Steak Recipe - How To Make Steak Tender You invest a lot of time and money into the steaks for a special occasion and when dinner time comes, they are tough. What happened? How can you cook steaks as tender as your favorite restaurant? The first step to cooking a good steak is to choose the right grade of steak. The top quality beef is graded USDA Prime and commands top prices. USDA Prime grade meats are sold to the restaurant industry and specialty markets and are not as likely to be found at your local grocery chain. The next grade of beef is USDA Choice. USDA Choice is tender, flavorful and only slightly lower in quality than USDA Prime. The meat is well marbled with fat and will be tender and juicy when properly prepared. USDA Choice makes up about 70% of all graded beef and is readily available in your supermarket. USDA Good graded beef is an acceptable grade of beef that has only minimal marbling of fat. It is leaner, but may not be as tender as USDA Prime or Choice. Next, ...
The History of Tiramisu Cake & Where and how this famous dessert was invented
The History of Tiramisu Cake: Where and how this famous dessert was invented
Open an old Italian cookbook, browse through the index and surprise! No Tiramisu cake recipe. My first encounter with Tiramisu was in 1985. I was in Italy at that time: A friend of mine told me about this new cake recipe she got. She was so enthusiastic about it that I felt compelled to try it immediately. The taste was unbelievably good, as never I had tasted before. Since then I fell in love with this dessert.
Everybody knows by now that Tiramisu means pick-me-up in Italian, for the high energetic content (eggs and sugar) and the caffeine of the strong espresso coffee. There are many different stories about the origin of Tiramisu. It is a layered cake; therefore some people place its origin in Tuscany, where another famous layered Italian dessert is very popular. It is called Zuppa Inglese (English Soup). It is not English and it is not a soup. Instead is a simple cake of ladyfingers or sponge cake, soaked in alkermes liquor, and alternated layers of chocolate and egg custard.
Layered cakes have been around for long time. The brilliant idea in Tiramisu is not in the technique of layering, but in the components. The great invention of combining together coffee, zabaglione cream, and chocolate: This is the true innovation in Tiramisu.
I love to study history of food. In my book The Timeless Art of Italian Cuisine Centuries of Scrumptious Dining, there is extensive information about culinary history of the various regions of Italy. I tried to trace the origin of Tiramisu investigating many Italian cookbooks.
The first clue is by the famous Italian gastronome Giuseppe Maffioli. In his book Il ghiottone Veneto, (The Venetian Glutton) first published in 1968, he talks extensively about Zabaglione custard. The name of this cream originates from Zabaja, a sweet dessert popular in the Illiria region. It is the coastal area across the Adriatic Sea that was Venetian territory for long time during the golden age of the Repubblica Serenissima (The Most Serene Republic) of Venice. Zabaglione was prepared in those times with sweet Cyprus wine.
The grooms bachelor friends, says Maffioli, at the end of the long wedding banquet, maliciously teasing, gave to him before the couple retired a big bottle of zabajon, to guarantee a successful and prolonged honeymoon. The zabajon, Maffioli continues, was sometimes added of whipped cream, but in this case was served very cold, almost frozen, and accompanied by the baicoli, small thin Venetian cookies invented in the 1700s by a baker in the Santa Margherita suburb of Venice. The addition of whipped cream, the serving temperature, the cookies, all these elements are close to the modern Tiramisu recipe. And even the allusion to the energetic properties of the Zabaglione, seem to refer to the Tiramisu name.
Later in my research the oldest recipe I could find was in the book by Giovanni Capnist I Dolci del Veneto (The Desserts of Veneto). The first edition was published in 1983 and has a classic recipe for Tiramisu. Recent recipe with infinite variations from the town of Treviso, says Capnist, discovery of restaurants more then family tradition.
But the final word on the origin of Tiramisu is from the book by Fernando e Tina Raris La Marca Gastronomica published in 1998, a book entirely dedicated to the cuisine from the town of Treviso. The authors remember what Giuseppe Maffioli wrote in an article in 1981: Tiramisu was born recently, just 10 years ago in the town of Treviso. It was proposed for the first time in the restaurant Le Beccherie. The dessert and its name became immediately extremely popular, and this cake and the name where copied by many restaurants first in Treviso then all around Italy.
Still today the restaurant Le Beccherie makes the dessert with the classical recipe: ladyfingers soaked in bitter strong espresso coffee, mascarpone-zabaglione cream, and bitter cocoa powder. Alba and Ado Campeol, owners of the restaurant regret they didnt patent the name and the recipe, especially to avoid all the speculation and guesses on the origin of this cake, and the diffusion of so many recipes that have nothing to do with the original Tiramisu.
I tried countless different recipes form the infinite variations of Tiramisu, but the classic one, (the recipe I show on my website), the recipe from the Le Beccherie restaurant, is still the one I prepare today and the one I prefer.
As an example of one of the many delicious variation of Tiramisu I am showing on my website a step-by-step recipe for the Tiramisu with Mixed Berries that is quickly becoming a new classic.
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