Dairy

I’m generally turned off when people describe food as being “sexy,” but sexy is the best description I have for this warm, luscious, pillowy raviolo. The word raviolo is the singular for ravioli, and this is one big, square raviolo filled with ricotta and a raw egg yolk. We are not at all ashamed to tell you that this is a direct rip-off from Michael Tusk, the chef and owner of Quince restaurant in San Francisco. The first time I had it, I thought it was one of the best things I had ever eaten, and for sure the single best pasta dish I’d ever put in my mouth. When our servers bring this to the table, they suggest to the guests that they cut into the raviolo starting from the center so the egg pours out onto the plate into the pool of browned butter that the raviolo sits in. It’s sexy. What else can I say? We recommend you use farmfresh eggs with bright orange yolks. You will need a 3 × 3-inch fluted cookie cutter or a fluted pastry cutter to make these.

Francobolli is Italian for “postage stamps,” and that’s what these small, filled pasta shapes look like. They are filled with braised short ribs that we whip with Parmigiano and then top with a simple tomato sauce. The reason for you to make this is the same reason we make it: to use leftover Brasato. This recipe makes more ravioli than you will need for four servings. You can either freeze the remaining ravioli or double the sauce recipe. If you double the sauce recipe, toss the sauce with the ravioli four servings at a time. Ricotta salata is ricotta cheese that has been pressed and salted. The result is a hard, bright white grating cheese with a much stronger flavor than fresh ricotta. Matt got the idea to bake the cheese in a very hot oven, which gives it a smoky flavor.

This classic pizza is a Margherita with prosciutto draped on the pizza after it comes out of the oven. I added arugula because I love the combination of arugula and prosciutto.

Pellicano offers a meat lover’s pizza, so I felt I had to offer one, too. Our version should be called a “pork lover’s pizza” because all four of the meats we put on it—fennel sausage, salami, guanciale, and bacon—are pork.

I created this pizza, an upgraded take on “Hawaiian pizza,” typically made with Canadian bacon and canned pineapple, for my son, Ben. When he was growing up, that’s the pizza he always ordered and I cringed at the combination every time. When I opened up my own pizzeria, I wanted to come up with a pizza using the same or similar ingredients that would please both Ben and me. We start with fresh pineapple and slice it paperthin so it caramelizes in the oven, and we use speck in place of Canadian bacon. But what I think really makes this pizza is the addition of jalapeño peppers. Their heat cuts through the sweetness of the pineapple.

Before we opened the Osteria, Matt made all of the dishes he wanted to put on the pasta menu for us to taste together. When he made this dish—his version of a classic from Puglia—I was absolutely convinced that the pasta program we were committing to was a good idea, and that Matt was absolutely the one to execute it. Evidently I’m not alone because this has been our most popular pasta since the day we opened. The chard you will prepare for this dish makes more than you will need for four servings, as does the Fennel Sausage recipe. It would be a good recipe to double and serve to a crowd—just remember to prepare the sauce and toss it with the pasta in two separate sauté pans.

Our prettiest pizza, this is the one that customers are most likely to point to when they see it being carried through the dining room. The squash blossoms are laid out over the surface so they bake into the crust, and the pizza ends up looking like a painting. We put the burrata on after it comes out of the oven, and I love the cool creamy cheese on the hot, crispy pizza.

Years ago my friend Paul Schrade gave me a wooden pasta stamp, which I never used. Since I’m a baker, I occasionally thought about using it to make a pretty cookie, but I never thought to use it for its intended use: to imprint corzetti stampati, or “stamped coins.” Then about a year after Mozza opened, when I’d run out of projects to nudge Matt about, I broke out the stamp and told Matt to get to work. Rather than follow the traditional Genoese route of serving corzetti with green beans, potatoes, and pesto, Matt came up with a version of Pasta alla Norma—Sicily’s most famous pasta dish that combines tomato sauce, eggplant, and sheep’s milk ricotta—using the corzetti in place of the spaghetti or penne traditionally used. We use Japanese eggplant and slice it into medallions, which work really nicely with the flat “coins.” No Italian in his right mind would ever take a shape from Genoa and toss it with a sauce from Sicily, but that’s one of the advantages of being American. Though we try to be respectful of tradition, we are not bound by it. Think of it as Italian fusion—and enjoy.

Just as you would order a baguette to judge a bakery, Margherita is the pizza to order to judge a pizzeria. Not only is Pizza Margherita the original pizza Napoletana but it has all the elements you want to look at: the sauce, the cheese, and of course, the crust. It’s our biggest seller.

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.

Polenta, which is cooked cornmeal, takes the place of mashed potatoes at the Italian table as a comforting, starchy side dish. To cook polenta correctly, you have to go by the texture, not the time, as the cooking times will vary depending on how the corn was milled and how fresh it is. We start with a whole-grain polenta, Anson Mills Rustic Polenta Integrale. Like any whole grain, it still has the germ and the bran, which gives it a more earthy flavor. It takes about three hours to cook so it’s definitely something to save for when you’re in the mood for slow cooking. We cook the polenta—with all that stirring that polenta is so known for—until you can’t feel the grain under your teeth. The texture of the finished polenta is almost custardy. Matt uses Italian sparkling mineral water to make polenta because he thinks the minerals in the water add to the flavor of the polenta. When making the polenta to serve Brasato al Barolo with Polenta and Horseradish Gremolata (page 230), omit the Parmigiano-Reggiano in this recipe.

The perfect example of how good a few simple ingredients, combined and prepared correctly, can be. When we can get it, our preferred variety for this is radicchio di Treviso, which has an oblong head. The roasted heads look so pretty lined up on a platter that they make the perfect addition to an outdoor meal served family or buffet style. As always, the quality of the balsamico you use is essential to the quality of the finished dish.

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.

The first place I was served fava bean pods, as opposed to shelled beans, was at Zuni Café in San Francisco. When they came to the table, I thought it was such an interesting idea, and when I tasted them I found them delicious. When you serve them this way, you want to use only tender, young, small pods, as larger pods will be tough and fibrous. If you can’t get young fave, use jumbo asparagus instead. In either case, this is a spring dish.

My two favorite salads in the world are a properly prepared Caesar salad and an iceberg wedge with blue cheese dressing, neither of which have any place in an Italian restaurant. Just as I sneaked the Caesar salad in under the guise of a tricolore (see page 98), here I disguised the iceberg wedge sufficiently so that my customers don’t realize that I’m serving a wedge salad, an American classic, in a Pizzeria. I don’t know where I got the idea to throw the dates on the salad, but the contrast of their sweetness with the pungent Gorgonzola really makes this.

Whipping cream is all about the details. Perfectly whipped cream is cloudlike and light, but if you go just a little too far, it becomes too stiff—on its way to turning into butter. I fold in a bit of crème fraîche or sour cream when serving whipped cream on desserts because I love the tang that it adds, and it guarantees a smooth, dense, and shiny cream. If you are whipping cream to put on a pizza, do not add the crème fraîche; simply continue whipping the cream until it is thick and mousselike.

Little Gem lettuce, a smaller, sweeter, very crunchy variety of romaine, appeared recently in Los Angeles the way burrata did: one day nobody had heard of it and now it’s everywhere. Also like burrata, I love it so much that I have found multiple uses for it in my restaurants. The first time I saw Little Gem lettuce was at the Atelier of Joël Robuchon in Paris seven or eight years ago, when I took my daughter Vanessa there for her birthday. A large percentage of Robuchon’s perfectly simple, perfectly executed dishes came with a dressed quarter of this tiny oblong-shaped lettuce with a beautiful, pale green color; I fell in love with Little Gem at first bite.

This mountain of arugula is layered with thinly sliced mushrooms and long thin shards of Piave, a hard cheese similar to but sweeter than Parmigiano—and much less expensive. It’s important to use fresh, firm mushrooms; look for those with closed caps and no blemishes. If you can’t find Piave, Parmigiano is a fine substitute.

Torta della Nonna, or “grandmother’s tart,” is traditionally a two-crusted tart filled with pastry cream that is seen in almost every trattoria in Italy. Dahlia and I knew we wanted to include a version, but luckily, the name gave us a lot of room to be creative. As long as it was reminiscent of something a grandmother would make—meaning homey, simple, and comforting, like this cheesecake version that Dahlia created—I felt we could call it Torta della Nonna. Honey is an obvious pairing with cheese in Italy, so we serve this dessert with three different types of honey on the side: a sweet, delicate, floral honey, such as wildflower honey; a bitter honey (also referred to as savory honey), such as buckwheat or chestnut honey; and honey in the comb. The crust that we use for this torta, Pasta Frolla, is a typical Italian pastry dough used in many classic Italian desserts. In keeping with the Italian spirit, I make it with Italian leavening. You will need an 11-inch flan ring (a straight-sided, bottomless tart ring) for the tart and one that is slightly smaller (we use an 8-inch ring) to cut a circle for the top crust.

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.