Tuscany Archives - Miss Foodwise

Fagliolini al Fiasco, beans cooked in a bottle

Regula — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:29:00 +0000

I’m already dreaming of travelling to Tuscany again…

On our first evening in Tuscany I ate a dish with beans. A friend of our hostess told me that dish was named “Fagliolini al Fiasco” “beans, cooked in a wine bottle”.

He told me this is a dish often sold by bakeries who used the leftover warmth of the bread oven to cook the beans in old Chianty bottles.

The technique was quite simple, the dried beans are dropped in through the narrow neck of the bottle and just barely covered with water, herbs and olive oil.

In the old days, the bottle was sealed with a wad of muslin and set in a corner of the fireplace onto the smoldering ashes. While everyone in the house was asleep, the beans cooked. Imagine waking up to that.

This dish is also one of the classic “pane e companatico” which means “Bread and something to go with the bread”. That something in was very often these beans.

Now being a lover of beans and cooking over an open fire, I had to give this dish a go.

It was a grey morning but as the weather was still mild for the year I was still able to fire up my oven in the garden and keep it warm for a few hours. In the evening we were rewarded by a aromatic bottle of beans and the smell of smoke in our hair. You do need some time, it takes 6 to 8 hours to cook.

What do you need

an empty clear wine bottle like a Chianty bottle (remove the straw)

fresh sage, a small handful

3 cloves of garlic

salt and pepper

a good quality olive oil

dried white beans, fava beans or another small type of bean

wood for your fire (I used old grape vines)

One day before

Soak the beans overnight

On the day

Light your fire with wood, I used a smoker BBQ which is basically a long bullet shaped BBQ with a lid and a thermometer so you can monitor your heat. I hope to build a Tuscan bread oven in my garden next summer but in the meantime this does the trick. I you have a fireplace, this will work to. Just be sure the flames can’t touch the bottle and the bottle isn’t placed in too much heat.

My oven was around 70° Celcius for 5 hours.

Drop the beans into the bottle until it’s filled to 3/4. The beans will expand so you will need that extra space. Add the 3 crushed cloves of garlic, the sage leaves and a bit of black pepper.

Pour in about 3 teaspoons of olive oil and add water so the beans are generously covered in water.

Close the bottle with a wad of muslin or cotton wool so the steam can escape the flask.

You best warm the bottle by putting it in warm water before you put in into the oven or fireplace.

Put the bottle into the oven when the fire is smoldering and leave on the cover for 3 hours.

After 3 hours, the beans in the bottle will look like in the picture.

Leave for another 2 hours.

After those 2 hours, open the bottle and try to get a bean out by using a skewer, have a taste, if the beans are still tough just put the bottle back in the oven for an hour and check again.

Mine were perfect after 6 hours.

We ate the beans in a few ways: just with parmesan and olive oil, with olive oil, croutons from homemade stale bread and parmesan and finally with Italian sausage I brought home with me from Tuscany.

Enjoy

Other posts about Tuscany:

• A trip to the farmersmarket of Monteriggioni and Chestnut cake

• Tuscany in the Autumn: the story of our trip

A fabulous Tuscan foodblog to go to: Juls’ Kitchen

Please leave a comment. I appreciate every single one.

The post Fagliolini al Fiasco, beans cooked in a bottle appeared first on Miss Foodwise.

Chestnut cake from Monteriggioni, Tuscany

Regula — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:49:00 +0000

A beautiful farmers market in the heart of a fortified town.

It was a sunny autumn morning when we left for Monteriggioni, the fog had slipped away and gave way to a yellow and brown colored landscape.

We changed our clocks one hour ahead that night so when we awoke the dew had already dried up and the sun was giving a warm glow.

We drove trough the rolling landscape of Tuscany to reach the hill where the quintessentially fortified town of Monterriggioni lies.

From a distance the town looks like a giant fairytale castle, as we drove towards it my thoughts wandered off to the Middle Ages when Monteriggioni was at the very heart of the conflicts between Florence and Siena. I imagined large battalions of knights approaching the town and peasants going about their business. The knights have all gone now but the farmers remained and were the reason we were driving here today.

Today was a special day in Monteriggioni because in the heart of the fortified town there was a farmers market going on. It was only for one day and there were no certainties for it to happen ever again. The town square was filled with food stalls, producers were proudly presenting their new Organic olive oil and wines were given to taste generously. There were smiling faces everywhere, from the stallholders insisting we’d try their food to the people who were enjoying the scenery and the sun. It was like at this moment, everyone was happy here. There was no music, no dancing but nonetheless this was a feast, a food fest.

The produce at this market was absolutely beautiful, if I could I would have bought something from every stall. But luggage restrictions bound me to making choices, a choice like this is hard to make. What do I leave behind, the glorious organic chestnut flour or the tasty Boar salami… I decided to leave the Fava beans behind and regret that choice every day since. What if I could have fitted an extra bag in my luggage?

Oh well, you can’t have it all and I went home with a beautiful selection of food.

Monteriggioni

Chestnuts roasting

Fill your own cone of tasty chillies

Proudly presenting the new Organic olive oil of 2011

Snail ragout, suprisingly delicious

Wild boar delicacies

Chestnut cake, recipe for my version of this cake below.

Chestnut bread and chickpeas

I baked a cake with the organic chestnut flour I bought at the market.
My friends and I tried to bake this cake in the evening as we tasted chestnut cake at the market that day. The heath of the oven warmed Giulia’s house and filled it with a lovely smell of chestnuts, on this chilly autumn evening.
We loved it so much at the market, I decided I wanted to have another try at reproducing this wonderful cake. After a few tries I came up with this recipe, it’s not at all the cake we tried at the market but I think this one tastes more of chestnuts, which was something I was going for.

Ingredients
200 gr of Chestnut flour
75 gr of corn flour
175 gr good quality butter (unsalted)
1,5 teaspoons of baking powder (check the pack, not all brands of baking powder are gluten free)
4 organic eggs
50 gr of cane sugar
3 teaspoons of Ricotta
1 teaspoon of Cocoa

Method
Preheat your oven to 160° (gas)
Cover a cake tin with baking paper
1. Mix your butter and the sugar, whisk until creamy
2. Add the eggs one by one
3. Add the Ricotta to the butter and egg mixture and stir
4. Add the two types of flour to a bowl and add the baking powder
5. Add the butter, egg and sugar mixture to the flour and mix together.
6. Pour the batter into your baking thin and put in the oven for about 50 minutes.

When you take it out of the oven, leave it to cool in the baking tin.
Dust with Cocoa when the cake is still warm.

You wouldn’t believe how much this cake tastes of roasted chestnuts, just divine!
A good thing about this cake is the low amount of sugar used.
Enjoy!

Next week I’m attempting another dish I discovered in Tuscany: Fagloli al fiasco
Have you missed my previous post about our Tuscan escape? You will find it here

Special thanks to Giulia from Juls’ kitchen

Please leave a comment. I appreciate every single one.

The post Chestnut cake from Monteriggioni, Tuscany appeared first on Miss Foodwise.

Tuscany in the autumn, a celebration of food.

Regula — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:28:00 +0000

The view at 7 in the morning…

You know that feeling when something sounds to good to be true?
I had that feeling about Tuscany…
Like so many people, I had fallen in love with the pictures in magazines, travel guides and the tales of good food and wine.
I was very eager to find out if the story’s about Tuscany were wildly exaggerated or true.

After arriving at Pisa airport, I took the train to Florence where I would meet two of my fellow food bloggers Zita from Hungary and Karin from Germany. We were going to explore the city and later drive back to to meet our lovely hostess Giulia, for dinner at Trattoria Bel mi’ Colle in Colle di Val d’Elsa. Florence is grand, we had fantastic coffee at Roberto Cavalli, visited David and strolled around town feasting our eyes on all the pastries. When we left Florence it started to get dark, we saw the sun set over the Ponte Vecchio and drove off to Colle di Val d’Elsa in pitch black.

Panforte, a Tuscan speciality – Carabinieri – Lovers lock at the Ponte Vecchio

The next morning I woke up at 6:30, too early but so eager to finally see Tuscany! I got up, took my camera and opened the blinds on the windows of the house.

The view at 6.30 in the morning.

The view… Perhaps it was the cold and the fog of dawn, but I was breathless for a moment.
I think I must have stood there for half an hour, looking at how the colors of the landscape changed by the minute.
Seeing the sun rise up behind the roof of Giulia’s house and warm the room with the last warmth an autumn sun gives.
I ran outside, still wearing my gingham pyjama and only a big red scarf to warm me. There was so much to see, so much beauty.
The dew on the olives was slowly drying up, the landscape turned from pink to orange and the sun shone on my red hair making my braid look like it was on fire.
I felt all kinds of emotions at ones, running around like a child, trying to capture every moment with my camera.

In the house, the girls started to wake up. The light changed from orange to a bright yellow with a deep blue sky. The day had started, we had a cup of tea and left to have breakfast in a little pasticceria in Siena.

We ate grapes straight from the vines, sat in the sun and tasted a lot of delicious food.

These grapes that were left behind after harvest, were without doubt the best I’ve ever had!

On our roadtrip we went to a medieval little town called San Quirico and to a village known for its thermal waters, Bagno Vignoni. This is where we ate Pici for luch, a traditional thick hand rolled pasta whilst sitting in the warm sun. When we arrived at the Renaissance town Pienza, the sun was already hanging low in the deep blue sky. We tasted pecorino and wild boar sausage in a sweet little shop and walked trough the town when the setting sun started to color the ancient buildings orange.

The evenings are getting quite chilly so when we were walking through the streets of Siena in the evening, we warmed our hands on a bag of roasted chestnuts, not that it was very cold but we just enjoyed the romantic feeling of passing the warming bag of chestnuts to eachother.

Chestnuts warming the hands of lovely Giulia

The height of our trip must have been the farmers market at Montereggioni, a quintessentially medieval castle. We tasted the new Organic Olive oil, had snail ragout for the first time and bought a load of beautiful local produce. I will show you this adventure in my post next week. (see post here)

For lunch we made chickpea crepes, pasta cacio e pepe and for dinner we made fresh pasta tagliolini with truffle. In the evening we went to the Chestnut festival in the old part of Colle val d’Elsa. Everything seems to evolve around chestnuts, wine and olive oil at the moment. Autumn really is the perfect season to visit Tuscany.

Tuscan pastries: left: Castagnaccio, chestnut bread with rosemary. right: Schiacciata con l’uva, flatbread with grapes

At the chestnut festival the whole town waits while the chestnuts are being roasted..

Sadly, the next day our journey came to an end, so after a nice walk through the Tuscan countryside we set sail to our homelands.
These were truly a wonderful four days, thank you Giulia for being such a fantastic hostess and for your warm persona.
I will never forget this, ever.

Olives are harvested by families, who then take the olives to a mill where they press their own Olive oil.

If you would like to see Tuscany through a local girl’s eyes like we did, Giulia arranges Tuscan food & wine tours and Italian cooking classes at her fabulous Juls’ Kitchen.

Fabulous places:
Nannini, Via Banchi di Sopra, 24, Siena. For Panforte.
La taverna del Pecorin, Via Condotti1, Piento. For cheese and delicatessen
Trattoria Bel mi’ Colle, Via Giuseppe Garibaldi 56, Colle di Val d’Elsa. For good local food and wine.
Caffè Giacosa, Via Della Spada, Firenze. For the best coffee and a slice of cake.
Pasticcerie sinatti, Via Fiorentina 99, Siena. Fantastic place for breakfast.
Trattoria La Parata, Piazza del Moretto, Bagno Vignoni. For traditional pici.

To be continued…

Other posts about Tuscany:
• A trip to the farmersmarket of Monteriggioni and Chestnut cake

• Fagliolini al Fiasco

Please leave a comment. I appreciate every single one.

The post Tuscany in the autumn, a celebration of food. appeared first on Miss Foodwise.