Mortadella

A good party spread is as much about curation as it is cooking. By using quality store-bought items and plating them up with a little bit of TLC, you have a tasty, stress-free snack at the ready.

There is no better beach or picnic sandwich: It feeds a crowd, gets better as it sits, and is a hearty meal built inside a loaf of bread. About that bread: Unless you live in New Orleans and can get the real thing, opt for a ciabatta or other loaf with a sturdy but not too crusty exterior.

This tiny handmade pasta is a labor of love, but you'll be glad you devoted an afternoon to fresh pasta-making once you've tasted it. The tender orecchiette is irresistible once tossed in the rich, buttery sauce studded with savory mortadella and bright peas.

When it comes to building a prime muffaletta, the bread may be more important than the olives, meats, and cheeses it’s married to. In New Orleans, this hefty must-have “sando” is constructed on a round, soft Sicilian loaf. In this version, Epicurious member Mike19711 uses focaccia. When serving large parties, use a soft Italian bread, a 9-inch round, or a long 14-inch loaf. Try and hold out until the olive salad has marinated for at least 24 hours; trust us, it will make the meal that much more authentic.

{for a small crowd} I grew up thinking strata was my mom's signature dish, until I realized every mother has her own version. You should know how to make it too, but {just between us}, yours can be much more elegant than your mother's, especially when you make it in a small dish to serve two and pair it with a large salad.

Tortellini are traditionally served in broth; Basic Chicken Stock (page 41) or Basic Brown Stock (page 50) would be equally delicious.

Cannelloni—that delicious stuffed pasta, literally translated as “big reeds”—is always a sign of a festive occasion in Italy. This baked dish can be made in advance and serve a large group of people, and it is loved by most. What you stuff it with almost does not matter, although a meat-and-vegetable combination is the most common choice. Cannelloni was a big-hit item on menus of Italian American restaurants in the sixties and seventies. If you have a gathering of family and friends, as Italians often do, this is a good dish to make.

In creating this recipe, I added the mortadella on the spur of the moment. I love raw artichoke salad, but have often prepared this salad with many other, different ingredients, such as raw mushrooms, or shavings of Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano. Recently I made a beautiful salad of small artichokes, crunchy celery, and some great imported mortadella, which I happened to have on hand. And so this salad was born: it certainly is based on tradition, but with my own touch. It has now become a family favorite for buffets, antipasto, or just for lunch.

This recipe will seem long to you, but read it through once or twice and it will become very clear that all we are doing is stuffing a piece of meat, roasting it, and making gravy to serve it with. That’s something I’m sure you have done any number of times—only in this case it is a breast of veal, which will yield delicious results. Breast of veal—bone-in breast specifically—is another wonderful meat cut that I hope you come to love as much as I do. Like the preceding shoulder cuts, it has a good deal of connective tissue, bones, and cartilage, which contribute to the flavor and texture of the meat, especially during long cooking. Because it comes from young animals, the ribs in the breast are just developing: there’s lots of soft cartilage, and you can just pull out the ribs after cooking, so serving and slicing are convenient. Stuffing the breast is the fun part. The muscle layers easily separate and hold a generous amount of savory filling; then, when it’s cooked and sliced, the cross sections of meat and stuffing make a beautiful presentation. It looks like an eye, with the meat as the lids. If you’ve tried any of the other roasts in this chapter, the procedure here will be familiar: covered roasting for tenderness and flavor, dry roasting for deep color and crisp textures—and developing a great sauce at the same time. The only difficulty you may find with this recipe is getting a nice big piece of veal breast, preferably the tip cut. It’s not always easy for me either, as you’ll understand when you read the box and study the technique photos here and on page 357. But if we all keep asking our butchers for veal-breast tip cuts, they’ll get the message—we want those excellent, traditional cuts of meat, and we want to stuff them ourselves!

Mortadella is a super-high-quality baloney. In fact, it’s probably the most delicious baloney you’ve ever had. At one of my dinner parties I was serving mortadella and one of my guests said, “Hey, this baloney has nuts in it!” And it does: Mortadella is full of pistachios and chunky bits of fat, both of which make it super-flavorful. My mortadella pâté is puréed, mixed with whipped cream, and topped with pistachios—think of it as baloney mousse.

Please do not let the bad bologna sandwiches of your youth deter you from trying this sandwich. Good mortadella is silky, flavorful, and because it doesn’t require aging, usually far more affordable than most artisanal sandwich meats. Here, we balance the smooth texture and rich taste of mortadella with the bitterness of grilled radicchio. The Pistachio Vinaigrette (page 181) is a nod to the classic use of pistachios embedded in the meat.

New Orleans is one of our favorite “kick back” vacation destinations. We go there for the people, the food, the music, and the overall vibe. New Orleans is second only to Memphis in vibeness. We also go there for the sandwiches, and always make a point of digging into one of their most famous, the muffuletta, every time we visit. It’s a killer sandwich, made with spicy Italian meats, cheeses, and a knockout marinated olive salad, the aroma of which is so powerful that when you’re waiting in line it’ll cause you to salivate! Our Memphis Muffuletta has bayou roots for sure. We start with a large round Italian loaf with a sturdy texture, so it can hold up to the delicious mix of ingredients. The meats and cheeses vary, but our favorite is a muffuletta with salami, hot soppressata, mortadella, smoked turkey, Swiss, and aged provolone. Our Memphis kicker is the addition of smoky piquillo peppers from Spain. They infuse the piquant olive salad with an incredible flavor. When it comes to cheese, we go for two flavorful varieties—an imported Swiss and an aged provolone. We call this our backyard sandwich, because it’s actually best if you assemble it in advance and allow it to marinate for about 30 minutes on the cutting board. Then you can cut the big loaf into eight wedges and have dinner on the patio. In New Orleans tradition, serve this sandwich with a cold Abita beer and some spicy Zapp’s potato chips.

This meat filling is similar to the one for cannelloni on page 165. You can use them interchangeably.

I always roast meats by adding some liquid to the roasting pan first, then allowing it to cook away and the meat to brown. The aromatic steam penetrates the meat before the surface of the meat is seared by the heat. Then I add more liquid as the meat cooks, to make a delicious pan sauce. Mortadella is one of those ingredients that give a tremendous amount of flavor to meat-based ravioli or cannelloni fillings. Think of mortadella as the Italian version of bologna, seasoned with Italian spices and studded, mosaiclike, with pistachios and cubes of seasoned pork fat. Thinly sliced mortadella is delicious as part of an antipasto assortment or in a sandwich. Add the mortadella to the meat and vegetables when they’re fresh out of the oven: the steam coaxes the flavor out of the mortadella. To grind the meat-and-vegetable mixture, you can use a hand-cranked meat grinder or a grinder attachment for an electric mixer. In either case, choose a disc that is fine but not too fine. Although it isn’t absolutely necessary, when I have besciamella handy, I like to stir a little into the meat filling. It helps to bind it and adds a smooth texture. You can prepare this filling with a combination of beef, veal, and pork, or with leftover roasts, like turkey, pork, or beef. If you’re making this filling with leftover meat, reheat it by simmering it with its own gravy and the porcini-soaking liquid, the soaked porcini, and some vegetables, like diced onions and celery and shredded carrots. When the meat is warmed through and moist and the vegetables are tender, season them, add the remaining ingredients, and grind as above.

Panino Muffuletta There are so many versions of the muffuletta sandwich around New Orleans, but it seems that Central Grocery in the French Quarter is the place to go. The store is charming enough, but at the back counter, seated on a stool with a muffuletta sandwich in front of you, is where you want to be. We sat down across from a man who told us he'd had his first muffuletta sandwich here fifty years ago and came back regularly for more. Next to him were a couple who have been coming to Central Grocery to enjoy the muffuletta sandwich for more than forty years. We ordered one without any hesitation. The large hamburger bun-like bread was soaked significantly with the olive-oil dressing of the olive salad; then layers and layers of the salad and col cuts were added. The sandwich was cut in four and wrapped in parchment paper. It was ten in the morning, one would say time for breakfast, but the two of us savored the muffuletta sandwich as did all the other customers.

This sandwich is a favorite in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. It's a clever—and delicious—way to clean out the fridge.

If there isn't a salumi plate, it can't be a modern Italian restaurant. Chef Frank Bonanno at the Osteria Marco in Denver takes the trend one step further, adding house-made relish and fluffy fried dough.