Holiday season with sparkling wines |
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The end of the year, already! We are looking forward to spending the holidays together and honoring some of our family traditions. One of our favorites is a Christmas eve toast to end the season of Advent and then to begin celebrating Christmas, which in our family lasts a good 12 days!! It is not for the weak as we have nightly dinners with great food and copious amounts of wines, lots of game playing, caroling around the piano and movie watching!
Nothing says festive and celebrating like a few bubbles in your glass. This month we’ll uncover sparkling wines from Italy, spumante in Italian. As much as we love a good prosecco, Italy also produces sparkling wines made in the classic method (metodo classico) that is also used to make champagne. During our tours in northern Italy, we visit several wineries that make delicious classic spumante.
In our family we always had fish on Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t the “Feast of the 7 fishes”. Most likely because our Grandparents were from mountainous areas, far from the sea. But also, it is more of an Italian American invention, cuz in America, why have only one fish when you can have seven! For our Christmas day celebration, we’re doing an old family favorite: a crown pork roast with chestnut stuffing. The recipe is below, and Gina will post the ‘how to’ on her blog.
We’ve been busy planning our 2022 and 2023 tours. There are just a few spots left for the spring tours. Are you ready to go? We’re more than ready to get going again! Check out the dates below. Or our website here: EccoLaCucina.com
We wish you all a very happy holiday season and may your new year be filled with joy, peace and love.
Buon appetito!
Gina and Mary
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Roast Pork with Chestnut Stuffing |
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Pork Rib Roast with Chestnut, Fennel & Prune stuffing
Pork rib roasts are so festive and delicious at Christmastime, full of flavor and beautiful to present at table. We stuff ours with chestnuts, prunes and fennel and tie it up with kitchen twine to cook. The roasts come with 8 ribs, perfect for 6-8 people. For a large group, get two and tie them together to form a crown of roast pork, with the stuffing in the middle of the crown. (Check out YouTube to see how to do that!)
Rib roast of pork, 8 ribs
½ onion, chopped
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp olive oil
½ bulb fennel, chopped
8-10 chestnuts, chopped
8 prunes, chopped
2 tbsp fresh parsley, minced
Sea salt and pepper
2 cups fresh bread crumbs (cut the crust off a loaf of bread and put it through a food processor)
Saute the onion in the butter and olive oil until softened, add the chopped fennel and continue to saute two minutes. Put the mixture in a bowl together with the bread crumbs, parsley, chestnuts and prunes; season with salt and pepper. Add a little olive oil until the mixture will hold together.
Dry off the roast and lay it ribs side up on a cutting board. At the base of each rib will be a little “button” of bone, cut each little bone nub out and discard. This makes it easier when carving the roast to serve. With a butcher knife, you are going to make a place in the loin to put the stuffing, then roll it back up and tie it between each rib with kitchen twine. To do that, carefully slice the pork loin about 1” under the ribs, unrolling the meat and slicing to butterfly it. The meat should never be less than 1” thick. Press the stuffing on the inside of the cut loin, leaving an inch at the end of the loin on the far end away from the ribs.
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Buon Natale - Buon capodanno - Auguri
Merry Christmas - "Good head of the year or Good New Year!" and
Good wishes!
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Italian Sparkling Wines for the Holidays
Nothing says Holiday like a glass of bubbly and Italy abounds with spumante, which is simply the Italian word for sparkling wine.
There are two ways to make a sparkling wine: the traditional method and the tank method. One is time-consuming and labor-intensive; the other is less so and done on a volume basis. In both methods the grapes are picked by hand and fermented into a still wine.
With the traditional method, most famously used in France to make champagne, the still wine is bottled with a small amount of yeast and sugar to ferment a second time. The wine is riddled by quarter-turning the bottles, then the lees, or yeast remains, are disgorged and the bottle is recorked. This complicated method is becoming more and more popular in wineries all over Italy, but historically the area around Asti in Piedmont and Franciacorta area in Lombardy are most famous for these wines.
In the production of the tank method, all the wine is put into a sealed tank along with sugar and yeast, to begin the second fermentation. Once the desired level of carbon dioxide is reached, the wine is filtered and bottled under pressure. This is the method used to make prosecco, asti spumante dolce, Lambrusco and a myriad of other Italian sparklers.
Salute! Cin-Cin! Cheers!
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We are excited to be back in Italy and looking forward to our tours next spring and fall! Join us for a week filled with delicious foods and regional wines. You'll learn a lot and have a great time, just leave the details to us!
We have good availability in the spring for both Piedmont (May 24 - 31 & June 1-8) and Tuscany (June 11-18) and in the fall for Tuscany (October 8- 15 and October 15 -22) and some spots left in Puglia (call or email Mary).
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Plus learn a thing or two! |
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Gina Stipo and Mary Stipo Potter | Ecco La Cucina | 1-972-342-8308| Email | Website
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