Tomato

For this dish, we braise squid in red wine and orange rind. The rind gives the sauce a slight bitterness that can seem overwhelming until you eat it on crostini with a dab of mayonnaise, and then it all comes together. We serve it as a condiment for pasta in the Osteria, which would be a perfect use for leftovers because when dressing pasta, a little goes a long way. We use calamarata, a short ring-shaped pasta that mimics the shape of squid rings, or paccheri, a long, tubular pasta that flattens when it cooks.

Ribollita is a classic Tuscan soup traditionally made with leftover minestrone thickened with chunks of stale bread. This version is something quite different, and it’s based entirely on the one they serve at Ristorante Da Delfina, a wonderful ristorante in a tiny village nestled in the hills just outside Florence. It was described to me as a fried soup, so the first time I ate it, I didn’t know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they’d turned the soup into something wholly unsouplike that I could eat with a knife and fork. The way we make it, after cooking off the liquid, we thicken the soup with bread, we chill it, and then shape it into patties that we pan-fry in olive oil. We serve it as an antipasto but it could be a side dish or, served with a green salad, a light meal. I often recommend it to vegetarians, and to make it vegan, just omit the Parmigiano rind. One of our inveterate recipe testers, Tracey Harada, tested this recipe about eight times to get the flavors perfect. Cavolo nero, a variety of kale, is one of the defining ingredients of any ribollita. You can find it at specialty food stores and health-food stores, but if you can’t find it, use another variety of kale.

When I was building the Pizzeria menu, I wanted it to be a true Italian pizzeria experience with a nod to the Italian-American pizzerias that I grew up eating in. With those American pizzerias in mind, I felt that we had to offer meatballs. What I really wanted to serve was a meatball sandwich, but as strongly as I argued for it, Matt argued against it. He softened over time and finally, two years after the Pizzeria opened, I got my meatballs—not as a sandwich, but as an antipasto: a bowl of meatballs served with buttered semolina toast on the side. Today they are the most popular antipasto in the restaurant.

Italians famously eat a lot of beans, so including shell beans on our menu was an obvious choice. Shell beans are so delicious and can be prepared in such a variety of ways, and yet you don’t normally see them at conventional grocery stores. Looking for shell beans is a good excuse to visit your local farmers’ market, which is where we find them in Los Angeles in the late summer and early fall. We use a mix of four types of shell beans—borlotti beans, cannellini beans, lima beans, and flageolet—because we like the range of sizes, colors, and flavors of the various beans. Properly cooking beans is about 90 percent of the battle, which is why we cook each type of bean separately; to spare yourself the effort, use fewer varieties of beans. If you don’t have access to shell beans, or when shell beans are not in season, you could make this using dried beans. Refer to Ceci (page 96) for instructions. The recipe for the bouquet is for each pot of beans. You will need to make the same number as types of beans you are making.

Caponata, a traditional Sicilian eggplant preparation, is the perfect example of agrodolce, the Italian word for combining sweet and sour flavors in savory dishes. When people order this antipasto at the Pizzeria, we suggest they also get an order of Fett’Unta (page 65) to absorb the delicious flavors of the caponata. Caponata is an ideal dish to serve at a party, because you can prepare it in advance and serve it at room temperature.

I was introduced to the concept of a chopped salad in the 1970s at La Scala Boutique, a casual offshoot, now closed, of the Beverly Hills institution La Scala. The salad, which they call the Jean Leon Chopped Salad (it’s now available at the original La Scala restaurant), is made of iceberg lettuce, salami, and mozzarella, all so finely chopped that you almost don’t have to chew it, then topped with ceci, or chickpeas, and a tangy red wine vinaigrette. I was totally addicted to that salad. I’ve been making chopped salads ever since, always with La Scala’s version in mind, but the one we serve at the Pizzeria with aged provolone and Sweet 100 tomatoes is my best yet.

Peperonata is a classic Italian contorno, or side dish, of stewed sweet peppers. This version, which we serve with ricotta-topped crostini at the Osteria and to dress the Buricotta with Peperonata and Oregano (page 152) in the Pizzeria, is unusual and especially delicious because after the peppers are stewed, they are baked—an idea I got from Gino Angelini, a wonderful Italian chef in Los Angeles. Baking the peppers further caramelizes them, making them even richer and sweeter than you ever imagined a vegetable could be.

Pan con tomate is a Catalan creation of grilled bread rubbed with garlic and raw tomato pulp, doused with olive oil, and sprinkled with coarse salt—and one of my favorite things to order at a tapas bar. So how do you serve your favorite Spanish snack at an Italian mozzarella bar? Add mozzarella, of course, or in this case, burrata, and give it an Italian name. We offer this dish only during tomato season. If the tomatoes have no flavor, the tomato bread will also have no flavor. And despite all the other delicious components, which include speck, pickled shallots, and tomato vinaigrette, the bread is, without question, the star. The recipe for the shallots makes more than you will need for this recipe, but they will keep for several weeks. Use the leftovers to make this recipe another time, or on sandwiches or grilled meat.

This is an Italian interpretation of a grilled lamb entrée you might see at a Lebanese restaurant. Scottadito means “burnt fingers” in Italian, and it refers to the fact that the lamb bones are meant to be picked up with your fingers while they’re searingly hot. We serve the lamb with a tabbouleh-like salad made of fregola sarda, a bread crumb–size pasta shape from Sardinia so small it acts like a grain in the kitchen, and Greek yogurt.

For me, a “tell” for a restaurant I probably don’t want to eat in is seeing a Caprese salad on the menu when tomatoes are out of season. I knew I wanted to serve a Caprese at the Pizzeria, both because everyone loves it and because it is an icon of a casual, inexpensive Italian restaurant. Since we opened in November, when tomatoes were no longer in season, I took it as a challenge to figure out how to present these flavors in a way that was every bit as good as a Caprese made with sweet, vine-ripened summer tomatoes, even when such tomatoes were nowhere to be found. This adaptation, which I first named Winter Caprese, consists of fresh burrata cheese, basil pesto, and cherry tomatoes on the vine that have been slow-roasted to concentrate their sweetness and flavor. I changed its name to Mozza Caprese when winter ended, tomatoes came into season, and it had become so popular that I could not take it off the menu. I suggest you serve it with Fett’Unta (page 65) to sop up the wonderful, juicy flavors left on your plate. The recipe for slow-roasted tomatoes makes enough for six or more of these salads, and the pesto recipe will give you more than enough pesto for that many. So, to expand the number of servings you make, just increase the amount of burrata you buy.

For these beautiful, sweet tomatoes on the vine, we start with Sunsweet tomatoes, which you can find sold in plastic boxes in grocery stores. I love the delicate, organic look of the small tomatoes dangling from the long stems. This recipe makes more than you will need for four servings of the Mozza Caprese. We did this to tailor the recipe to the size of the boxes the tomatoes are sold in and because you are sure to lose some tomatoes to anyone who walks by after they are out of the oven. If you can find tomatoes on the vine at your local famers’ market, even better.

One of the things I like about Italian food in general is that it is not a wimpy cuisine; the flavors are bold and decisive, as you will see in this preparation of bacalà, or salt cod. I first tried this classic preparation at Ristorante Da Delfina, at the same lunch where I also discovered Ribollita “Da Delfina” (page 115). I loved how hearty the dish was and how pronounced the flavors were. In keeping with the Florentine tradition of eating bacalà on Fridays, we serve this as the Friday piatto special in the Pizzeria, and in keeping with our tradition of cooking Pizzeria dishes in the pizza oven, this, too, is cooked in that oven. We start with fresh cod and salt-cure it in the style of old days, where the fish was cured as a way of preserving it. Ideally you will start with a center cut of cod, which will yield more even-size pieces, which will salinate evenly. The cod takes three days to cure, so plan accordingly.

Matt got the inspiration for this dish from the Whole Hog Dinner that the restaurant Oliveto, in Oakland, hosts every year for chefs, food professionals, and friends from all over the world. One year they served pasta with cured pork, pickled peppers, and tomato sauce, which was so good that when we got back to Los Angeles, Matt decided to make his own version. Fiorentini means “Florentine,” but here refers to a twisted short pasta shape made by Setar, an artisanal pasta producer in Napoli. If you can’t find it, use another dried, artisanally produced pasta in its place, such as maccheroni alla chitarra, a big tube-shaped pasta from Napoli. The tubes collapse when they cook so they’re like empty ravioli.

Wild boar, called cinghiale, is hunted and sold all over Umbria, so as a born-again Umbrian I would feel as if I were betraying my experience of Italy if I didn’t include this ragù at my restaurant. Cutting the boar is the hardest part of this recipe, and it isn’t hard at all. The ideal is to buy frozen wild boar and cut it while it’s only partially defrosted, when it’s easier to cut.

Like the name suggests, this is a basic tomato sauce that we use in a variety of dishes. You can keep it in the freezer for up to six months, so you may want to double the recipe and freeze the extra. The only “secret” to this sauce is that you start with good canned tomatoes. Our preference, hands down, is San Marzano, a variety of plum tomatoes from Campania praised for its tart flavor and bright red color.

These tomatoes are part of the arsenal of ingredients that we reach for to bring layers of flavor to other dishes. They add not just the flavor of tomatoes but also the slightly charred flavor that you get from cooking the tomatoes at very high heat. The tomatoes need to fit snugly on a baking sheet, which is why this recipe calls for you to roast four pounds of them. But you can always freeze them to use at a later date. I recommend you freeze them in batches of four halves, as we always call for them in multiples of four.

Passata comes from the word passare, which means “to pass” in Italian, and passata di pomodoro, often referred to as passata, is the name given to tomatoes that have been passed through a food mill, or through a gadget made especially for the task called a passapomodoro, or “tomato passer.” Anyone who has ever successfully tried to grow tomatoes or who has ever visited a farmers’ market in the late summer knows that when the time comes, you get all the tomatoes you could ever dream of—more than you could possibly eat or give away—and you get them all at once. During this time in the Italian countryside, they pass the tomatoes through the passapomodoro, which extracts the skin and seeds, and bottle the sauce that is extracted. A typical Italian larder might contain dozens of these bottles, which look like wine bottles and which allow cooks to use “fresh” tomato sauce year-round. Our passata is a little different from a traditional passata in that we cook it and season it to enhance the flavor, but it is still a very pure product.

The silky texture of this puréed sauce belies the kick of its chipotle and cascabel peppers, which are similar in heat to cayenne. Serve it with chips or crudités.

We like to serve grilled fish over a coulis made by pureeing half the salsa until smooth and adding olive oil until the mixture is the desired consistency.