With the summer over (sad face) but the warm days of Indian Summer lingering on (happy face), this dish will be relavant for a few more weeks (for those who are super traditional about eating warm weather dishes only in warm weather). For me, this will be an excellent dish to eat after months of freezing winter weather and extra fat stored from weeks of heavy stews. It’s a mix of light and heavy, but, for some reason, it feels lighter than heavier. Maybe that’s just what I’m telling myself?

Roughly translating to tuna’d tuna, tonno tonnato is grilled tuna with a cold tuna sauce, and probably doesn’t sound all that appealing. Even the photographs can not capture how delicious this dish really is (beige on beige – gorgeous!). That could be because it’s fish, but, if you think about the concept behind it, i.e. making a sauce out of the same thing as the principal element of the dish, you are reminded just how many times you’ve had a meat sauce. Taking it to it’s logical conclusion, how many times have you had leftover bolognese sauce cold the day after? It’s pretty good, right? In fact, most long-cooked sauces taste even better the day after.

Tonno Tonnato is take on the traditional Piedmontese dish, Vitello Tonnato, a cold, sliced veal dish topped with the cold tuna sauce (one we will make someday for this here blog). Vitello Tonnato is sure to make many American’s scratch their head in wonderment (or maybe even make their stomach churn at the mere idea of the dish). We are one food culture that doesn’t often mix fish with meat like many other countries do (with the exception of some Creole/Cajun and Lowcountry dishes). But, if you’ve ever given it a try, you’d realize just how well they can go together.

I think the tonnato sauce alone could be used in a variety of ways if you don’t feel like topping some tuna with it. It would make a great spread on some grilled bread with a bit of white beans and herbs mixed together as a bruchetta topping. Throw it in a bowl with some veggies as a dip? Toss it with some cold macaroni for a twist on tuna pasta salad? How about as a nice little condiment for your pannini (depending on the stuffing, of course) or maybe as a dipping sauce for some crispy fried shrimp, fried zucchini or fried oysters (or anything fried for that matter)?

It is important you try to have an open mind about tonnato. So, if you think of the tonnato (the sauce portion of the dish) as a fish version of a cold meat sauce, it might sound more appetizing. On the other hand, it might not. So feel free to skip this one if it grosses you out, but do us a favor and first ask yourself if you would turn your nose up at a nice medium-rare steak topped with bolognese sauce.

**A little on a personal note:  You may notice we’ve been kind of MIA for the past 4 or 5 months – we really haven’t been posting as much. Well, we have a little bambino coming our way within the month and, although we love this blog, we also love life and, as you know, sometimes blogging can feel like it’s getting in the way of living life.  Although we have still been cooking, we’ve also been trying to prepare for the kid, moved, Jonny started a new, more stressful job, we set up a nursery, learned about breast pumps, binky’s, boppy’s, barfy’s and any other stupid thing babies r us tries to make you think you need (I swear all I had growing up was a cardboard box for a toy and an umbrella stroller!).  Jonny and I have also been enjoying our time together before this child arrives and turns our relaxing twosome into, well, who knows, probably a crazy, loud, but fun 3-some (ok that sounds weird).  So you can see why blogging took a back seat to more important things.  We are excited but, naturally, nervous.  We swear we will still be cooking up a storm as soon as we learn how to parent a newborn so, please stick with us. We may be silent for a few months, but we won’t be gone.  And I promise I will not turn this blog into a way to showcase my kid and his latest round of “perfect poos or perfect coos” and I promise we will not feature recipes for homemade baby food!  This blog will remain Jonny and my baby – our thing.  We’ve still gotta have our little things that are just for us, right? That’s not being too selfish? So, again, we don’t often get too personal around We Are Never Full, but we felt like all 4 of you who actually read our blog deserved to know why we haven’t really been keeping up the way we used to recently.  Hopefully this new little life will inspire amazing dishes in the near future!  Stay tuned!

It’s fairly safe to say that no group, with the exception of the enigmatic gaucho, played as significant a role in defining Argentine national character as the Italians. Primarily (and principally, numerically-speaking) from Liguria (particularly Genoa), Piemonte and Tuscany, but latterly also from Naples and other areas of southern Italy, these Italian immigrants, literally by the million, descended on Argentine soil during the last decades of the 19th century and the inter-war period of the 20th century having a profound effect on the social, cultural, linguistic and gastronomic life of their adopted home. (bear with me, this is going somewhere)

And nowhere in Argentina was this impact greater than in the southern barrios of Buenos Aires, La Boca and San Telmo, the neighborhoods where these Italians began their new lives. A (then) new local slang, lunfardo - which not only features a highly confusing form of wordplay known as vesre that reverses words so tango becomes gotan (as in The Gotan Project) and cafe con leche becomes feca con chele, but which is also littered liberally with words taken from various Italian dialects (for example, laburar (to work) instead of trabajar, manyar (to eat) instead of comer) – grew out of this linguistic melting-pot. And it had a similar effect of Italicizing the Porteño diet with such Italian staples as pizza, pasta, gnocchi, and a variety of Genoese chickpea flatbread known locally as faína (similar to the famous farinata of Genoa we wrote about a while back) accompanying the ubiquitous steak and offal on restaurant menus.

Of course, (and paraphrasing Karl Marx) the Argetin-izing of these Italian staples was also just as much of a historical inevitability, and while we’ll revisit our experiences with Argentine pasta in a later post, the focus here is Argentine pizza, and in particular the Buenos Aires classic dish that is the fugazzetta.

More or less three “types” of pizza are available in Buenos Aires: thin crust (a la piedra), a thicker, more risen (1 inch/2cm thick) doughy kind known as de molde, and media masa which is a half-baked version sold in supermarkets to be finished off in the oven at home. An informal and in no way scientific survey by yours truly indicates that a la piedra places slightly outnumber those selling thicker pies, but many of the most traditional Argentine pizzerias we read about, served pizzas in the latter camp, so it was one of the most famous of these that we endured a sweaty, grimy, two-hour walk across town to visit.

El Cuartito is decorated like the bedroom of an aging (and single) sports fan with faded posters for Las Vegas boxing showdowns cheek-by-jowl with team photos of 1980s Argentine soccer champions sporting the shiny, shortie-shorts popular at the time, and is split into two sections: standing and seated. Claiming a table in the seated section, the gruff, white-jacketed waiter – a dead-ringer for Fredo Corleone from The Godfather – plonked down two menus on our formica-topped table and scurried off.

Glancing at our fellow diners it quickly became apparent that Argentine de molde-style pizza is very different from any pizza we had ever eaten. Laden with masses of yellowy-white melted cheese, dotted sparingly with other toppings (like whole green olives and big slices of tomato) and served on circular wooden boards, it didn’t resemble either the pizza we’ve eaten in Italy or in New York or Chicago. Excited at having entered a new realm of pizza-dom, we ordered a pizza mixta (half cheese, half anchovy (no cheese, only red sauce on anchovy side), a fugazzetta, and an order of faína, along with two foamy mugs of Quilmes Chopp (ubiquitous draft Argentine beer).

The first to arrive, the mixta, was about the diameter of a large dinner plate and a shade less than an inch in depth. Half-covered with molten cheese (that tasted like somewhere between a mozzarella and a mild provolone) with the opposing half smothered in a crimson tomato sauce and laced with some giant salted anchovies, it would have been a good lunch by itself, and we were happy, when the fugazzetta hove into view, that “Fredo” our waiter ended up forgetting about the faína. 

Now, remember the seemingly dull linguistic and ethnographic details in the second paragraph? Good, because the word fugazetta is derived from “fugassa” meaning “focaccia” in Genoese dialect, and is the name given in Argentina to an onion focaccia with grated cheese gratiné-ed on top. First created by Genoese immigrant baker Agustin Banchero in La Boca around the turn of the 20th-century, the fugazza has since become famous enough that the family have not only opened a series of Banchero Pizzerias (first one in 1932), but the recipe was so valuable it was patented in the 1950s.

So, then, if a fugazza is a thick onion pizza, a fugazzetta – purportedly invented by Agustin’s son, Juan – is a fugazza stuffed with mozzarella cheese. And, when one arrives on your table with a solid thunk, you realize that this is a serious deal and rightly famous. Our faces were a mixture of surprise, delight and fear when we were presented with ours. Puffed up like a yeasty Michelin man, our fugazzetta was probably three inches thick, oozing with melted cheese and bristling with crispy sweet onions.

Deciding that we should take a brief rest before hurting ourselves on the fugazzetta, we searched for inspiration in the boxing posters on the walls and began humming the Rocky theme tune quietly to ourselves. Immediately to our left, was a framed Argentina soccer jersey, with the phrase “a mi favorito El Cuartito, siempre a mi cariño” (to my favorite “El Cuartito”, always in my heart), signed by one of, if not the, greatest soccer (futbol) players of all time, Argentine icon, Diego Armando Maradona, aka “El Pibe de Oro” (the golden kid).

Now, this was significant not just because a shirt signed by the great man loomed above us like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue, but also because, in the context of the giant fugazzetta slumping threateningly before us and our knowledge of recent Argentine history, it appeared more like the Argentine shroud of Turin. You see, (it’s not clear when Maradona signed this jersey), but in early 2005 Diego had to be admitted to hospital to have his stomach-pumped after eating an estimated 25 pizzas during a food and cocaine binge that nearly killed him. If the jersey was inked after this misadventure, one can only deduce that the pizza at El Cuartito is so good it’s impossible to bear a grudge against.

So, chastened by this story of gluttonous daring, but undeterred, we managed to get about halfway through the cheesy, crispy, doughy fugazzetta before conceding a weary, yet happy, defeat. To our right, two Porteños sporting significant bellies, were noisily tucking in to a fugazzetta of their own but, amazingly, were topping it with thick slabs of faína. As we waddled towards the door, it suddenly hit us that we had a lot to learn about the lore of Argentine pizza-eating if we were ever going to be able to compete with the locals, let alone the legends.

Special thanks to La Cocina de Myri for her excellent history of the Fugazzetta I cribbed from liberally above.

And, while you’re at it, good fellow, I’ll have a warm bath with virtually anything you’ve got on the menu: pasta, potatoes, fish, chicken, soup, bread…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

A man goes to the doctor complaining of neck ache. The doctor gives him some painkillers telling him to take two after a warm bath every evening for a week. When the man returns, the doctor asks him if he’s feeling better. “No,” replies the man, “my neck still hurts and it’s getting worse.” “Really? Did you not take two painkillers after a warm bath every night like I told you to?” asks the doctor. “I tried,” says the patient, “but I couldn’t swallow the pills after drinking the whole bath…”

No, dear readers, (and apologies for the excruciating “joke”), we’re not talking about any old warm bath, and certainly not the kind with bubbles and floating soap-dishes, no we’re talking about bagna caôda, the famed “warm bath” of the Piemonte and Liguria regions of northern Italy, that, as much as you might want to, you don’t actually climb into yourself.

Also spelled bagna càuda, this garlic, anchovy, oil and butter dipping sauce is to these parts of Italy what fondue is to the Swiss, and is typically consumed communally from a large central pot into which sharers dip their bread or raw, boiled or roasted vegetables. Like fondue, bagna caôda is always served hot, as it’s name suggests, and is usually eaten in the autumn and winter as an appetizer, starter or, even, a main course.

Quite apart from being phenomenally good and easy to make, it’s the ultimate combination of land and sea in the world of condiments. Combine anchovies fished off the Ligurian coasts with bright green and fruity Ligurian olive oil, tangy Piemontese garlic and sweet butter from the head of the Po Valley and you’ve got an awesome sauce that might be paired with anything. It’s not traditional – and you should try it the original way first – but we see no reason why bagna caôda couldn’t be made into a delicious pasta sauce with some tonno (Italian oil-cured tuna), spread on a fresh loaf for an amazing garlic bread, over grilled fish or chicken as an enhancing sauce, or mixed with mashed potatoes for a wonderfully flavorful side dish. Just be careful, it really is so damn good, you’ll be putting it your coffee next…

**I’d like to dedicate this post to Dana at Dana Treat for reminding me that a bit of  meat-free posts could be ok sometimes! I, like a carnivorous idiot, commented on her vegetarian blog post about brussel sprouts asking her to “just add pancetta” for a tasty twist (something cheesy like that). I was quickly reminded that that would be a great idea if she wasn’t a veggie. Anyways, although this isn’t purely vegetarian, it sure as hell does not contain meat. Thanks, Dana!**

Bagna Caôda con Verdure Miste Cotte (anchovy, garlic sauce with grilled mixed vegetables)

Ingredients (serves 4-5 as an appetizer)

• 20-40 pieces of your favorite veggies, cut into bite sizes (cauliflower, broccoli, fennel, carrots, mushrooms, potatoes, green beans and asparagus work well)
• 3/4 cup + 2 tsp good olive oil
• 6 cloves garlic, crushed
• 4 1/2 oz anchovy fillets, minced finely
• 2 1/2 oz unsalted butter
• ground black pepper

Recipe

• Over medium-low heat, gently cook garlic, anchovy and 3/4 cup olive oil in a saucepan until garlic softens and anchovy has pretty much dissolved, stirring occasionally. Do not brown garlic at all.
• Season with black pepper to taste.
• Stir in butter and allow to melt. Combine thoroughly and keep warm, do not allow to boil or cook anymore.
• Parboil root (and cauliflower/broccoli/fennel types)vegetables until beginning to soften. Remove to a ice bath and allow to cool thoroughly.
• Toss the cooled + still raw veggies with coarse sea salt, pepper and remaining olive oil , and grill over a hot fire until blistered and crunchy.
• Serve immediately with a warm bowl of bagna caôda and lots of fresh bread to catch the drips. Enjoy!

Last year, among the many beautiful and delicious places we visited was the affluent and storied Piedmontese town of Alba. The countryside surrounding Alba is literally bursting with good things – Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera and Dolcetto wines, thermal and freshwater springs, and multifarious game, but the town’s most famous product, and rightly so, is the white truffle. Though we only stopped in to Alba for an all-too-brief visit, we wanted to make the most of our time there. So, after a gentle stroll around admiring the architecture, we quickly got down to brass tacks. We scoured the town for its famous food & beverage products, and either ate or drank them on the spot or purchased some to consume later, or both. In one store we bought bottles of the four principal varieties of local wines, and in another we bought a small jar of strawberry-sized black truffles, a 100ml vial of truffle oil (complete with small lump of white truffle), a 50ml squeezy-tube of white truffle puree, and another small jar of white truffle mousse. It was a targeted strike of almost military precision and I am very proud that we were so single-minded about it, especially after a bottle of wine and a large lunch. Indeed, now that we’re back in the US, where Albanese products are not only scarce but terrifyingy-priced, I am even more delighted with the foresight and commitment we demonstrated that day.

Of all the good ideas out there, two of the best (at least in my opinion) are: the thought that whatever the soil-coated, lumpy tumescence was that a pig was urgently digging up at the base of an oak tree was worth further investigation; and the thought of using said ugly growth to flavor butter. I should add that neither of those ideas were mine, yet I support them both vigorously. It is clear to me now that while pigs are not always particularly discerning in their choice of foodstuff – and I do not take many of my dietary decisions based on their proclivities – they make an extraordinarily good choice when they choose to root for truffles. And, if you’ve never eaten a truffle before, I am hereby going on the record and saying that they are as good as people say they are, probably better. They are one of the best things I have ever put in my mouth and I enjoy them more each time I have them. Potentially, they are the basis for a lasting and bankrupting addiction.

However, we weren’t able to come away from Alba with quite the volume of truffles and truffle-products that I would have liked, and sadly, I doubt that we’ll manage to make them last until we’re able to visit the town again. But instead of dwelling on this maudlin fact, we decided to make the most of what we had brought back with us and recently treated ourselves to a slap-up steak dinner that celebrated our Albanese truffles appropriately. We prepared a black & white truffle compound butter to go with our (perfectly-cooked) steak, and the result was possibly the richest and most decadent thing I could have imagined (see recipe below).

If you come across some reasonably-priced truffles anywhere, buy them. If you find any truffles anywhere, in fact, buy them, even if it requires some complex re-financing of other property. You will not regret it. If you can’t find truffles, or have nothing of worth to mortgage, you can make compound butters out of all kinds of things. Previously, we’ve made one with garlic and tarragon, and it was pretty darn delicious, and apparently, crushed walnuts and a dash of walnut oil are also very acceptable. I would suggest you make at least one kind of compound butter very soon to top your favorite cut of steak. It’s exceedingly good.

Black & White Truffle Compound Butter

1 stick unsalted, softened butter
1 small black truffle, chopped or shaved finely
1 tbsp white truffle paste
pinch of black pepper

Allow butter to soften out of fridge until very pliable. Unwrap it and put it in a mixing bowl. Add the truffles. Get your favorite wooden spoon and cream butter and truffles together until thoroughly combined. Take a spatula and scoop butter into a piece of plastic wrap leaving at least an inch of room at the ends. Roll-up butter in wrap and twist at ends to tighten wrap around butter. You should have something that resembles a short, wide sausage. Place compound butter wrap in freezer for 25 minutes before using it to allow it to set up. Slicing it onto your steak is also easier if butter is almost frozen. [If you're not intending to eat the butter immediately, you can just place it in the fridge.] Slice rounds of truffled butter onto your warm steak or potatoes and enjoy!