the other parts (take them out of the pot as soon as they are done if you plan to reserve the meat for another purpose, returning bones to pot after removing meat).

I think the heart and soul of Italian cooking is coaxing the true flavor out of raw ingredients, and that’s what we do with these beans. Stracotto means “long cooked,” and for this recipe, yellow wax beans, a summer vegetable usually prepared al dente, are simmered long and slow with our deeply caramelized soffritto. You’ll want to make this dish only if you already have soffritto in your refrigerator and when yellow wax beans are in season. You could also use yellow Romano beans.

What I like most about this mussels preparation is that they are not simply steamed in white wine, like the vast majority of mussels you see in restaurants. We cook them with a light tomato sauce—and, yes, also white wine—and toss in piles of herbs after the mussels are cooked, so the herbs wilt only slightly. The finished dish manages to be original and familiar at the same time. It also couldn’t be easier to make.

We exclusively use Umbrian lentils in our restaurants, which are smaller than common brown lentils and are various shades of brown to green. Castelluccio, the town where the lentils come from, is a two-and-a-half-hour, winding, hilly drive over the Apennine Mountains from my house. Once you get there, you don’t feel like you’re in Umbria—or Italy—at all. There are no sunflowers. No rolling green hills. The landscape is crater-like, with fields and fields of flowering lentils. It feels more like you’re on the moon, or in Oz. When I visited with a group of friends, we ate lunch at the one trattoria in town. Of course they offered lentils, and I was surprised to find them cooked in a much heartier way than I had ever seen lentils prepared before, almost like a stew or a ragù, with pork sausage, another delicacy of that region. This is Matt’s rendition of the lentils we had that day.

Italians famously eat a lot of beans, so including shell beans on our menu was an obvious choice. Shell beans are so delicious and can be prepared in such a variety of ways, and yet you don’t normally see them at conventional grocery stores. Looking for shell beans is a good excuse to visit your local farmers’ market, which is where we find them in Los Angeles in the late summer and early fall. We use a mix of four types of shell beans—borlotti beans, cannellini beans, lima beans, and flageolet—because we like the range of sizes, colors, and flavors of the various beans. Properly cooking beans is about 90 percent of the battle, which is why we cook each type of bean separately; to spare yourself the effort, use fewer varieties of beans. If you don’t have access to shell beans, or when shell beans are not in season, you could make this using dried beans. Refer to Ceci (page 96) for instructions. The recipe for the bouquet is for each pot of beans. You will need to make the same number as types of beans you are making.

These days it’s almost old-fashioned to cook your own beans, even for restaurants. While canned are surprisingly good (I included many canned beans in recipes in my last book, A Twist of the Wrist), homemade beans are so much better. The key to good dried beans is to cook them long enough so that they become creamy. Many restaurants undercook their beans, and frankly I would rather have canned beans than beans that are dry and chalky.

It’s impossible to walk into any bakery in Italy without seeing a lattice-covered jam-filled tart called a crostata, so when I penciled out a short list of the desserts I would want to make at Mozza, it was only natural that crostata was on that list. For the longest time, I just couldn’t decide how I wanted to serve it. An unadorned crostata seemed fine for a bakery, but it looked too naked on the plate to serve alone at the Pizzeria. At the same time, I was struggling with how to incorporate another Italian favorite, panna cotta, into our repertoire. Somehow, in the course of all of my experimenting, I got the idea to substitute the creaminess of gelato, the most obvious accompaniment to a fruit tart, with the creaminess of panna cotta, and I put the crostata and panna cotta together. It worked, solving both problems at the same time. We drizzle the panna cotta with saba, Sardinian grape must. What we created was a dessert built of all Italian elements that, though you would never see them together in Italy, somehow work. I’m proud of that. The recipe makes twelve crostate, four more than you will serve with the panna cotta. I based the yield on the number of crostate the dough would make—and I figured you could find someone to eat the extras. You will need twelve 1/2-cup miniature brioche molds to make the panna cotta, though you could use 2-ounce ramekins—your panna cotta will taste just as good, it just won’t look as pretty. The crostata dough is the same as the Pasta Frolla (page 276) with toasted sesame seeds added. Dahlia and I got the idea when she was working on a sesame-seed biscotti. We didn’t like the biscotti enough to include them in our repertoire, but we really liked the subtle flavor and crunch that the seeds added to the dough.

Americans think of vanilla as “plain” ice cream, the connotation often being that it is boring. But vanilla, if it’s done well, is neither plain nor boring. Although they are expensive, it’s worth the extra money to buy large, plump vanilla beans, which will impart significantly more flavor than lesser-quality beans. My favorite are Tahitian.

Matt got the inspiration for this dish from the Whole Hog Dinner that the restaurant Oliveto, in Oakland, hosts every year for chefs, food professionals, and friends from all over the world. One year they served pasta with cured pork, pickled peppers, and tomato sauce, which was so good that when we got back to Los Angeles, Matt decided to make his own version. Fiorentini means “Florentine,” but here refers to a twisted short pasta shape made by Setar, an artisanal pasta producer in Napoli. If you can’t find it, use another dried, artisanally produced pasta in its place, such as maccheroni alla chitarra, a big tube-shaped pasta from Napoli. The tubes collapse when they cook so they’re like empty ravioli.

Mantecato means “churned,” and bacalà mantecato, essentially an Italian version of French brandade, is salt cod potato purée. We started making these crostini to use the salt cod we had left from the Bacalà al Forno (page 215) at the Pizzeria. It’s so popular that we now make extra salt cod for this dish.

Stracciatella comes from the verb stracciare, which means “to tear apart.” Italians use the word for several foods, including the inside of burrata cheese, a soup in which the egg is dropped into hot broth, and this gelato, which consists of plain gelato, known as “fior di latte,” or “flower of milk,” with dark chocolate “shreds” strewn throughout. Ariana Flores, the assistant pastry chef for both restaurants, is always happy when this flavor goes back into rotation. It’s her favorite to eat, but I also think she likes the process of drizzling the chocolate over the ice cream to make the shreds. I love how plain stracciatella is—that it’s basically just milk, without even egg yolks or vanilla, which American chocolate chip ice cream generally contains—and I like the bright white color of it. If you want to make fior di latte, an Italian classic, simply omit the chocolate portion of this recipe. I especially like it topped with toasted pine nuts (page 63).

I love alcohol-flavored gelato because the alcohol cuts the richness of the dairy and also allows the gelato to get super-cold. But because alcohol doesn’t freeze, if you add too much to the gelato it won’t freeze at all. After making many versions with varying amounts of booze, we determined that the recipe below contains the maximum amount of alcohol that will freeze in a home ice cream maker. If it’s still not boozy enough for you, do as I do: drizzle a few drops of bourbon over the top.