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SUPPER: Who likes anchovies?
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
SUPPER: Who likes anchovies?
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Seems like no one wants to give anchovies any love, at least not in public. What do you want on your pizza? Anything but anchovies. Why don't you like anchovies? Eww, salty stinky little fish! Raise your hand if you can't stand anchovies but just adore the boquerones at Amada. Guess what they are? Some super-boutique, marinated, salty little fish, that's what.
The good news: the ever-helpful Brothers Di Bruno and Claudio King of Cheese sell neat little fillets of Spanish white anchovies; cleaned, marinated, and free of bones, guts, fishy aromas and anything else that might offend delicate sensibilities. Not that I'm sneering. I've been skeeved on foreign fish since I was old enough to say "Not anchovies!" on my pizza. Only in the last few years have anchovies and I made a nodding acquaintance. You can't write about food, and go to restaurants 300 times a year, without biting into a few things you secretly fear.
That's why gentle, marinated anchovy fillets (boquerones) are a friendly introduction to the world of small, oily and delicious for the fish fearful. True of both boquerones and the hot Spanish transfer student in your high school: an empty wallet gets you nowhere. At Di Bruno Bros., white anchovies are $49.99 a pound. You only need about ten dollars' worth to cook with to create a satisfying meal for four, or an appetizer for the gang.
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Some boquerones-purist will howl over me putting the fancy fish on a pizza, but tough calamari. You eat what you like, and I'll profane my expensive ingredients any way I see fit.
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| Proof dough in a warm place. |
| Photo l Felicia D'Ambrosio |
Mitch Mandell's Pizza Dough is one of the easiest and most reliable dough recipes and pizza-making methods around — he includes instructions for making a basic yeast-raised dough in a food processor, stand mixer, bread machine or by hand. As Mitch says, dough making ain't brain surgery — but there are as many ways to screw it up as there are foodies cruising the Internet. Follow the directions, measure carefully, and make sure your dough has a warm place to rise. The pilot light of a gas-fired oven will keep the oven warm enough for the dough to come alive. Lacking that, I put my covered bowl of dough a few feet away from the space heater and it perked up nicely. Adaptation is the key to dinner.
After rolling out the dough, I dressed it with some good extra-virgin olive oil, ricotta cheese, sea salt, herbs and a small school of anchovies; then into a 500-degree oven on the pizza stone for just a few minutes. It tasted amazing, and the omega-3 rich, low-mercury little swimmers are ideal "brain food" — check out this Telegraph.uk article on eating oily fish.
The Mitch Mandell recipe yields a healthy quantity of dough, perhaps five personal-sized pizzas or two bigger pies. I took a shot at rolling the dough very thinly and pinching it around individual anchovy fillets. These got a sprinkle of sea salt and just a minute in the oven, and there you have some boquerone empanadas. Some were super oily and came open in the oven. They tasted lovely anyway, and should please many a fishy foodie as an amuse bouche.
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