Tuscan Hamburger

On my recent trip to Tuscany I visited a small trattoria called Barones in the heart of Florence. This wonderful trattoria served a hamburger unlike anything I've ever had before. Picture a juicy grilled hamburger topped with grilled zucchini and eggplant. The taste was complex, contracting the juicy beef, melted cheese, and the savory grilled vegetables on a toasted bun. I have recreated this for you so that you do not have to travel to Florence to taste one of the best burgers I've ever eaten.

Ingredients

1 small eggplant (sliced crosswise 1/8 inch thick)

½ tsp kosher salt

¼ tsp ground black pepper

1 small zucchini (sliced lengthwise 1/8 inch thick)

6 TBS Olive Oil

2 1/3 lb Beef Hamburger Patties

2 Hamburger Buns

Cheese (Provolone or Mozzarella) optional

Preheat the oven to 200°F.

Slice the eggplant into 1/8 inch round slices (your choice if you want to peel the eggplant first). Place them on a cookie sheet and sprinkle with ½ teaspoon kosher salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Let it sit for 15 minutes.

Slice the zucchini lengthwise into 1/8 inch thick slices. I used a mandolin for this.

Place a large griddle over medium high heat and add 2 tablespoons of olive oil per batch. Saute the zucchini until it starts to turn a golden brown. Flip and repeat. Place the cooked zucchini in an oven safe dish to keep warm. Add 2 more tablespoons of olive oil and start to cook the eggplant until golden brown. Repeat until all of the eggplant is cooked. Place in the oven with the zucchini.

Fry or grill the burgers until cooked the way you like them. On the far end of the grill toast the buns. Top the burgers with either mozzarella or provolone.

Place the 2 slices each of the zucchini and eggplant on top of the burgers and serve immediately.

NOTE: The zucchini and eggplant can be sautéed up to two days in advance and just heated before serving.

To print a copy of this recipe go to Tuscan Burger.

What to do with Leftover Wine

You usually have two choices when you open a bottle of wine, drink it all before it goes bad or throw out what is left in the bottle and is no longer drinkable. Well, I have a third choice - never throw out wine again. Just pour the leftover wine into an ice cube tray (you remember those from the old days) and freeze it. You then pop out the cubes and put them into into a zipper bag. They are then available to add to sauces, liven up a stew or add to a smoothie (LOL).

Tuscan Sausage & Beans in Rada

Tuscan Sausage with Cannellini Beans

One of our favorite hill towns in Tuscany was Rada. This little town had charm, great food, wonderful

Wine and Cheese for the Bikers

people, and 6,000 bike riders. As we entered the town we were assaulted with bikes everywhere we went. It turns out we stumbled upon a historical bike race and Rada was one of the stops along the race. Now the stop was not your conventional water stop - bikers were treated with wine, cheese and prosciutto! Try doing that in the us. The people in town were the friendliest of any town we visited. I visited a shop to ask if they carried balsamic vinegar and was treated to a lesson on the different grades of balsamic vinegar (that will be a totally separate blog). To top off the experience we ended our visit with lunch at an outdoor cafe, Dante Alighieri, Where I enjoyed a dish of Tuscan Sausage and cannellini beans. Tuscan sausage is very different from the Italian sausage we get in the US. It is a very mild pork sausage flavored with mace and coriander. It complimented the savory cannellini beans in a light tomato sauce. It was wonderful.

Favorite Meal in Tuscany

While I enjoyed many meals in Tuscany, one really stood out on top. We took Rick Steve’s advice and ate at a restaurant in Voltera called Don Beta, a small family owned Trattoria. When I eat at an Italian restaurant in the US I usually rate it’s quality based on the gnocchi, a small potato pasta that looks like pillows. When I saw Gnocchi  “gnudi” (Tuscan dumplings with 4 types of cheeses and balsamic vinegar) on the menu at Don Beta’s I had to order it. As you can see by the picture, the Gnocchi that they served me was nothing like what I expected. They were the size of a meatball and bathed in a cheese sauce then drizzled with balsamic vinegar. They were wonderfully light and loaded with spinach. With each bite your mouth coated with a wonderful 4 cheese sauce that was complimented with a hint of sweet balsamic vinegar. I definitely have to try to make this when I get home.

Tuscan Wine at Tenutte Niccoli

Today I was able to visit the winery owned by the agroturismo where I am stayinSangioveseg in Tuscany. The wine here is excellent as expected and the quality of wine in Italy has risen dramatically in the last 75 years. Growing up I remember the straw covered chianti bottles with the melted candles that often tasted like your grandfather made it in your basement. Today, Italian wine is winning awards on a global basis and the quality is quickly catching up to the best in the world. Wines like Brunello from Montalcino and Chianti Reserve are fetching high prices on the world market. Here is a quick tour of the Tenutte Niccoli Winery that uses Varnacci and Sangiovese grapes that have been grown in the San Gimignano region since the time of the Etruscans.

The grapes are dumped into this auger which feeds them into the separator.

This cylinder spins and the grapes are forced through the holes.

The grapes drop through the crusher and are pumped through hoses into the fermentation tanks.

The grapes for the red wine with their skins are placed in large tanks for 2 weeks to ferment. The white wine uses only white grapes and is fermented without their skins.

After a second 1 week fermentation the wine is stored in French oak barrels. The white wine is stored at 15C and the reds are stored at 27C. 

This gadget allows the CO2 to escape during the second fermentation without letting in any oxygen, You can see the bubbles escaping.

The best part of the tour, of course, was the wine tasting at the end.

Agroturismo La Lucciolaia in San Gimignano

One of the highlights of my stay in Tuscany was my stay at the Agroturismo La Lucciolaia in San Gimignano. The best way to describe what an agroturismo is is to compare it to a bed & breakfast that is located on a farm. We stayed at La Lucciolaia in San Gimignano for 5 days. It was very modern with large rooms and a modern bathroom (very important in Italy). The breakfasts were wonderful with salami, cheese, eggs, croissants, fresh baked good, fruit and wonderful cappuccino. The best part were the views out our room. Looking out our back window we can see the ancient walled town of San Gimignano sitting on top of a hill across a valley covered with vineyards  We were even able to watch them harvest the grapes for this years crop of wine.

La Lucciolaia Agroturismo

Breakfast

View of San Gimignano Out Our Bedroom Window

Our Room

Tuscan Desserts

One of the best parts of dinner in Italy are the desserts. They are varied, sweet and delicious. Here is a sampling of what I've enjoyed.

Chocolate and Pear Torta

Tiramisu

Croissant Filled with Pastry Cream

Almond Biscotti Dipped in Sweet Dessert Wine

Pasta Ragout: Good Eats – Lousy Weather

In the past 24 hours, I’ve enjoyed 2 great pasta dishes and have experienced torrential downpours. The Duomo in Siena today was absolutely breathtaking but we got soaked and cold waiting in line to get in. Thankfully we enjoyed a wonderful dish of ravioli that warmed our hearts.

Tagliatelle ai Profumie del Bosco

Tagliatelli Pasta with Scents of the Forest

We devoured this pasta dish last night at our agroturismo with great quantities of wine made on the farm we were staying at. The tagliatelle pasta was homemade, tender and shaped like long, broad noodles. It was bathed in a ragout of ground pork and mushrooms (thus scents of the forest) in a brown sauce. If all I was eating was this dish I would have had at least two dishes. As it was this was only the second of five courses. Pasta in Italy is never served as a main course.

Ravioloni di Ricotta e Spinaci al Sugo di Agnello

Large Ravioli with Ricotta and Spinach in Lamb Ragout

These were some of the best ravioli that I have ever eaten. They had a creamy center of ricotta cheese and spinach and were bathed in a brown sauce that had small diced pieces of lamb with fresh thyme and mint. My only regret was that I did not order a second plate of the ravioli.

Wild Boar Salami

Variety of wild boar salami

One of the specialties of Florence and Chianti is the wild boar. You can have it served in a red wine stew, in sausage and in salami. While we were at the Castello Verrazzano, where the explorer Verrazzano lived, enjoying a wine tour several wild boars broke out of the brush and scampered across the vineyard. At the end of the tour we enjoyed a plate of wild boar salami, cheese and the best balsamic vinegar I have ever had. The balsamic was so good you could have drank it by the glassful (it was $75 for a small bottle). Compliment the food with a Chianti Classico Reserve and the wild boar salami and I was in heaven. I would be a very happy man if I could have that for lunch every day for the rest of my trip. Immediately after this meal we visited the town of Greve where we visited a famous butcher that specializes in wild boar products.

Wild Boar Salami at the Castello Verrazzano Winery

Wild boar shanks air cured like prosciutto

 

Wild boar in front of a famous butcher in Greve

Italian Hamburgers

Ok, I didn't come to Italy to eat hamburgers but alas I was in a local restaurant and found out what the Italians can do to improve our humble hamburger. What I found was a hamburger made from a local breed of white cattle. Each hamburger is then layered with grilled eggplant and zucchini then topped with aged provolone. This is served in a perfect roll that is crisp onthe outside and soft on the inside. The combination made my mouth curl up with a smile from the first bite to the last.

Gelato

Gelato is the Italian word for ice cream, and is defined as a soft ice cream containing little or no air. I define it as delicioso. It seems like there is a gelato shop on every corner each with gelato piled high in every flavor imaginable.  They have every thing from chocolate, to cantaloupe to pana cote, to butter pecan, to smurf (it was blue and I have no idea what it tasted like). My only regret is that I will not have enough time to try every flavor. It's rich, intense, creamy, sweet and cold. What more could I ask for after walking around all day.

Locanda di Poeti (Inn of the Poet)

Locanda di Poeti 

(Inn of the Poet) is a small guest house (just 7 rooms) just minutes from the center of Florence. It is loaded with poetic charm - the walls are covered with poems and there is even a spot where you can write your own poems. The rooms are comfortable and recently remodeled with all of the modern conveniences. They even have a small kitchen where you can make yourself some espresso in the morning. I give it 4 stars.

Lunch in Florence - Piazza di Santa Croche

We had a wonderful lunch in in an outdoor cafe on the piazza (plaza/square) in front of Santa Croce (Holy Cross).

Penne with Mushrooms and Olives - a wonderful dish of pasta bathed in a mild tomato sauce with cream, mushrooms and black olives (similar but more 
sophisticated than our black olives).

Pasta Carbonara - spaghetti with a rich cheese sauce and spicy Italian bacon. It was sinfully rich and creamy.

First Day in Italy

After  only a few hours sleep the first day in Italy is always exhausting and the best way to combat being tired is sun and food. It's a beautiful sunny day in Florence, 75F, and food is around every corner. 

We started our day with lunch in a little trattoria called del Barone on Via Borgo S. Lorenzo close to the Duomo. We had some great sandwiches that were inspiring and mouthwatering. First off they were some of the best crusty rolls that I've ever had, not like the soft rolls we eat in the US. The crust was crispy and inside soft. I had a sandwich with fried fennel sausage that they made right at the restaurant and were savory like a good sweet Italian sausage should be. The other sandwich we enjoyed was layered with pecorino cheese, grilled eggplant and tuscan ham (you can't get this in the US). It was a lunch made for a king.

After walking around for a few hours it was time for a snack and I could not resist buying some pastries at a cafe. One of my favorite Italian pastries growing up is Sfogliatelle which are shell-shaped filled pastries filled with Italian Cheese and candied fruit. What should my eyes behold but a Sfogliatelle filled with Nutella chocolate hazelnut cream. Think of a hundred layers of thin crust that crackle and melt in your mouth while oozing out a creamy chocolate center. They were pure decadence.