December 11-17, 2003

cover story

Fruits of the Season

BOWL FOODS: Oranges, Bosc pears, heirloom apples and black walnuts find their way into Stephanie and John Reitano’s wintertime gelato and sorbetto. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

City chefs ripen their winter cooking with the bounty of the local harvest.

by Jenn Carbin

The holiday season, which means late fall through the first weeks of winter for those of us on the East Coast, is an interesting time for local food businesses.

Some offer such standards as game or goose, others put twists on old ideas and still others re-create seasonal, ethnic tastes unfamiliar to many of us. With modern access to networks of local, rural farmers and in-season produce from other parts of the world sometimes brought in to brighten up plates, the bottom line is this: Options go beyond the more typical deep flavors and rib-sticking dishes of winter.

Fall is the traditional harvest season for the Northeastern U.S. There’s a bounty: game, root vegetables, red and yellow onions, fennel, sweet potatoes, squash, Brussels sprouts, arugula, kale, pears, cranberries.

This time of year gives many chefs the chance to reach for something new, whether fresh or warming: Stephanie Reitano of Capogiro Gelato Artisans combines local cranberries and heirloom apples to make a sparkling sorbetto; Sean Weinberg of Rose Tattoo whips up an Italian-style pasta filled with sweet winter squash; Django’s chef, Bryan Sikora, balances rich regional tastes with warm-climate fruits; and Kevin Couch of the Main Line’s Spezia makes cranberry and pistachio bread pudding.

Weinberg has been chef at the Rose Tattoo for four years. This holiday season, he is offering an appetizer of seared sea scallops with an apple puree made from six types of heirloom apples; the fruit comes from an orchard north of Allentown, near a friend’s mountain house.

He got major schooling in cooking with on-hand, seasonal ingredients during two years he spent living in and traveling through Italy in the early ’90s. He spent eight months in the Piedmont region, in the foothills of the Alps, where he cooked for his room and board.

Typifying this time of year for Weinberg is a dish that uses agnolotti, a tortellini-like Piedmontese pasta that he keeps on the menu as both an appetizer and an entree, with one filling or another, as a tribute to the people who embraced him and taught him about food and regional flavors. His use of regional ingredients is arguably the best way to pay tribute to his Italian teachers.

In spring he might fill agnolotti with green garlic ("the first thing up from the ground") and his house-made ricotta cheese. In coldest January and February, he’ll probably fill it with braised beef and vegetables.

Now, as fall gives way to winter, Weinberg fills the small pasta with pumpkin, kabocha, butternut squash and ricotta. Sweeter pasta fillings such as squash are traditional in some regions of Italy, as are sweet toppings. In this fall-winter rendition, he sprinkles amaretti, Italian almond macaroons that are traditional for the holidays, on the pasta just before serving.

The squash and pumpkin are seeded and roasted, seasoned with salt and pepper, then whipped into a puree, cooked over low heat and gradually mixed with the ricotta.

The filled pasta is sauteed in brown butter; sage and grated amaretti cookie top the agnolotti once it's out of the saute pan. As for the sage, "it reflects fall and cold weather and works well with brown butter. And it's very, very traditional," Weinberg says.

Stephanie Reitano of Capogiro has learned, through Italians -- including her husband, John, and his family -- and her own quick-study dedication, the art of making first-class gelato and sorbetto, Italian interpretations of ice cream and sorbet. Though she uses ingredients from outside the Northeast (mangoes, blood oranges, Saigon cinnamon) for some of her flavors, her enthusiasm for, and commitment to, Pennsylvania and New Jersey ingredients is obvious.

Reitano dreamily describes the earthy taste and slight bitterness of black walnuts. She purchases shelled hickory nuts from a Pennsylvania purveyor and pounds them into a paste to make one of her richer flavors. Fruit that doesn't possess vine-ripe flavor or natural, dramatic color gets rejected; milk comes from a Lancaster farmer and his grass-fed, hormone-free cows.

The flavors she picks, even within seasons, change according to what she deems most exceptional. She is currently putting to use sweet potatoes, pumpkin, pears, heirloom apples and quince, in addition to tropical fruits and other year-round ingredients.

A gelato or sorbetto takes only seven to 10 minutes to come together once in the machine Capogiro imported from Italy, but assembling, peeling, seeding, chopping, cooking and otherwise prepping the ingredients takes hours. Reitano says everything in the store is made every day (very few can be used the next day by mixing them with fresh batches). On a recent overcast day, Reitano has started her chestnut gelato, but says "it won’t be ready for three days."

She has cooked a batch of chestnuts slightly; over the course of the next few days she’ll let the nuts soak in sugar, water, spices and vanilla beans in a heat-up/cool-down process that will leave the "fruit" very tender and translucent. In a separate process, she’ll cook chestnuts until they fall apart; then she’ll create a milk and chestnut paste with them. The paste and the "candied" chestnuts will be blended into the final gelato.

The flavors at Capogiro are a surprise, particularly for those accustomed to commercial ice cream. The hickory nut gelato, though rich and buttery, tastes like a truer, cleaner, lighter butter pecan ice cream. (Pecans come from a variety of hickory tree.) "Pear wild turkey" sorbetto has a creamy color, a fresh, almost overwhelming pear taste and a slight tang from the whiskey. Pumpkin gelato is rich and deep-flavored, with some spice and seemingly none of the fatty ingredients of your favorite pie. The "baked apple" has a buttery bakedness that sneaks up on you in the finish. "Clean" is the word that keeps coming to mind, and Reitano says that's right.

She explains that in addition to the ingredients, there are three reasons the flavors of her gelato are so spectacular when compared with ice cream, reasons that describe what makes any good gelato a taste experience. There is less fat in gelato, which means there is less fat to coat the tongue and interfere with the main flavors; gelato is kept at a higher temperature than ice cream, which releases more flavor; and it has a greater density than most ice cream. Capogiro's product has air whipped into it at a proportion of only 20 percent, sometimes less; ice cream can be 50 percent air.

Goose is traditional Christmas fare in many European countries; in these parts, it's unusual.

Aimee Olexy, who co-owns Django with her husband, chef Bryan Sikora, says since they put goose on the menu in the middle of November, it’s often been the best-selling entree. A confit of braised breast and leg, the goose is served with white corn polenta, shiitake ("forest") mushrooms and a goose sauce with crispy shallots.

"If ever there was a time when guests have a little more willingness to indulge, it's now," Olexy explains. "Preparations tend to sweetness and more decadent ingredients."

Kevin Couch of Spezia would likely agree: He's

working with confit, pearl barley, turnips and lots of game. He serves braised savoy cabbage and juniper-accented chestnuts with venison, and looks to maybe adding a beef-cheek stew to the menu as the winter really kicks in.

Goose, a very fatty bird available fresh from early summer through December, has "succulent, sticky meat," even more so than duck, Olexy points out. Django uses a Canadian variety of goose, from either Pennsylvania or a free-range duck farm in New York’s Hudson Valley.

The menu also includes game meats. Olexy describes her process of following the seasons and following intuition as basically the same thing. "Rich, iron-y" venison, for example, is appropriate to the current menu because it's the kind of thing people crave to sustain themselves now. "Your body gets ready for that this time of year," she says. Referring to Django's venison dish, which consists of an herb-roasted loin with whipped potatoes, pickled turnips, port sauce and a foie gras-and-date "parfait," she says, "I can't imagine having port sauce or venison in the summer."

On the current menu, cider figures in a sauce; pomegranate seeds are sprinkled on a cheese plate. There’s a game tart, filled with boar, squab, venison and pearl onions and served with a celeriac, or celery root, salad.

Olexy mentions that salt fishes are "characteristic of the season," and baccal• is often part of the "seven fishes" Christmas Eve feast of Italian Americans. There are salt-cod fritters in the saffron mussel bisque. "We like to hit home with people’s memories," she says.

As a final touch, Django is offering a warm lobster salad with fresh noodles, celeriac, baby arugula and toasted capers in a lobster vinaigrette.

"A lot of people think of lobster more in the summer; I think of it more in the winter," Olexy says. That's when, according to her, the meat is particularly firm and has a "clean flavor."

Olexy doesn't mean to make things sound complicated. She laughs, "People constantly ask what we eat during the holidays." She tells them: for Thanksgiving, "sweet potatoes with marshmallows. Low-country American foods. Christmas is Bryan's family -- cabbage ham."