Wednesday, November 15, 2017

B-O-L-O-G-N-A


After bidding a fond farewell to Firenze, we hit the road again which is not such a hardship as the views through Tuscany are stunning this time of year.  I thought about pulling off to the side of the road to photograph it but I was on a mission and needed to make it to Bologna by lunch.  And we pulled up just in time for the restaurant that had been recommended to me by my next AirBnB hostess. 

Famous worldwide, the Bolognese version of Ragù (there are countless types of sauces out there) contains ingredients that might surprise you and is only served with tagliatelle (tortellini or gnocchi if you are in a pinch but never with spaghetti).   The recipe, which is registered with the Accademia Italiana della Cucina preserves the integrity of the sauce and its history. (I'll post the recipe at the bottom!)  The girls had another world famous recipe from Bologna - Tortellini- filled with Mortadella (which we know as Bologna).  All truly authentic and such a treat.  And now you know why Oscar-Mayer (and the world) spells Bologna the way they do.

Looks fabulous, doesn't it?  I ate every, single bite!

Craving satisfied, we were off to walk off some of the heavy meal.  We did not have a lot of time as we still had a ways to go on our drive to Verona but we did get to explore the Piazza Maggiore, the main square, and popped into the Basilica San Petronio.  With its pink marbled bottom and brick upper half it is not the prettiest church but it does have an interesting history.  As it was being built the Vatican found out about the plans for it to become the largest church in the world.  Suddenly, all funding disappeared and was funneled to the University instead.  It is still the largest brick church in the world and the 10th largest overall.




 Back outside we tried to locate the statue of Neptune but found that it was being refurbished and was hidden behind lots of scaffolding.  Running low on time we decided to start our walk back to the car and ducked into several of the 666 porticos (almost 43km in total!) that dominate the streets of Bologna.  Tall enough for horses to pass through them with their carriages, the covered arcades were built when the influx of University students started pouring into town (remember all of those Vatican funds that built up the school?).  Not wanting to build outside the city they simply built covered porticos in front of already existing storefronts and added student housing directly above them.  Nowadays they are fabulous for keeping you from the blazing sun or the downpouring sky.  And the different designs are pretty to look at.  We didn't get through nearly 666 of them but we did manage a km or two.






 We made it back to our car and hit the road once again as our final stop of the day was Verona.  An uneventful drive, a fabulous check-in by perhaps the nicest hostess ever and we were settled in our new home away from home by dinner time...which left us wanting another round of the famous cuisines of Bologna.


***With a solemn decree of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina – the Italian Academy of Cuisine, the present was notarized and deposited in the Palazzo della Mercanzia, the Chamber of Commerce of the City of Bologna on the 17th of October 1982.***

Ragù alla Bolognese

Ingredients

300 gr. beef cartella (thin skirt)
150 gr. pancetta, dried
50 gr. carrot
50 gr. celery stalk
50 gr. onion
5 spoons tomato sauce or 20 gr. triple tomato extract
1 cup whole milk
Half cup white or red wine, dry and not frizzante
Salt and pepper, to taste.

Procedure

The pancetta, cut into little cubes and chopped with a mezzaluna chopping knife, is melted in a saucepan; the vegetables, once again well chopped with the mezzaluna, are then added and everything is left to stew softly. Next, the ground beef is added and is left on the stovetop, while being stirred constantly, until it sputters. The wine and the tomato cut with a little broth are added and everything left to simmer for around two hours, adding little by little the milk and adjusting the salt and black pepper. Optional but advisable is the addition of the panna di cottura of a litre of whole milk at the end of the cooking.




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