large red onions
300ml red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
100ml extra-virgin olive oil
240g fine green beans
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan, plus extra for shavings
3 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52)
small bunch of chives, chopped
salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 220°C, gas 7. Leaving their skins on, wrap the onions in foil and bake in the oven for about 1 hour until soft.
While the onions are cooking, put the vinegar into a small pan and boil until reduced by about a third. Remove from the heat, stir in the sugar until dissolved, then stir in the extra-virgin olive oil to make a vinaigrette.
When the onions are cooked, unwrap them and peel off the skin. While they are still warm, cut them in half, separate the layers and season with salt and pepper, then put them into the vinaigrette.
Blanch the green beans in plenty of boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, then drain. Place in a bowl, sprinkle with the grated Parmesan and season with salt and pepper. Toss with the Shallot vinaigrette and sprinkle over the chives.
Arrange the onion layers on your serving plates. Place the beans on top and shave over some more Parmesan.
Insalata di fagiolini gialli, patate e tartufo Yellow bean, potato and black truffle salad
One day some lovely yellow beans came into the kitchen, fresh from the market, and I remembered something my grandmother used to make for me and my brother Roberto when we came home from school after the summer holidays. My grandfather grew yellow beans in our garden and he would leave them as long as possible over the summer, so they developed proper little fagioli, tiny beans, inside. The flavour was fantastic.
Each summer Roberto and I used to go away to a children’s holiday camp, then our parents would come and get us and we would go to Emilia Romagna or, later, Liguria for another few weeks. By the time we came home to Corgeno, three things were certain: we would have to go back to school, the maize would have grown as tall as Roberto and me, and the yellow beans would be ready. My grandmother used to boil them – not until al dente, like green beans, but for longer, so they were soft. Then she would boil some potatoes and break them down into a chunky mash – what has since been fashionably called ‘crushed’ potatoes. When we came in from school, she would heat up some butter in a pan, put in the potatoes and beans and cook them until the potatoes were a little crusty and burnt. Then she would break two eggs into the pan, to make a kind of frittata. I remember we would look for the little fagioli inside and pounce on them like prizes. So much of the food we ate when we were children seemed to be associated with little games.
So when, many years later, the yellow beans came into the kitchen at Locanda, that combination of beans and potatoes kept coming to mind. Of course we had to come up with something a little more refined, so we decided to bring in some black truffles – partly because they are in season at the same time as yellow beans and partly because the starchiness and sweetness of potato really support the flavour of black truffle, which is milder than the white truffle. To highlight the flavour of the truffle even more, and balance the sweet/sour/starchy elements, the salad also needs to be more vinegary than usual, so the vinegar has a real presence in the mouth. If you don’t have any truffles, you can still make a lovely salad – or, if you can find some good quality black truffle and mushroom paste in an Italian deli, add a tablespoon of it to the vinaigrette. In Italy, I would use the yellow Piacentine potatoes, which come from very sandy ground. They have a similar quality to the baby Jersey Royals that we use in London for this salad when they are in season.
8 medium-sized new potatoes
240g yellow beans
small bunch of chives, cut into batons about 4cm long
1 tablespoon freshly grated Parmesan
2 tablespoons Shallot vinaigrette (see page 52)
3 tablespoons Giorgio’s vinaigrette (see page 51)
60—70g fresh black truffle
salt and pepper
Cook the potatoes in their skins in boiling salted water until soft, then drain (it is always best to cook potatoes in their skins, to keep in as much flavour as possible). Peel them if you like (we do this in the restaurant, purely for the look of the salad, but at home I might not bother).
In a separate pan, cook the beans in boiling salted water for about 7-9 minutes, until they are slightly overcooked (both the beans and the potatoes should be warm for this salad, so try to make sure they are ready at around the same time). Drain and set aside.
Cut each potato into quarters lengthways and put them in a bowl with the beans and chives. Season, sprinkle with the Parmesan and toss first with the Shallot vinaigrette, then with Giorgio’s vinaigrette. The dressing should be quite sharp to bring out the flavour of the truffle, so add a little more vinegar if necessary.
Arrange the potatoes and beans on serving plates and, at the table at the last minute before serving, grate the black truffle over the top.
Insalata di asparagi e Parmigiano Asparagus salad with Parmesan
For one month of the year only – April – we get wonderful, early, thick white asparagus from Friuli in the Northeast of Italy, but otherwise we only make this dish when the green asparagus is in season from late April to mid-June. Such a short time, but an exciting one, especially in Italy. For ten months of the year you have no asparagus at all, then suddenly millions of kilos, then none again, so during this precious period there are large fairs in all the growing regions, with every restaurant serving asparagus. It is no good eating tasteless asparagus all year round, flown hundreds of miles from other countries – where is the magic in that?
Sometimes, especially in London hotels, I see restaurants using little asparagus tips to decorate a dish of something else entirely, such as meat or fish. I consider that an insult – a great misuse of a fantastic flavour. Asparagus should be the entire dish – a large portion served with eggs, Parmesan, butter, or a savoury zabaione made with white wine. That’s the way to eat asparagus.
Good, fresh asparagus should be firm. If you bend a spear in the shop or at the market when no one is looking, it should snap in the natural place just below halfway – if it simply bends and doesn’t snap, then it isn’t fresh. Some people also say that only really fresh asparagus will squeak if you rub the spears together.
It is best to use a griddle pan for this recipe – or you could grill the spears on a barbecue. However, if you prefer to blanch your asparagus, divide it into bunches of five or six spears and tie with string, to prevent the tips getting bashed and broken. Then stand the bundles in a tall pan of boiling salted water, keeping the tips above the water so they will steam gently thanks to the heat below and the flavour will be stronger.
Often people say that once the asparagus is cooked you should plunge it into iced water to stop it cooking further, but I think it is better to take the spears out of the water about a minute before