Italian Seafood Banquet – Ciao Italia

Simmering codfish over a tomato-based bed of sliced fennel, Castelvetrano olives, capers, garlic, and hot red pepper flakes; shrimp-filled seafood with fregola.

(Season 30 | Episode 10)
—
Ciao Italia with Mary Ann Esposito turns everyday cooking into a happy celebration of authentic regional Italian cuisine with flavorful recipes from the Piedmont to Puglia, Tuscany to Sicily, and everywhere in between. By using authentic ingredients from the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet, Mary Ann creates Italian recipes that turn ordinary meals into memorable masterpieces. Buon appetito!

#cooking #italianfood

– Ciao, I’m Mary Ann Esposito here at La Scoula Culinaria at Tuscan Market and today I’m with some very special friends and of course you. And we’re making pesce and seafood too. And that’s all there is to it. I mean, cooking doesn’t have to be complicated. Add the cream. So about a half a cup of heavy cream goes in here. You did a great job, Mary Ellen. – Thank you, Mary. – With the base of the pan. It’s a little rumba action.

– Think I’ve got a relatively clean hand to work with. – Right, clean hand. I always say you have to keep that hand clean so you can answer the phone. – Yeah. – Yeah. – [All] Ciao! – You did both so well. – No, I don’t think I did. – You did really, really well. That was beautiful. I think you should keep that. – No, I don’t so. – Oh, absolutely. – Today, we are going to make a very popular Neapolitan dish called acqua pazza, crazy water.

It’s a weird name for a recipe but it’s a very traditional one. And let me show you what happens in this recipe. So you have to start with fish, pesce, and here we have some beautiful looking cod. So you want the loin cut of the cod, the thicker part of the fish.

And I have to tell you, when this recipe is made in Naples they use the whole fish. So when it’s presented to you as the final dish it has the head and the tail. Of course, the fish is clean, gutted and all of that.

But we live in America and we don’t do those things, but by having the whole fish, it gives you that added flavor. So we have nice looking cod here and you can tell it’s fresh by, first of all looking at it, that’s number one. If it looks yellow, looks a little dried out,

You know that that’s old fish. And the other way of telling of course is to just smell it. It should smell sweet and fresh. If it doesn’t, well then you know that you have old fish. So for this recipe, we need four 6 oz. pieces of cod.

And here we have four beautiful pieces. This is a dish that goes together very, very quickly once you have all the ingredients ready. So let me show you how it goes. And I always work on a mat that’s for seafood and you should do the same if you’re making a fish dish,

Always have these mats ready because you don’t wanna really contaminate a wood surface. So I’m gonna put this aside and show you what goes with the cod because cod by itself is pretty bland. So we wanna do something to it. Now, why is it called acqua pazza? It’s called acqua pazza

Because originally these Neapolitan fishermen would go out, they would catch the fish and they would cook it in sea water. And we all know how salty that can be. So they would add sea water. They would add wine, they would add tomatoes, whatever they had, and this became acqua pazza.

So we’re gonna make it today for you. So you wanna start with the aromatics and here we have a nice head of fennel. Now, most Italians eat this as a digestivo, raw. So they’ll have it after a main meal but it’s also great cooked. It’s wonderful in this dish. It’s great roasted.

It has a very sweet flavor and a very mild licorice taste. Some people don’t like that. So when you buy it, the whole thing is edible. Most people throw this part away and only use the bulb. So you have the bulb, then you have the stalks and you have these fronds,

Which are very nice in soups and stews. Often when you buy it, you see that it’s, there may be a few brown spots on it but there’s nothing to worry about. All you have to, you just wanna scrape it with your vegetable peeler and get those rust spots off.

See, just take it off. And then you can go ahead and use the whole bulb. So you just take those off. You wanna wash this really well. Cut off the bottom there. That can go in soup. So we don’t wanna throw that away. And then you just wanna cut it down.

Take off the fronds and the stems. This you’re going to save and use in something else. And then it’s a matter of just slicing it and you just wanna slice it in thin slices. So you need about a half to a cup of the sliced fennel.

So now that we have that, I’m just gonna put this aside and talk to you about the tomatoes because that is another essential part of this recipe. So for the tomatoes, you wanna use either cherry tomatoes or you could use canned tomatoes. If you do, make sure that you use a good one.

A good product from Italy. So I love cherry tomatoes in this. And before I got here today, actually yesterday, I went in my garden and I picked some tomatoes for you because one of my very favorites is this tomato. Look at this tomato. It’s very different than this cherry tomato, right?

First of all, it’s much bigger than this. They’re both very sweet. This tomato is called a Piennolo, a Piennolo del Vesuvio because it grows at the base of Mount Vesuvius in Campania. And because it grows at the base of Mount Vesuvius it’s grown in that volcanic, rich soil.

So it has really, really delicious flavor. Let me show you what it’s like inside. You see it’s very, very meaty. Now, what do you use this tomato for? This tomato is good for sauces, for stews. It’s good for salads but what the Neapolitans do is they gather up all these tomatoes.

They still have it on the vine. And then they put it around hemp leaves, hemp rope rather, and they hang them. So you’ve often seen pictures of these tomatoes hanging and they dry them for the winter. So this is a good choice. You can find seeds for the Piennolo tomato on the website,

On our website and also on any garden seed website. And it has that nice little point right there. Very good meaty, meaty tomato. If you’re not using that you can just use generic cherry tomatoes. And here we have them all cut up. Here is another option. This is a plum tomato.

Now this tomato of course is used for sauces. And everybody thinks that they’re growing a San Marzano tomato. You’re not. You’re growing a plum tomato. San Marzano tomatoes may look like this but they can only be grown in San Marzano in Campania.

So if you have a can of tomatoes that says San Marzano on it but it doesn’t have DOP after it, those letters that tell you that it comes from a specific area in Italy, you’re not doing, you’re not making something with San Marzanos. You’re making something with just a plum tomato.

So now that you know all that, I’m gonna get started at the stove and we’re gonna get a little olive oil and garlic going. Couple tablespoons of olive oil in the pan, extra vergine. So we wanna add some garlic, two cloves sliced. And you’ll know when garlic is right in a pan

Because first of all, you can smell it. So it’s fragrant. Secondly, you don’t want it to burn. You want it to just get a little color on it. So I’m real careful about watching it. Then you wanna add that fennel. So there’s the fennel that we sliced up

And we just wanna let this wilt down. So I’m gonna turn this down a little bit and let that cook until it’s where I want it. And meanwhile, let me talk to you about what else goes into this. So we need a little bit of hot red pepper flakes. This is a piacere.

You know what that means in Italian? Means as much as you like. So, a piacere. If you don’t like it real hot, just add a few flakes. If you really like it like that, you can add as much as you want. So we’re gonna add a few little hot red pepper flakes.

And then we have these cute little things. These are capers. Capperi in Italian, capperi. And they’re called capers because they grow in the Mediterranean all over, not just Italy but also Spain, Greece, Turkey, those places, they grow in the crags and stone walls. And this is the unopened flower bud actually

Of the caper plant. And they are extremely pungent. They’ve got a little bit of a vinegary taste to them. Yeah. But they add a lot of zest to a lot of different dishes. Now you can get them in brine, which is what these are. Or you can get them in salt.

If you get them in salt you’ve gotta rinse them really, really well. The best ones come from Pantelleria, which is an island off of Sicily. So then we want some anise seeds. So here are some anise seeds. And then we’re going to add some of these, Castelvetrano olives.

And here they are cut up. This is an olive that comes from Western Sicily and it’s meaty and fruity. It’s mild. It’s not real salty. Even people who don’t like olives will like this olive. So we’ve cut them up and you can buy them like this already pitted.

So you don’t have to fight with getting the pits out. So now that you know that, I’m gonna take all this over to our pan because then we’ve gotta add the tomatoes, a little vino, water and we’re ready to add the fish. The fennel is nice and soft.

It’s where we want it now. So now we can add our hot red pepper flakes. Remember I told you this is a piacere. So because I like it a little spicy, I’m just gonna add what I like. So a few pepper flakes. You wanna add those capers, briny capers.

We wanna add a few fennel seeds with that licorice flavor that’s gonna bring out more flavor from the chopped fennel that we have in there. We wanna add our tomatoes. Here they are. Pomodorini in Italian. And we wanna mix this up. A little bit of salt and pepper. Again, don’t overdo it

Because you wanna flavor it at the end as well. But any cook knows that you’ve got to flavor as you go. Got to flavor as you go. So, test, test, test. So there’s a little pepper for us. I’m gonna mix this around. And this is great served over, with the fish,

If you have some toasted bread in the bottom of the bowl. It’s really delicious. So now that we have that mixed we need to add the olive, which are right here. So the olives go in. Half a cup or so. Pitted, see how pretty this looks now? Really beautiful.

Almost the colors of the Italian flag. Green, white and red. And now that we have that, we wanna add some water. About a half a cup of water goes in. Stir that around. And now I wanna raise this heat a little bit because we wanna add some wine.

And usually I like to use the wine that comes from the region. And this is a Greco Di Tufo and Greco Di Tufo is one of the more popular Campanian wines from the region of Campania where this recipe hails from. So I’m gonna give this about a half a cup

Of the Greco Di Tufo. Stir this around. Now you don’t wanna boil this away. You wanna cook it very, very slowly. Add the fish on top. And we’re gonna put a cover on this and we’re going to let it cook until that fish turns opaque. It isn’t gonna take very long.

Maybe about 10 minutes on a low heat. So now we cover and we wait. I think it’s great that Mary Ellen Powers, who is in the cooking school today, decided to come up here and cook with me. So welcome. – Thank you very much. – Benvenuta,

As they say in Italian. – Thank you. – So do you know anything about fregola? – It’s a grain. – Yes. – Used in Italian cooking. – Very good. See smart already. So let me talk a little bit about what we’re gonna do today. So we’re gonna do a recipe from Sardinia.

In Sardinia, one of the most popular pastas is something called fregola. So it’s used with a lot of fish dishes, particularly with clams because in Sardinia, they make this with a tiny, tiny, very sweet clam but today we’re gonna do it with shrimp. We’re gonna do something a little different.

So let’s talk about the shrimp before we boil the fregola. So here we have, Mary Ellen, some shrimp. This is, these are just medium size shrimp and they’ve already been peeled and deveined. However, if they’re not deveined, then you get this little tool.

See, I love this little beak blade tool, ’cause I use it. It has a nice curve on it. So it follows the curve of the shrimp. So you can just go down the back like that and open it up and take out that intestinal track that’s usually there. These are nice and clean.

So if you do have shrimp that have an intestinal track you need to use a small tool like this to get that vein out. You’ve done that before, right? – Yes, I have, sure. – Okay, so then the question comes in, well how much shrimp do I need?

It depends on the size of the shrimp for the number of people that you want to serve. So you’ll see on a bag of shrimp, it’ll say U 41-50 and you’re wondering what’s this U thing? U 41-50, that’s a unit piece. So that’s telling you that there are 41 to 50 shrimp

For a medium size shrimp. So next time you buy shrimp, if you’re buying jumbos you might see something that says 6-8, there’s only six to eight shrimp because they’re jumbos. Today, we’re using medium and we have here about 25 or 30 shrimp that we’re going to use for a dish with the fregola.

So we wanna season this first. So for it, we wanna add, why don’t you put in a little bit of the garlic, powdered garlic. Now, why am I using powdered garlic? I very rarely use powdered garlic. This will stick to the shrimp. So why don’t you mix that?

And then we want to add a little bit of salt. So we wanna just get them coated. – Now, do you keep the tails on for a specific reason? – I just think it looks nicer. – Okay. – But you can take them off.

So a little salt and then you want some black pepper. And I was first introduced to fregola itself when I visited a friend of mine in Sardinia, who lives in Cagliari, and he made the clam dish with the fregola, and ever since then I became a fan of the fregola.

So that’s got the garlic now and the salt, the pepper. A few hot red pepper flakes. Remember it’s– – I might like a lot. – You like a lot. Okay, well then, alrighty. Good, okay, that looks good. Now mix that all around. And we just let these shrimp sit aside

While we make the fregola, we cook the fregola, and we make the sauce for this dish. So Mary Ellen, I’m gonna have you cook the fregola. – Okay. – But we’re not gonna cook fregola in water. And this is just a tip

For any kind of a grain that you wanna cook in a liquid. I tend to like to use a broth, whether it’s a beef broth, chicken broth, even wine because it gives the grain a much better flavor. So we’re using chicken broth and we have one cup of the fregola.

Now you notice when you look at it, it has different colors, right? It’s not all the same colors. Some are darker than the others. That’s because once these little grains are made from the semolina and water, they’re rubbed into these little grains, they’re dried and then they’re toasted.

And that’s why they have this different color variation. So, but that’s just adds to the appeal of it. So get this in a pot. – Okay. – Bring it to a boil. We’re gonna add the fregola. Put the heat down to medium high and we’re gonna let that cook

Until the fregola is tender. We still want it to be chewy. It is a chewy type of pasta. So you’ll know that it’s right by tasting it. I can never really give a total time element here because everybody likes their pasta cooked a little differently,

But we really want this to be al dente. All right, so here, Mary Ellen, we have some diced zucchini and you really want to use nice, fresh zucchini. So, I always try to use the smallest ones I can find because they have less seeds and less water.

So if you go to the store or if you’re getting this out of your garden you wanna get them when they’re small, because you know, you have to sleep in the garden overnight because otherwise they become baseball bats. So we’ve got about four cups of the diced zucchini

And then to flavor this even more we’ve got some tomatoes in olive oil. So these are dried tomatoes in olive oil. Now I usually make my own. And if you go on the Ciao Italia website you can find the recipe for making tomatoes, dried tomatoes in olive oil.

And then you have them during the winter months. And this gives a really nice bumped up flavor. And then of course we need some onions and we have some parsley here. So those are going to be the ingredients that go with our shrimp.

So we have to cook this first in a little olive oil and then we’ll add the shrimp because the shrimp aren’t gonna take very long at all. We don’t wanna overcook the shrimp ’cause then they’ll be tough. So are you ready to do this? – Yeah, sure, I have a question.

Do you use flat leaf or curly? – I use the flat leaf, Italian flat leaf parsley, which has a much better flavor, number one. Curly parsley is used mainly as a garnish. – Okay. – You know, it doesn’t have that flavor that flat leaf does.

And I grow this in my garden every year. And then what I do is when I get a lot of it I mince it up like this, just the way it is, and then in increments of one quarter cups, I put them in some paper, plastic wrap or press and seal,

Twist it and put the little bags in a big freezer bag. Then you can use it directly from the freezer in soup, stews, sauces, that kind of thing. You won’t be able to use it – Fresh. – you know, if you wanna just sprinkle it over a plate

Because it’ll just get too soft. So whenever you can, use Italian flat leaf parsley, okay? Let’s cook. All right, so we started here in the pan with about two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. We’ve got one onion that’s minced and we just wanna let the onion cook down a little bit.

So once it’s soft like that then we can add in our zucchini. This is a real simple dish. It’s gonna be nice with the fregola and with the shrimp. So in go the zucchini. And now we have to let this cook down a little bit.

So if you see that the pan is somewhat dry because this is what cooking is all about, right? Using your head. You just add it as you go. Just add it as you go. And this is, I’m using extra virgin olive oil because extra virgin olive oil, yes, can be used in cooking.

You don’t wanna deep fry with it, but if you’re doing like a saute like this, it’s perfectly fine to use. So we’re gonna let this go now until those zucchini wilt down. All right, so now you can see that the zucchini has cooked down, right, Mary Ellen? – Yes, it looks great.

– So we’re going to add now these tomatoes. Remember these are the tomatoes and olive oil and that just adds another level of taste, but also color. It’s pretty, very pretty looking. And then we’re going to want those shrimp. So now they can go right on top. Spread them out

’cause shrimp don’t take very long to cook. – [Mary Ellen] This smells delicious. – As soon as they turn pink, they’re done. So I’m gonna spread them out a little bit in the pan, just like that. And now we’re gonna give them that lemon juice right over the top. Cover

And in about three minutes this is gonna be ready to serve with the fregola. Beautiful, huh? – [Mary Ellen] Beautiful. – Okay. Yes, so you see those shrimp when they turn pink like that, they’re done. So here’s our fregola. Nicely cooked in the chicken broth that we made ourselves.

So now we just take some of this and layer it right over the top. It’s just so pretty. And it really is super delicious, number one, and healthy. All right, now you need to give that a little bit of parsley. Wow. You did a great job, Mary Ellen. – Thank you Mary Ann.

– So, there you have it. Fregola with shrimp, Sardinian style. Wow, Mary Ellen, look what we did today. Class look what we did, right? – [Student] Looks good. – We made two fabulous dishes. One here called aqua pazza. What does that mean? – [Mary Ellen] It means crazy water. – Exactly. Because originally it was cooked in salt water with wine.

But we did it with tomatoes and olives and fennel and it made a beautiful sauce. And now this is all ready to eat with maybe some beautiful grilled bread, huh? And then we traveled on down to Sardinia and we made fregola, which is that wonderful little pasta, that’s so typical in Sardinian cuisine.

And we combined it with onions and zucchini and shrimp. And it’s a great first course. Mary Ellen, class, thank you for coming. And until I see you nella cucina again, I’m Mary Ann Esposito. – And I’m Mary Ellen Powers. – Ciao! – [All] Ciao!