It seems more a well researched article on whatever Italian bakery is available abroad, but certainly not a realistic description of Italian food variety.
Being Italian, it's always a bit funny to see Italian food being described from outside. The article is missing some important points about Italian bakery. In Italy you can find "panifici", which sell both savoury and sweet baked products, from pizza to bread to biscotti and other sweet non-refrigerated cakes. You can also find "pasticcerie", which sell only sweet products, both baked, frozen and semifrozen, from cakes to pastries to meringata. Finally you can find "gelaterie" which sell mostly ice-cream based product, but also other frozen and semi-frozen products. The selection given, thus, is misleading because it's leaving out a huge selection of similar products which are majorly important in Italian cuisine, starting with gelato based treats.
Furthermore, Italian cuisine is strongly regional. Bakery in Naples is completely different from bakery in Genoa or Venice. The article presents a subset of items from some of these regions, but is in no way a complete or realistic description of what one can find in Italian bakeries. Some examples here (this is really a tiny subset!): http://www.dissapore.com/grande-notizia/i-migliori-pani-ital...
I understand the article doesn't claim completeness, but they are presenting a glass of water and calling it a sea.
For what it's worth, this article is probably better titled "the Italian-American Bakery Explained"; over the last century and a half Italian-American culture has evolved in to something with roots in, but distinct and different from, the culture of Italy itself. It's largely based on the culture of Sicily and the South, since that's where so many Italian immigrants came from, but years and years in America have shifted it in to a sort of separate culture. It's especially telling that this is from a New Jersey-focused website, since NJ is one of the epicenters of Italian-American culture in the US.
I'm a fourth-generation Italian-American myself, and I've recently been learning Italian and gotten interested in geneology and tracing the cultural roots of my family. It's really interesting to see how true Italian culture is similar to what I grew up with, but also very different.
In fairness to the author, "Italian bakery" does not necessarily denote a bakery in Italy. I mean a bakery in Italy is just a bakery: in ordinary conversation two Romans would not normally apply an adjective indicating 'Italian' when describing an ordinary bakery located in Rome.
'Italian' is generally useful (and hence used) when it distinguishes between bakeries and the common context for 'Italian bakery' is in places like New Jersey where it is likely to clarify what a person is talking about.
Perhaps there's an analogy in that 'Italian American' is often useful and 'Italian Italian' probably less so. Or perhaps not.
It's a regional news outlet, writing an article about regional businesses. There is literally nobody within 300 miles of Newark (a region of about 100M people) interested in the topic who doesn't know what they are referring to.
Calling anything "Italian" would be equally parochial, as Naples, Milan, Sicily, etc have broad differences in cuisine and culture.
This is actually the common usage. I've never heard anybody say they're going out to an American-Italian restaurant.
Along the same lines, when I tell my friends that I'm going to a Chinese restaurant, they know exactly what I mean. And no, it doesn't mean I'm taking the next flight out to Shanghai to eat.
I live in the Boston area and I most definitely say "Chinese-American" when discussing potential restaurants. For example if my friend asked about Mary Chung's in Cambridge, that's Chinese-American, where as the Shanghai Gate in Alston is Shanghainese. Of course I don't always know. I also would refer to pizza/sub shops that are everywhere around here as Italian-American if someone asked, as opposed to the upscale places in the North End. I may be wrong about my labels, but I do use them.
The same pattern is observed in other countries. In India, a Chinese restaurant will typically serve Indian Chinese cuisine rather than Chinese cuisine as it is eaten in China.
Do you think somebody reading nj.com is really likely to be confused about what country the restaurants being discussed are in? This is like complaining about a US newscast referring to "our nation's capital" because every country has a different capital.
I find a lot of Europeans - particularly Irish - to get unduly upset when Americans use the term "Irish" to mean "Irish American". Sometimes it gets downright childish, ie "you're not really Irish we are!".
9/10 they aren't using it to mean 'Irish American' though. Many, many Americans I know and have met claim to be 'Irish' despite they and their parents never having set foot in the place and they genuinely mean they are of Irish nationality. Sure it can be used as shorthand for 'Irish American' but that's generally not what is meant (in my experience). Ireland's diaspora is more than 10x the country's population so it's definitely not something we rebel against or dislike. There are LOTS of people abroad who can rightly claim to be Irish. When you claim it with virtually no actual ties to the country mainly so you can try to claim some stereotype it's irritating. Irish people are generally pretty proud of our American links and contributions. "you're not really Irish we are!" is not a thing.
Of course they mean Irish American. What else could they mean? I don't think the Irish (in Ireland) are even on the radar. There's a real misunderstanding Europeans have of the European diaspora in general - they think they can understand it in the context of still being in Europe, but you can't.
Thanks for an interesting read about Italian bakeries! I do feel compelled to point out, though, that an "Italian bakery" is a very specific, regional thing easily recognized by the readers of this local newspaper. If the term were a little more honest it would be called an "Italian American" bakery, and as a visitor and native Italian you would find quite a bit more to take issue with than the selection! What is undeniable though, is how delicious and truly special the cookies are at a good Italian bakery. Some of the best things I've ever eaten are from Gencarelli's Bakery in Bloomfield NJ.
I think it's important to keep in mind that this is NJ.com (I used to work there!) and their audience (people in New Jersey) is very well defined. Their audience knows exactly what the article is talking about. Every once in a while they have a breakout article like this. They're closely associated with Newark and the Star-Ledger, and I wouldn't be shocked to learn out that the article was tailored to spur discussion over the merits of Italian vs. Portuguese bakeries Since Newark has a large, and more recent, Portuguese-American population.
I think when they say "Italian" "Italian-American" is implied. After all, the author describes himself as "Italian" and these are all the foods I'd expect to see in an "Italian bakery" in the United States.
Ha, this, and not just this but what Italian bakery are you likely to find gelatto and tiramisu in? I think maybe the author has only been to Battale's Eataly in NYC, which is more like "open floor Italian-ish gourmet market" than a bakery.
replace 'italian' in your post with chinese, french, american bbq, new californian, brazilian, arab, mexican, etc, etc, etc.
but of course, the cuisine you understand the most personally is the one that is most persecuted, right? the one that everyone gets wrong, because it's so nuanced and special, more special than anyone else's cuisine, because don't you see, italians invented civilized cuisine, you heathen?
welcome to how the world interprets regional/national cuisine. it's all wrong. none of it is correct, because it is a foreign understanding. italy is not special in this regard.
I never spoke about persecution, and having lived half my life abroad (France, Singapore, Portugal and UK) I know pretty well multiple cuisines and I do appreciate them. I did not post the above lacking understanding of how different cuisines have different stories to tell. However I do feel that your comment is just a dismissal based on a partial understanding of my previous post.
Italy is particularly interesting for being regional and so is India, for example. Chinese cuisine I would not even call regional so far apart are the different cooking styles.
French cuisine is also regional but way more uniform than Italian cooking.
Keep in mind that Italy has not been a united country for long at all, and for example people from different regions speak different languages (there are 4 official languages in Italy, but probably at least a dozen spoken recognized languages such as Friulano, Sardo, etc.). Many of our grandparents (if not parents) did not speak Italian as a first language, that came about starting from the 50's with national television and internal migration.
So you can imagine that traditions and cooking are completely different from place to place. For the same reason there are hundreds of types of pasta for example.
>(there are 4 official languages in Italy, but probably at least a dozen spoken recognized languages such as Friulano, Sardo, etc.)
There is only one "official" language (Italian) since 1861.
Each region has its own dialect, that may (or may not) be either very similar to italian or very different from it, that makes more than 12.
You are right that until the '50's and even later, the whole 60's for a large part of the population Italian was a "second language", television started broadcasting in 1954 but it was a "luxury" item and had some diffusion only in the second half of the 60's
German, French and Slovenian are "official" languages in the sense that there are areas where these languages are used by local governments together with Italian. Eg in the Bolzano/Bozen province you can deal with most institutions in German.
Besides Italian, there are 12 officially recognized languages (Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian), four of which are co-official languages (French in Val d'Aosta, Ladin and German in South Tyrol and Slovene in Friuli).
Officially recognized languages can be taught in schools for example, along with Italian. Co-official languages enjoy equal status with Italian, all road signs are bilingual, all official state material is bilinugal, etc.
There is only one official language, Italian and 12 minorities which cultures and languages are officially "protected" or "safeguarded".
That is the essence of the Law 482/99 you cited.
In two border regions (namely Trentino Alto Adige for German and Val d'Aosta for French) the population speaking the "other" language is so vast that there are special provisions that make those regions "bilingual", but in Friuli Slovenian is spoken by a minority and has much less relevance.
Albanian, Catalan, Greek, etc. are spoken by very small commmunities (still coming from the original country where the language is spoken) that "immigrated" in Italy centuries ago, and often they diverge from the "original".
Sardinian is instead a "self-standing dialect", a local historical language of the island, that is "protected", but nothing more (you don't have official state documents written in Sardinian, nor official signs, etc.).
The "tower of babel" (that was a problem in the past) did not came however from those "foreign" languages, after all Italy has century old tradition of trading with France, Germany, etc., but rather from the dialects, and from the lack of schooling/education.
Dialects are local and independent from other European languages (though of course they may well have been influenced from them (take the dialects of Sicily as an example) you can find in it words that clearly come from Spanish or French (or even Arabic).
The people that immigrated to the US obviously largely came from the poorest (and most isolated) regions and the dialect they spoke had very little in common with Italian, a large number of those people couldn't read or write (at least not properly) in Italian and for tens of years, they had no or little contacts with Italy, it is only too normal that words changed in the meantime.
> Italy is particularly interesting for being regional and so is India, for example. Chinese cuisine I would not even call regional so far apart are the different cooking styles.
This separation of cuisines is absolutely true for India as well. Some of the same ingredients are used due to geography with very different spices and preparations.
I don't think that parent wanted to be pretentious, as an Italian I was confused by the article too, then I realized that it's a description of the italian sweets that you can find in a certain part of the US.
It seems natural to me that someone would try to skew the usually US-centric view of HN by stating their experience.
> Does anyone make better cookies, pastries and desserts overall than the Italians? We don't think so! And bread? Please.
Yes: the French make better bread, cookies, pastries and desserts. French bakeries are just so good.
I am not a self hating Italian: Italian cuisine is vastly superior to French cuisine (really overrated!); Italian wine is on par (if not better) than French wine. But French bread, pastry and desserts just win. Like: hands down. They are just so much better.
I am in Paris since 2012, and I am not yet tired of buying bread every morning: the smell of fresh bread in the morning is like heaven... Nothing is quite like a good French croissant, or croissant aux amandes, or...
The quality of Italians bakeries and pastries is not even half of the French ones. I ignore why Italians totally lack of a "culture" of bread... we can do so much better.
Meanwhile, as a Norwegian, the notion that Italians or the French make 'good' bread is hard to swallow. That's probably what most of us miss when we go further abroad than North Europe - decent non-white bread to eat for breakfast. (citation needed). However, this is probably mostly due to the differences in what we expect good bread to be..
As a Swede I'm quite confused about what you're trying to say.
I guess the benefit of (what I guess is the kind of bread you are talking about) is that it can be stored quite easily and last for a month or two in room temperature.
I am talking about what is here in general referred to as 'grovbrød' as opposed to what is here in general referred to as 'loff'. Loff can be good, but to many it feels substance-less, especially for breakfast.
Ah. Not sure what name that has in Sweden (I think just: "Fullkornsbröd"), but having worked at a Norwegian company (or three) I did experience that kind of bread in their Oslo-based company canteen many times over the years (during my 40 visits or so). It's really good with Nutella. :)
But really.. I think this all comes down to the fact that there are a lot of different ways to make bread around the world. In a way I think it's good that not every taste/texture combination is readily available everywhere - it makes travelling so much more interesting.
When I was living in Switzerland, my biggest woe was that all of the bread seemed to be white, or sweet. I could find no good simple grainy brown bread, like at home in Ireland.
One of my joys of moving to Norway is the selection of good, fresh bread available. I've been here a few years and still find the in-store bread slicers odd. Some of it took some getting used to with my American palette - I suppose I could get the fluffy stuff, but I refuse. Weirdly, however, I rarely buy the stuff as I developed a habit of simply making bread daily.
you can find dark/black bread (not that white American/English sweet sponge) in most of continental Europe, especially in countries influenced by German and Russian cuisine
It's interesting to note the relationships different nations/cultures have to bread.
For example, a lot of bread (French, Italian, Turkish), while tasty enough, is very dainty compared to the rough, rustic, whole-grain stuff we eat in Scandinavia:
In Norway, where I'm from, supermarkets carry a couple of types of white bread (refined, processed wheat), which is no longer popular. And even in the tiniest grocery stores, almost all breads were made fresh the same day.
This comes from tradition, but also from government guidelines that have always held whole-grain flour to be healthier than the more refined kinds, as is other kinds of wholesome, unrefined, down-to-earth stuff.
Meanwhile, in NYC, where I live, it's difficult to find fresh bread that isn't just white bread. The shelves are bulging with dozens of types of plastic-wrapped, pre-sliced, mass-produced, mind-numbingly boring bread with long shelf lives and containing preservatives and even sugar (!) or high-fructose corn syrup (!).
I am from Rome, I lived in France for more than 5 years and now I'm back in Italy.
Southern Italian bread is good, provided you like the 2-3 types made your area, which usually means some variation of casereccio. Oh and also choose the right bakery. If you want something with more cereals, maybe dark bread you're basically fucked.
In France 80% of bakeries are decent, it's really like coffee for us. In Italy you can eat good bread, but we don't hold bakeries to the standards we expect from cafés.
> If you want something with more cereals, maybe dark bread you're basically fucked.
Yep, if you want non-Italian bread in Italy you're fucked, that's right.
It's like eating sushi at the all you can eat restaurant run by Chinese.
Anyway, I don't want to defend Italian bread more than necessary, but we basically don't eat bread, we use bread like asians use rice, to eat something together with bread.
There are plenty of options if you don't want bread, from pizza to focaccia, from farinata to roll pastry etc. etc. etc.
> which usually means some variation of casereccio
This is an exaggeration.
It's true that most of Italy is made by small cities if not villages, where variety is minimal, but put them together and you made one of the most diverse food ecosystem in existence.
All I'm saying is that if you think about it. If somebody asks you where to buy good bread, you probably have an opinion. If somebody asks you where to have a good espresso or a simple pasta dish, you probably know one place where where it's excellent, but expect it to be good everywhere. With bread it's different.
As an Italian-American, who lived both in the US and in Northern Italy, please do not try the bread in the US. It is not even comparable to northern Italian bread. And the author is from the east coast, which has more of a European presence. The bread on the west coast (California), is even worse.
One of the biggest shocks for me when I moved from the east coast to the west was the decline in quality of bread in supermarkets. Strangely, a lot of people, even other east coasters who moved west, don't seem to believe me when I say this, or don't have the same complaint.
Things have been slowly improving in the past couple of years, new bakeries are opening, EXPO had its effects, but we're still talking about small niches and not the typical Italian bread, it's more all grain, cereal, black, whatever is popular abroad.
For example in Milan it is impossible to find good (not even great, just good) michette (that we call rosette in Rome) even if they were invented in Lombardy.
Americans always used to have the highest regard for French cuisine (hence its popularity with celebrity chefs like James Beard and Julia Child, and in famous fine dining establishments like NYC's Waldorf and Ritz-Carlton hotels), until roughly the release of The Godfather in 1972, which caused a boom in interest in Italian-American culture, including Italian cuisine, which is nowadays by far the most popular here.
If French cuisine is known as the best cuisine it's because of its gastronomy and its high-end restaurants!
However when going to "regular" restaurants, Italy is simply the best.
Well... it's a matter of opinion, I guess, but give me biscotti regina and pizzelle any day.
e: Also I think where you said "ignore" you meant "don't know," because in English "ignore" can only mean "to not pay attention to" but the alternate meaning of the French word "ignorer" fits better with your sentence.
De Gustibus, I prefer unsalted bread thick crusted, wood fired.
I'm not sure it's because of eating with salty stuff, cause bread with marmalade, hard chocolate, or chocolate spreads is absolutely common throughout italy, both where bread is salty and where it isn't.
It's probably true that bread in Italy is not designed as something you eat alone, which is why it's very plain compared to, say, Polish or German recipes.
> It's probably true that bread in Italy is not designed as something you eat alone, which is why it's very plain compared to, say, Polish or German recipes.
Which breads, pastries, and desserts do you think make good examples of French superiority? I'd like to give some of them a try.
IMO both countries have excellent bread. Its just an opinion, but I think that Tiramisu is not only the best dessert, but also the best food on the planet.
i am from continental Europe and by my memory best bread I ate was in Turkey, while I have great memories about Filipino cakes available from small bakeries on every corner almost for free, was seriously addicted to them when traveling in Philippines
people defending their own cuisine are usually people who haven't traveled enough to compare
i am also always amazed for instance by popularity of Thai cuisine while personally I find Malay cuisine superior if I had to decide what to eat for rest of my life and consider Georgetown food capital of world (though I haven't visited that many destinations, so take this with grain of salt)
The irony is that traditionally made ciabatta or france baguett is not white. If you put in just a little yeast, put it in a coldplace, and let it slowly grow over night- then and only then you get the real thing. Anything you can order on the same day is just not the real thing. A good baker needs a day for this and will tell you.
Note that these are Italian bakeries in New Jersey, not bakeries in Italy.
Having spent this past autumn in Italy (Rome and Florence) I can say that the average Italian bakery has a lot of the cookies/pastries in the first picture and little to none of the more exotic (read: absolutely delicious looking) desserts presented here. They also tend to double as pizza shops. Basically, less refined, the pictured desserts seem more restaurant quality.
I wasn't spending much time in the chique areas, however, so maybe (high end) Italian bakeries do in fact deliver such mouth watering delicacies ;-)
Have cut way down on sugar the last month or so, there's a feeling to eat the photographs...
>"Note that these are Italian bakeries in New Jersey, not bakeries in Italy."
Indeed, these are not not places where you go for breads they are Italian- American Pasticcerias(they tend to be in the Northeast of the US - NJ, NYC, Boston etc.) You go to these for a coffee, some cheesecake and conversation or for a box of takeout pastries. Most of them don't even sell regular bread just sweets. You could probably write a separate article on Italian bakeries in the Northeastern US though.
when I lived in Italy I would always scour a new city for what my friends and I referred to as secret bakeries
one night we closed the bars and were walking home past santa croce in firenze
it was nearly 5am and we suddenly could smell sweet pastries in the air
literally following our noses we wound through labyrinthine alleyways until we came across an halfway open garage door
looking in, the garage was full of industrial ovens and wheeled racks full of newly baked pastries prepped to fill the glass counters of every bakery and coffee shop around the city
we got an employees attention and politely asked to buy one of those fresh, warm, straight out the oven pastries
the bakers were happy to sell us any of the pastries all for one euro each
the first time was a magical experience and now i'm always sure to take a night to walk the streets of any italian city at 5am looking for a secret bakery baking the fresh pastries before they are sent out into the city
it was a fun moniker my friends and i gave these garage bakeries
the secret is more about the unpublished locations and less about the idea of it.. would you prefer the use of 'silent bakery'?
though one such 'secret bakery' may produce the pastries listed in the article i think this open door discovery is more closely tied to the culture of italy, you may be hard pressed to walk through residential areas of nj and find a silent bakery but give it a try and report back if you find some secret spot to get these pastries straight from the ovens
the anecdote is just a fun thing this article reminded me of
I won't argue with the other names (although some sound quite wrong to my northern-italian ear), but I'm 100% positive that no Italian would call it "pannetone": it's "panettone", ("giant bread" or something like that).
Now we can start the big debate for deciding whether the true one is panettone with just raisins or panettone with raisins and "canditi".
Boy, do we love to talk about food... and we're generally quite picky about it although I agree with other commenters: we need to learn from other countries the pleasures of brown bread.
Just start considering NJ the 21st Italian region. Spaghetti with meatballs and chicken parm are certainly things you never see in Italy, but are considered a staple of Italian cuisine in the US.
The other thing which is weird is how a lot of these specialities are very regional: I wouldn't know a place that makes good panettone also makes good sfogliatelle or cannoli.
It's not that those foods aren't found in Italy, they're mostly just not found served like they are here. Spaghetti with meatballs exists, it's just that you'd have spaghetti usually first. Meatballs here are simplistically polpette al sugo there, and would be eaten as a meat course after the pasta.
Chicken parm is one too many ingredients slammed together. You have chicken cutlets there for sure. It would usually (but not always) be eaten more simply than with sauce and cheese on it, and not served over or next to pasta like here.
A lot of that is also more distant generation Italian-American. My parents, who are from different regions of Italy, and my grandparents, one of whom grew up in Italian Africa, didn't really make this stuff. Not to say it isn't good, I just think it's been changed to fit the US in two big ways - first, that meat (and food generally) is cheaper here, so we eat a lot more meat; and second, everything on one plate, since IMHO Americans want to eat faster than Italians would.
Polpettine are different than the Italian-American meatballs that you'll find over here. Much smaller, and one bite in with the pasta. American polpette are more like polpette Napoletane (and for good reason, that's who brought them here) and quite often even larger than that. You have to cut them to eat them, even if it's just with a fork. Too big, in my opinion, to eat with pasta. I serve them as secondo.
You are also assuming that Italian cuisine didn't evolve in the past century. Even the most famous Italian dish: pizza margherita is not 150 years old. There are very common dishes nowadays, for example carpaccio, that pare post-ww2 inventions.
Did you know that Quebecois French is closer to old French than proper French French? Can you safely say it isn't us who have evolved and Italo-Americans who have stayed the same?
No, I think that both Italian and Italian-American cooking have evolved over that time. Italian-American cooking isn't a snapshot of early century southern Italy, and neither is a given Italian region a snapshot of its past. Both have moved forward independently. Both have changed a bit in my lifetime.
Panettone isn't panettone in my house without the candied fruit.
Its also vitally important that the candied fruit you use be at least 20 years old, since its sold in absurd quantities (relatively to how much you use in a recipe) and the only thing we use it in is panettone and wheat pie (which, actually, my mother is in the other room making for easter).
Now, what goes into the wheat pie... That's gonna start up an argument here.
Yes, panettone. Pannetone is not a thing, only a spelling mistake no Italian would do. No hard feelings, I keep making spelling mistakes no native English speaker would do.
Almond biscotti are my go-to bake. The recipe is so simple I never managed to get it wrong, not even on my first try. I make a big batch once a month or so, keep a handful for myself, and take the rest to the office. I'm convinced this is one of the reasons I have a job :P PROTIP: do dunk them in coffee. They are supposed to be hard and dry.
Tiramisù is also simple to make - no baking required! Homemade is infinitely better than anything you get almost anywhere, including some restaurants (and during my travels throughout Italy I made a point of trying every tiramisù [and Carbonara] I crossed paths with). PROTIP: leave in the fridge for at least 24 hours before consuming. The flavours mix and the dessert becomes twice as delicious.
There's no wrong place to ask for an almond biscotti recipe.
This recipe I'm now sharing with you has been lovingly passed from nonna to nipotina, generation after generation... until I found it on some random website.
* 250g plain flour
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 180g caster sugar
* 1 pinch salt
* 25g butter, melted and cooled
* 2 eggs
* 175g almonds, coarsely chopped
1) Mix the flour with baking powder, then add sugar, vanilla sugar and salt. Form into a mound with a hollow in the middle.
2) Pour the butter and eggs into it and knead to a dough. Knead in the chopped almonds. Form the dough to a ball, adding more flour if necessary. Cover and chill for 30 minutes.
3) Line a baking tray with baking parchment and preheat oven to 200 C / Gas 6.
4) Cut dough into 6 pieces and shape each into a 25cm log. Arrange logs on a baking tray, leaving enough space for them to spread whilst cooking. Bake in preheated oven for 10-15 minutes.
5) Allow them to cool a little, then cut into 1cm slices. Lay on a baking tray and bake for another 8-10 minutes at 200 C / Gas 6 until golden-brown.
That's one of my first attempts. Note that the dough has been rolled and flattened before the first bake - I don't do that anymore, which makes the biscotti fluffier. Here's a more recent batch: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=212037919144199&set=...
One of my first internet finds of the 1990s was Corby Kummer's Almond Biscotti.
His recipe seems to indicate it has less fat than traditional or something like that I couldn't find the official website but I see this website has it: http://dendritics.com/scales/biscotti.asp
They turned out well really hard so hard you can't eat them by biting them you have to dunk them.
Tip you need a food processor the batter is so thick your arm will be sore even the food processor struggles.
Just for the record, "biscotti" is the "generic name" for any kind of biscuit, if you want the "Cantucci" you need to ask for either "cantucci" (better "cantuccini") or for "Biscotti di Prato" .
To be strict, the "Biscotti di Prato" are the most famous "type" of "cantucci", for which there are several slightly different recipes.
Of course they are typical of Tuscany and you won't find them everywhere in Italy, in Lazio there are the similar "tozzetti".
... oh, and usually they are eaten only after the meal, dipped in either Vin Santo or Aleatico or similar sweet wines.
Its an extension of this, "your Italian food isn't real Italian food".
Combine with nit-picking the language people use to delegitimize their positions.
I'm just glad we have a very wide variety of different things. I love tracking down/cooking both things that are very, very traditional Italian dishes (my family is all from Italy originally) and I also enjoy lots of American bastardizations of those dishes and there's nothing wrong with liking both. I absolutely love cooking dishes from recipes that are from the era in my family where they immigrated to the USA (great-grandmother, pre-WWI), they have a mix of traditional Italian with practical realities of the fact that they were now in the USA, which resulted in them having less access to traditional ingredients (and being dirt poor for a good while).
Naah, it is not necessary at all, you just enter a bakery (or other similar eating shop) and point your finger on something in the showcase, the natives will understand that you want that product ;) and almost invariably it will taste good.
Do not go to the restaurant and try ordering spaghetti with meatballs, however.
This is a very narrow view. I am Italian-American in the literal sense (a citizen of both countries), we are fairly recent immigrants although I grew up in the US. There is simply no way for the average American to be that exact regarding Italian cuisine without having grown up there. The same way it is nearly impossible for the average Italian to be that exact regarding American cuisine without having grown up here. Asking someone to understand the different names and types of biscotti or cantucci, for instance, is similar to me expecting you to know the various local varieties of lobster rolls depending on where in New England you are, and then also holding you accountable to know that someone in New Jersey will probably not be able to make you one, and someone in coastal Virginia may not even know what one is.
Everyone does the best with the words they know. Help a tourist out, they'd do the same for you in their home.
> Help a tourist out, they'd do the same for you in their home.
Gracefully accepting corrections when your language is incorrect are part of receiving help.
If I were to write these posts in broken Itanglish do you really think native speakers would not correct me? Would it be acceptable to call them "narrow minded"?
I'm all for helping but please stop assuming that a US-centric point of view and language are the default for everything. For most people on the internet, neither assumptions hold.
I think the point wasn't that you shouldn't help people understand your language or culture. It's expecting everyone to know this stuff automatically and looking down on someone for not knowing everything about it. That isn't very nice/fair.
"Yes, people are not really aware how ignorant and arrogant they look when they use the wrong Italian words to describe Italian food "
Gracefully accepting corrections is fine. I get that plenty when I visit Italy, and Italian is my first language even if it's decayed a bit. You don't make it sound like you're doing it constructively, though. Not sure if it's your intent, but you're coming across as though Americans are ignorant because they don't grasp the finer details.
Actually in Italian you can say a "parmigiana di melanzane", but "parmigiana" by itself is meaningless, there are "parmigiana di carciofi", "parmigiana di gobbi", and of course "parmigiana di patate" (that has completely different ingredients).
The only role of the gelatin in the panna cotta is as a thickening agent. But this is not the only way to make this delicious dessert.
If you want to experience a less chemical taste, the gelatin can be effectively replaced with egg whites (which on the contrary also contribute to the flavor).
To thicken the mixture of milk, cream and sugar, flavored with vanilla seeds/pod, you might add the egg whites to it. Cooking does not change.
The result is a softer cream, with a wide-ranging taste.
The timing on this, the day before Easter is great: if you live in the US and have an Italian bakery anywhere near you, go in and get yourself a 'pizza rustica'. It's an Italian-American pie made of sausages, cheeses, and eggs in a crust, and it is wonderful. It's pretty much only available around Easter (my family has had one for Easter brunch basically as long as I can remember), so now's your chance to go try one.
To be fair, we would need several more articles to debate the origins and characteristics of every other region's bread-like products. I would be glad to read them, but it probably isn't realistic to compare all of them in the same article. This submission from a few months ago mentions a slew of breads that are found in various parts of India, though of course not all are Indian in origin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13119986
Given the content, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was not a 50-page "slideshow". I'm glad to see that websites are starting to abandon that terrible format.
I felt like this took a long time to get to the point, which was: Italian Americans are generally descended from speakers of Southern Italian languages that differ from modern standard Italian, and those languages are notable for having terminal vowel deletion, converting "o" into "oo," and voicing unvoiced consonants, leading to them sounding distinct from modern standard Italian speakers.
Being Italian, it's always a bit funny to see Italian food being described from outside. The article is missing some important points about Italian bakery. In Italy you can find "panifici", which sell both savoury and sweet baked products, from pizza to bread to biscotti and other sweet non-refrigerated cakes. You can also find "pasticcerie", which sell only sweet products, both baked, frozen and semifrozen, from cakes to pastries to meringata. Finally you can find "gelaterie" which sell mostly ice-cream based product, but also other frozen and semi-frozen products. The selection given, thus, is misleading because it's leaving out a huge selection of similar products which are majorly important in Italian cuisine, starting with gelato based treats.
Furthermore, Italian cuisine is strongly regional. Bakery in Naples is completely different from bakery in Genoa or Venice. The article presents a subset of items from some of these regions, but is in no way a complete or realistic description of what one can find in Italian bakeries. Some examples here (this is really a tiny subset!): http://www.dissapore.com/grande-notizia/i-migliori-pani-ital...
I understand the article doesn't claim completeness, but they are presenting a glass of water and calling it a sea.