Adaptations 1

 First let me say that Ollie just blew up my brand new Bialetti cafettiere.  Brand new in that it has, or was, never used.  How does one do that?  This is not hi-tech.  In fact, the Bialetti, which by the way makes the best coffee in the world, is about as low tech as you can get.  But apparently, where there's a will there's a way.

 

In theory, that black thing on the stove is supposed to be attached to the pot, not to mention the black thing on the top which is supposed to be standing up-right.  And the smell...well, I will not describe the smell!

But that's not what I wanted to write about today.  I wanted to write about food.  I think a lot about food.  Not only because I like to eat, but because you have to learn a whole new way of looking at food when you move to a new country.  Familiar products are absent and the ones you think are familiar turn out to be quite different.  Sometimes dramatically so.  Take for example peperoni.  Every American is familiar with peperoni, after all, what's life without the occasional peperoni pizza.  Except in Italy, peperoni are not spicy dried sausages, but fresh peppers, what we'd call in the US red bell peppers.  To make matters worse, there doesn't appear to be a dried sausage similar to peperoni, at least not here in Liguria.   Ok, there's no peperoni, so what!  There are so many amazing sausages, or salumi, as well as fantastic pizza, one gets over their craving for peperoni pizza pretty fast.

The bigger issue comes when you need to use a new basic product.  In this case, flour. There are not many things I miss from home, but sourdough bread, bagels and American style cakes belong to that special category of "damn I wish I had some...!" So, for the next few weeks...or months, I am going to embark upon an adventure of trying to recreate American food products using Italian ingredients.  My first hurdle is going to be flour.  It never occurred to me that other than whole wheat versus white, there would be any significant differences from flour in the US to flour in Italy.  I could not have been more wrong, and on many levels.  American flour is typically hard wheat while Italian typically soft wheat.  American flour is labeled for it's designated use, general purpose, bread, cake etc, but here you can buy 0 or 00, Type 1, Type 2, farina integrale, and farina Manitoba 0 and 00.  0 and 00 are grades of texture, and compared to American flour is seems to be superfine and superfinest.  In a word, you better know what you're doing when you bake with Italian flour because it's not the same thing.

Also, there's no such thing as bleached flour or cake flour such as SoftasSilk.  There is a technique for bleaching flour using a microwave, but it is so labor intensive that until I decide I'm going to start baking wedding cakes for a living, I'll give it a pass.   Not to mention that I no longer own a microwave.

I have for years been a fan of Rose Levy Beranbaum and her book "The Cake Bible".  This is cake baking as a science!  When she published her new book "Rose's Heavenly Cakes"  I immediately purchased it from Amazon.com thinking I was going to return to the US for a quick trip and be able to pick it up, a trip that never happened.  So, not to be deprived, I immediately asked for another copy for Christmas, and gave my first copy to my daughter.  Which brings us back to flour.  The cakes in this extraordinary book use US style bleached cake flour and I really want to bake some of them.   I'll keep you posted on my efforts, but until I perfect the technique, I still have my fallback Italian apple cake with olive oil from Anna del Conte, which is as good as any cake I've ever eaten.

For the recipe for apple cake and other great Italian food from this wonderful writer, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Amaretto-Apple-Cake-Artichokes-Conte/dp/product-description/0099494167.