Friday and Saturday, Amy and I stayed with her Parma host family from a semester she spent in Italy in college. Claudio and Claudia Ferraroni live in a 4-story building with Claudio's three brothers and each of them have a floor; the top floor is not occupied and Amy and I stayed there. Claudio, Claudia, and their son Lorenzo, were incredible hosts and Claudio immediately saw that the way to connect with me (as we couldn't do it though language) was through cured meat and booze; I believe I ate half a pig's hindquarters while at their home and ran though quite a few bottles of wine and about a bottle of grappa with Claudio. Claudio also liked to bring out his Mussolini paraphenelia (apron, underwear, wine collection...) to rile up the liberals, and it got really interesting when he brought out his shotgun...
Saturday, Claudio took Amy and me to a parmesan cheese production wharehouse and we got an impromptu tour by the Indian guys making the cheese. It's quite an operation with copper vats that are used to make each round. They take big paddles and dislodge what becomes the round from the bottom end of the vat, which looks like an upside down funnel, and then hang the curds in burlap to extract the extra liquid (we each got a fist of warm curds off of one of the rounds... guess that one will be a little light). Once the extra liquid is wicked away from the round, it goes into a plastic mold for a couple of days to form up, then a salt-water bath for a week or so, then to the aging rack for several months. Each round ends up being around 400 Euro and this joint had around 1,000 rounds in the aging racks. We also went to a salumi factory, but they weren't grinding pigs up to shoe them in their own intestines, so we were limited to trying the product. That afternoon, we made carbonara. Saturday night, the entire family (including their daughter Mariana and her boyfriend) went to a restaurant out in the country. Dishes of note: various proscuitti (to be placed in a pillow of fried bread [basically a square fluffy unsweetened donut...] and consumed over and over again), capitelli in brodo, tres ravioli, and wild boar (chingiale).
Sunday for the midday meal, the entire family convened (including Frosty), and Claudia showed Amy and I how to make gnocchi (potatoes and farina, that's it... rice the boiled, peeled, and still steaming warm potatoes into a waiting mound of flour, knead the resultant mixture into a smooth dough, roll pieces into index-finger width lengths, cut into gnocchi-sized pillows, and texture). We had the gnocchi with both a gorganzola sauce and a pomodoro and basil sauce; it was lovely. We spent the afternoon at the house and then Amy and Mariana drove me to the train station so I could make my way to Figline Valdarno for a cooking class.
No comments:
Post a Comment